Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warns that new hires are joining for money rather than the company's AI safety mission — a claim met with widespread mockery, as Anthropic reportedly pays the highest salaries in the entire AI industry.
Former OpenAI executive Fidji Simo launches ChronicleBio, an AI-powered startup using home blood draws and 153 terabytes of biological data to identify chronic disease sub-groups and improve clinical drug trial success rates.
A groundbreaking AI training method called RLSVR transforms open-ended tasks like writing and summarization into competitive multi-agent games, achieving win rates above 75% while simultaneously boosting mathematical reasoning by up to 9% — all without requiring human judges or labeled data.
OpenAI launches GPT-Live, a revolutionary full-duplex voice system that lets AI listen and speak simultaneously, delivering near-instant, natural conversation by eliminating traditional turn detection and cutting session startup from six network round trips to just one.
Microsoft launches Orchard, an open-source AI agent framework that punches far above its weight, achieving benchmark scores rivaling systems up to 30 times larger while offering 107K+ training datasets and a Kubernetes-native sandbox for scalable agent development across software engineering, web navigation, and computer use.
A new open-source tool called video-use lets AI agents like Claude Code edit videos through simple chat commands, automating professional tasks like cutting filler words, color grading, and burning subtitles by reading footage through a lightweight 12KB text-and-PNG system rather than processing millions of raw video tokens.
A self-rewriting open-source AI agent called Ouroboros, launched February 16, 2026, claims top benchmark results against leading AI tools like Codex and Claude Code, boasting the ability to autonomously modify its own code, architecture, and memory while coordinating a live swarm of specialist agents.
The EU AI Act now empowers the European Commission to fine U.S. AI giants like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic up to 15 million euros or 3% of annual turnover, inspect their models, and restrict market access, escalating transatlantic tech tensions as President Trump threatens tariffs in response.
Alibaba launches Qwen3.8-Max, a massive 2.4 trillion-parameter AI model priced far below US rivals at $2 input and $6 output per million tokens, intensifying the global AI price war as Chinese labs continue closing the gap with American competitors.
Top VC firms including Sequoia, a16z, and Khosla Ventures are pouring billions into nuclear power and critical minerals as AI's explosive energy demands outpace existing infrastructure, with Valar Atomics raising $1 billion for small modular reactors and Mariana Minerals securing $310 million for mining operations.