A group of House Democrats led by Rep. Greg Casar of Texas asked House Speaker Mike Johnson on August 10, 2026 to bring the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and other major AI companies before Congress to testify under oath about a series of incidents in which the companies' own models hacked into outside organizations during safety testing, CNBC reported from a copy of the letter shared with the network. The lawmakers pointed to the breaches, all disclosed by the companies themselves over the past…

Why organizations that redesign customer journeys before implementing AI will outperform those that don't Over the past year, AI has produced a series of high-profile customer experience failures. Pizza Hut is being sued for $100 million after a franchisee alleged an AI-powered delivery optimization system increased delays and hurt customer satisfaction rather than improving it. Air Canada was held responsible after its automated AI agent provided customers with incorrect information about…

London-based Edgify has raised $9 million in Series A+ funding to expand its edge artificial intelligence platform, bringing the company’s total funding to $25 million. The round was backed by Rank Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners. Edgify plans to use the capital to accelerate deployments across physical retail while developing its platform into a broader infrastructure layer for managing AI models across distributed devices. The company has initially found traction in grocery retail…

HD Hyundai Heavy Industries has signed a contract worth $673.8 million to supply 1,000 megawatts of power generation systems to U.S. data centers, the company announced on August 9, 2026. The buyer is Corban Energy Group, a U.S. energy infrastructure developer, and the equipment will feed data centers operated by what HD Hyundai describes as a major U.S. technology company. The systems are built around the company's 9.6-megawatt HiMSEN engine, a medium-speed engine it positions for continuous…

Firebird opened its first AI factory in Hrazdan, Armenia, on August 8, 2026, and used the ceremony to lay out the rest of the map: a second market in Kazakhstan with 125 megawatts of secured capacity, an intended investment from NVIDIA, and a pipeline the company says will reach 2 gigawatts of AI infrastructure by the end of 2028, per its announcement. The Armenia site is the operational debut. Firebird plans to scale it beyond 70,000 NVIDIA Rubin and Blackwell GPUs and 300 megawatts of…

OpenAI has acquired NextSlide, a startup that built software for turning raw material into finished presentations, with the NextSlide team now working on ChatGPT. Founder Ahmed Beshry announced the move in a note on the startup's website. He did not disclose financial terms. NextSlide's product converted prompts, notes, documents, or research into a polished, editable presentation, the pitch being that producing a deck should not depend on design skills or hours of manual layout work. Beshry…

Firebird, a U.S.-based AI cloud company, opened the CIS region's largest AI factory in Armenia on August 8, 2026: a facility in Hrazdan built on NVIDIA accelerated computing and Dell PowerEdge servers, with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Kazakhstan's Deputy Prime Minister Zhaslan Madiyev, and U.S. chargé d'affaires David Allen attending the opening ceremony. The buildout plan is large by any regional standard: Firebird plans to deploy more than 70,000 NVIDIA Rubin and Blackwell GPUs…

xAI shipped Grok Imagine Image 2.0 on August 7, 2026, making the new model generally available as the Quality Mode on grok.com/imagine and inside the company's iOS and Android apps, according to the company's announcement. The release lands as xAI lists its models under the SpaceXAI name, and it arrives with region-level editing tools, multi-image reference inputs, and a claim to the number-two spot on both major image arenas. What Image 2.0 adds The release is built around editing as a…

I’ve spent way too much time doing tasks that feel like they should be someone else’s job, whether it's formatting reports, organizing information, or repeating the same steps in different apps. At some point, you start thinking, “Maybe I should just hire a VA.” That’s why Claude Cowork’s Record a Skill feature caught my attention. Instead of writing out a giant list of instructions for an AI, you can record yourself doing a task, explain what you’re doing as you go, and have Claude turn your…

Microsoft has brought its fourth Indian cloud region online, declaring general availability of the India South Central region in Hyderabad, Telangana on August 6, 2026. The three-availability-zone build is the largest hyperscale region Microsoft operates in the country and, by the company's count, gives it the biggest hyperscale cloud footprint of any provider in India. The region is the first concrete capacity delivery against the US$17.5 billion India commitment Microsoft announced on…

