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Techmeme
August 14, 2026, 8:50 PM
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Top News

Z.ai:
Z.ai debuts GLM-5.3, which uses the same base model as GLM-5.2 with scaled post-training for stronger coding skills, and says it'll release weights in two weeks  —  With GLM-5.2 we built the stack: IndexShare for efficient long-context processing, SAO for RL on long-horizon tasks …
Reuters:
Z.ai says GLM-5.3 scores 84.5% on CyberGym, vs. Mythos 5's 83.8%, and its most sensitive cybersecurity functions will only be available to verified users
Madison Mills / Axios:
Risk report: Anthropic raises misalignment risk estimate from very low to low and says it doesn't plan to release a stronger internal model called “Model 2”  —  Anthropic does not plan to release an internal model that appears to be more powerful than top-of-the-line Mythos …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: PayPal is in talks to sell itself to a group including Stripe and Advent, which proposed paying $60.50/share in July; PayPal is seeking a higher price  —  The fintech startup and private-equity firm Advent offered to buy the struggling payments company in July
Bloomberg:
SpaceX closes its $60B acquisition of Cursor, two months after SpaceX formally announced it had agreed to acquire the startup  —  SpaceX has completed a $60 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence coding startup Cursor, a key part of Elon Musk's bid to gain ground on rivals Anthropic PBC and OpenAI.
Natasha Mascarenhas / Bloomberg:
Investor letter: Thrive's 2022 early-stage $516M fund that invested in OpenAI and SpaceX was worth $3.7B+ as of the end of June, net of fees and other charges  —  Thrive Capital's 2022 early-stage venture capital fund, a $516 million investment vehicle that made early bets on OpenAI …
Bloomberg:
Docs: Anthropic told investors it generated $11.5B+ in revenue, with positive adjusted operating income, in Q2, up from $787M in Q2 2025 and $4.73B in Q1 2026  —  Anthropic PBC is telling prospective investors its second-quarter revenue jumped at least 14-fold versus the same period a year ago …
Lynn Doan / Bloomberg:
Filing: Nvidia has a nearly $21B stake in SpaceX and a $30B stake in Intel; Nvidia invested as much as $2B in xAI in 2025 and $5B in Intel  —  Nvidia Corp. on Friday disclosed a nearly $21 billion stake in Elon Musk's SpaceX and a $30 billion one in Intel Corp.
More: Financial Times and CNBC
Reuters:
Sources: Apple trained a China-specific LLM with Alibaba's support, which would make Apple the first foreign company to offer a proprietary AI model in China  —  Apple (AAPL.O) has trained a large language model specifically for the China market, three people familiar with the matter said …
Reuters:
France's top court blocks a bill banning social media for under-15s, saying it infringed upon freedom of expression; Macron orders the PM to rework the bill  —  France's top court on Friday blocked a bill banning social media access for under-15s, saying it infringed upon freedom of expression …
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Google adds a toggle in Gemini and Flow to remove visible watermarks from AI-generated images, videos, and music; SynthID watermarks and C2PA metadata remain  —  Google will still embed invisible SynthID and C2PA watermarks into AI-generated images, videos, and music.
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
Epic v. Google: in a compliance hearing, a judge orders Google to remove “anticompetitive friction” for installing third-party app stores from its Play Store  —  Judge Donato was not having Google's ‘anticompetitive friction.’  —  One month after Epic Games and Google seemingly stopped fighting …
@alibaba_qwen:
Alibaba releases weights for Qwen3.8 models under Apache 2.0 license, including Qwen3.8-27B, which it says beats Qwen3.7-Plus and excels in real-world coding  —  We promised open weights for Qwen3.8. Now, time to meet them! 🎉 ⚡ Qwen3.8-27B: - A native multimodal dense model. With just 27B parameters, it outperforms Qwen3.7-Plus overall and shines in real-world coding & office workflows. - 262K native context, easily extendable to 1M
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat:
DeepSeek debuts DeepSeek Harness under the MIT license in developer preview, touting a design where “everything is a plugin” that can be swapped out  —  DeepSeek is expanding beyond the model layer and deeper into the software developers use to put AI agents to work.
Fred Lambert / Electrek:
Waymo receives approval from the California Public Utilities Commission to expand across 18 counties, including Sacramento and San Diego  —  Waymo says California regulators have signed off on the biggest expansion of its robotaxi service yet, covering 18 counties from Sonoma down to San Diego.

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 8:50 PM ET, August 14, 2026.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

From Mediagazer

Josh Gerstein / Politico:
The BBC is seeking to subpoena Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner in the defamation lawsuit the president is pressing against the broadcaster

Dade Hayes / Deadline:
ABC and NBC plan to air a combined 90 NBA games in the 2026-2027 season, a 14% increase over last season, continuing the shift away from comedies and dramas

Bryan P. Sears / Maryland Matters:
A Maryland court strikes down a state tax on some digital ads as a violation of the Internet Tax Freedom Act; Apple, Google, and Peacock TV challenged the tax

More News

Reuters:
The US OCC conditionally approves a bank charter application for Trump family's World Liberty Financial, allowing it to directly issue its USD1 stablecoin
Financial Times:
Sources: JPMorgan Chase terminated its banking relationship with Polymarket in 2025 over regulatory concerns, though it still maintains some ties to the company

Earlier Picks

Nathaniel Meyersohn / CNN:
A look at Quincy, a rural Washington farming town of 8,500 that benefited from a data center boom as its poverty rate fell from 29.4% in 2012 to 6.2% in 2024
Demetri Sevastopulo / Financial Times:
The White House puts tariffs on drones and their components, including a 100% levy on “particularly sensitive” models, aiming to cut US reliance on Chinese tech
J.J. McCorvey / Bloomberg:
A judge orders Kalshi to stop offering most of its prediction market contracts in Washington state, after finding it likely violated state gambling-related laws
The Information:
A profile of Camilla Clark, quiet adviser to husband Dario Amodei and behind-the-scenes player at Anthropic; she once pitched a porn startup to Jeffrey Epstein
Frederic Lardinois / The New Stack:
OpenAI launches Computer History, an opt-in feature that turns day-to-day computer activity on macOS into memories and a timeline that ChatGPT and Codex can use
Zac Hall / 9to5Mac:
OpenAI previews Ultrafast, an API tier powered by Cerebras that runs GPT-5.6 Sol up to 14× faster and generates up to 750 output tokens per second
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