Recent AI news and official updates

TechCrunch AI published: Cloudflare is giving AI companies until September 15 to separate web crawlers used for search from those used for AI training and agents, or risk being blocked by default on many publisher sites.

Google AI Blog published: Google, the New York Jobs CEO Council and Urban Assembly hosted an AI summit for 150 education and industry leaders.

MIT Technology Review published: Let’s start with a game. Open up your chatbot of choice—Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini—and type “Give me a random number between 1 and 10.” You’re going to get 7. Almost always. Now type “Another” and you’ll get 3 or 4. Type “Another” again and you’ll get 8 or 9. That won’t work every time—but if it…

TechCrunch AI published: Venice AI is already profitable, with annualized run-rate revenues of over $70 million, CEO Erik Voorhees said.

TechCrunch AI published: Google's 24/7 agentic assistant, Gemini Spark, comes to Mac alongside other improvements, like real-time tracking and support for more apps.

TechCrunch AI published: Meta is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business, selling access to AI compute power and models. The move would pit it against the big cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

MIT Technology Review published: This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Claude Science is Anthropic’s newest flagship product At an event for pharmaceutical executives, biotech founders, and researchers yesterday, Anthropic announced Claude Science, a major new product intended to support scientific research…

TechCrunch AI published: The Trump administration's erratic approach to AI policymaking has left companies across the industry with little clarity about what will govern future model releases.

TechCrunch AI published: Wayve’s offering is part of a growing trend of AI startups using employee tenders as a strategic tool to attract and retain talent.

Simon Willison's AI Notes published: We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5. We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon. — Anthropic , on Twitter Tags: ai , generative-ai , llms , anthropic , claude , claude-mythos-fable

Simon Willison's AI Notes published: Nano Banana 2 Lite Also known as Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image ( gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image in their API ), this is the "fastest and cheapest Gemini image model, engineered for velocity and scale". I used AI studio to run this prompt: Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where is the raccoon holding a ham radio I like that one better than the results I got from the other Nano Banana models when I tried this back in April. It spelled Forest Festival wrong in two different ways though. Via Hacker News Tags: google , ai , generative-ai , llms , gemini , text-to-image , llm-release , nano-banana

MIT Technology Review published: At an event for pharmaceutical executives, biotech founders, and researchers on Tuesday, Anthropic announced Claude Science, a major new product intended to support scientific research in the same way that Claude Code supports software engineering. Like Claude Code, Claude Science can autonomously carry out meaningful work when given concise, high-level instructions, and it has access…

Simon Willison's AI Notes published: What's new in Claude Sonnet 5 Claude Sonnet 5 came out this morning . I always head straight for the "what's new" developer docs because they tend to have more actionable information than the official announcement post. Anthropic say of Sonnet 5 that "its performance is close to that of Opus 4.8, but at lower prices". The system card helps explain how they were able to release the model without being blocked by the US government: Sonnet 5 is significantly less capable at cyber tasks than Mythos 5: its safeguards are thus similar to those we apply to Opus 4.7 and Opus 4.8 (models that are more capable than Sonnet 5 but much less capable than Mythos 5). Of note from the "what's new" API changes: Sampling parameters temperature , top_p , top_k are no longer supported. It has a 1 million token context window and 128,000 maximum output tokens. It features "the same set of tools and platform features as Claude Sonnet 4.6" Adaptive thinking is on by default, unless you specify "thinking": {type: "disabled"} . The pricing is the same as Sonnet 4.6: $3/million input, $15/million input, with an introductory discount to $2/$10 until 31st August. But... The model has a new tokenizer, where "The same input text produces approximately 30% more tokens than on Claude Sonnet 4.6." - effectively a 30% price increase. I used my Claude Token Counter tool to try out the new tokenizer. Here are my results for several larger documents: Document Sonnet 4.6 Opus 4.7 Sonnet 5 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (English) 2,356 3,347 1.42x 3,341 1.42x Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Spanish) 3,572 4,753 1.33x 4,747 1.33x Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Chinese, Mandarin Simplified) 3,334 3,366 1.01x 3,360 1.01x sqlite_utils/db.py (4,279 lines of Python) 44,014 56,118 1.28x 56,113 1.27x So the new token is roughly 1.4x times more expensive for English, 1.33x for Spanish, 1.28x for Python code and effectively the same cost for Simplified Mandarin. Here's the pelican . It's nothing to write home about. Sonnet 5 thinks it looks like a goose. Via Hacker News Tags: ai , generative-ai , llms , anthropic , claude , llm-pricing , pelican-riding-a-bicycle , llm-release

TechCrunch AI published: EquiLibre Technologies, a Prague-based AI lab founded by three ex-DeepMind researchers, is now valued at more than $500 million.

TechCrunch AI published: Google is updating its image generator to make it faster and cheaper, making it a more useful tool for creators looking to make AI content.

TechCrunch AI published: Nvidia AI chip competitor Etched says it has already booked $1 billion under contract for the inference systems powered by its chip.

TechCrunch AI published: Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5 brings stronger agentic capabilities, lower pricing, and improved safety, positioning the model as a cheaper alternative to Opus, GPT-5.5, and Gemini Pro.

TechCrunch AI published: Acti is betting the smartphone keyboard is the next home for AI assistants. The startup's new keyboard for iOS and Android works across apps and lets users create custom AI-powered shortcuts using natural language.

Simon Willison's AI Notes published: The AI Compass This political compass style quiz by bambamramfan is pretty neat - answer 29 questions about AI and AI ethics to see which of the 30 archetypes you best fit. I'm impressed that my answers on my first time through the quiz categorized me as "The Garage Tinkerer", patron saint myself! It's implemented as a single page React app using the <script type="text/babel"> trick to avoid the necessary build step. Here's the code . Via @erisianrite.com Tags: ai , generative-ai , llms , ai-ethics

TechCrunch AI published: Anthropic's Claude Science is a workbench that gives scientists one environment to do computational research, saving them from the need to bounce between databases, pipelines, and tools.