OpenAI said on August 7, 2026 that internal evaluations of Astra, one of its upcoming models, show such strong agentic coding and cybersecurity performance that the company can no longer rule out the Critical cybersecurity capability level defined in its own Preparedness Framework. It is the first time OpenAI has attached that label's possibility to a specific model, and it triggered immediate containment steps: stricter security controls, a pause on some internal Astra work, and plans to bring…

AI agent reliability startup Lemma has raised $2.3 million in pre-seed funding to build monitoring infrastructure designed to catch a particularly difficult class of problem: AI agents that appear to have completed a task successfully while quietly producing the wrong result. The round includes participation from Matrix, Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, Vermilion Cliffs Ventures, Irregular Expressions, Cervin Ventures, Comma Capital, Position Ventures, and Eight Capital, alongside angel…

For the last two years, the enterprise AI conversation has been dominated by one question: how much more productive can we make the developer? The metrics have been familiar: lines of code generated, hours saved, user stories completed faster and pull requests merged sooner. These are useful indicators, but they tell only part of the story. In large enterprises, software delivery is rarely constrained by coding alone. It is constrained by context, governance, architecture, security, domain…

Anthropic on August 7, 2026 released an update to the biology safeguards on Claude Fable 5 that the company says cut biology-related "fallbacks" by about 85% in testing across its product surfaces — the automatic handoffs that route a user's query to a less capable model when the system judges a request touches safeguarded biology territory. In its announcement, Anthropic said users should now see far fewer fallbacks on everyday health and educational questions, such as interpreting lab…

Why real customer behaviour matters more than ever in the age of AI Product managers and engineers can spend months shaping a feature before anyone outside the business touches it. When customers get hold of it, they might use it exactly as expected or find a completely different path. They might ignore the main feature altogether and keep coming back to something the team barely noticed during development. This is where the real learning, and the interesting decisions, begin. Meanwhile, AI has…

OpenAI's advertising build-out has crossed into Latin America. The company's Ads Manager availability page, updated on August 6, 2026, now lists Brazil as available to advertisers, with Mexico marked "coming soon" — completing a market set that already spans the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. The expansion lands alongside a round of product upgrades. As Business Insider first reported, citing an email OpenAI sent advertisers on August 5…

Ilan Gluck, Head of Go-to-Market, North America at Digital Matter, is an experienced technology and commercial leader with a background spanning the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, supply chain technology, data analytics, and enterprise strategy. Before joining Digital Matter, he spent more than five years with Cox 2M and GearTrack, serving as General Manager and Chief Revenue Officer and helping advance real-time asset tracking and supply chain visibility solutions. Earlier…

AI travel agents have improved rapidly over the past two years. KAYAK launched AI Mode in 2025 and expanded it with Ask AI in 2026. Booking.com has continued to expand the AI trip-planning tools it first introduced in 2023, while adding new products for specific parts of the journey, including AI-powered car rental search and assistance. Both illustrate travel search moving from lists of results toward natural-language conversations. An AI agent can turn a lengthy search process into a highly…

SK hynix's board has approved a combined 54 trillion won (roughly $39 billion) for two new fabrication plants, the company announced on August 7, 2026: 35.2 trillion won for "Y2," the second fab at its Yongin Semiconductor Cluster, and 19.1 trillion won for "M17," a new NAND fab in Cheongju. The two projects expand production capacity for both halves of the memory business that AI infrastructure now runs on: DRAM for high-bandwidth memory, and NAND flash for the enterprise SSDs piling up behind…

Anthropic has opened a public beta of self-hosted environments for Claude Code, moving the coding agent's cloud sessions off Anthropic's infrastructure and onto servers inside the customer's own network, the company announced on August 6, 2026. The option is available to organizations on Claude Team and Enterprise plans and is switched off by default. A session started from the web, mobile, desktop, the terminal, or a scheduled routine runs inside the organization's network, next to its…