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T H E U N C E R T A I N F U T U R E S
all the news that fits the context window
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No. 46 · Friday, 14 August 2026Welcome to the Hotel California, where you can check out any time you like but you can never leave: OpenAI's head of preparedness has given up the job and stayed at the company. Its new safety chief is in a relationship with the head of product, and its revenue chief has gone altogether. Washington will let vetted private companies hack foreign criminals back, DeepSeek raised its prices the day it shipped its flagship model, Anthropic is shopping for a $6 billion acquisition, and Mistral has European companies underwriting a gigawatt of compute.
░░▒▒▓▓ TOP 5 ▓▓▒▒░░OpenAI has replaced its safety leadership, and the new safety chief is in a relationship with the head of product
Sandhini Agarwal, who led safety teams at the company, left in July after more than six years there, and Dylan Scandinaro is no longer head of preparedness, the role that owns catastrophic risk, though he stays at the company; four people have held that job in the three years it has existed. Amelia Glaese, previously head of alignment, now runs safety, and is in a long-term relationship with Thibault Sottiaux, who runs core products including ChatGPT and Codex, an arrangement multiple current and former employees told WIRED they find unusual given how often the two functions pull against each other. OpenAI says the relationship was reported through company channels and that Zico Kolter, who chairs the board's safety and security committee, was told; staff separately told WIRED that competitive pressure to ship has made safety hard to prioritize, which is close to what departing alignment lead Jan Leike said in 2024. Denise Dresser, the revenue chief hired from Slack in December, left on Thursday as well (more in BUSINESS, below) (WIRED · CNBC).
Washington will let vetted private companies attack foreign criminal networks
Donald Trump signed a national security presidential memorandum on Wednesday, Expanding Capabilities to Combat Transnational Cyber-Enabled Crime, setting up a program in which companies vetted by the Justice and Homeland Security departments may run surveillance and destructive operations against foreign cybercrime groups. Every action needs written pre-approval against a named target, companies may not touch foreign governments or the groups those governments direct, and the departments have 60 days to write the procedures and 180 days to report on them. The White House frames it around the $20.8 billion Americans reported losing to cyber-enabled crime last year; the more durable fact is that a decades-old ban on private offensive hacking now has a door in it, and CyberScoop notes the appetite in conservative circles for letters of marque, the licenses that once turned private captains into sea privateers (TechCrunch · CyberScoop).
DeepSeek's V4-Pro is official, and the price is going up with it (update)
The checkpoint we covered yesterday, spotted in DeepSeek's own price list before anyone announced it, became a general release on Thursday, pitched at agent work. Alongside it the Chinese lab opened global testing for a developer preview of Deepseek Harness v0.1, an MIT-licensed rival to Claude Code and Codex. The same announcement raised API prices by as much as 1,100% on some rates, with peak-hour output going to $3.96 per million tokens from a flat $0.87 when the new rates take effect on Sunday. Artificial Analysis, the independent model-benchmarking outfit, scores the model 53 on its Intelligence Index, a point above the smaller V4 Flash and behind Kimi K3 from the Chinese lab Moonshot, so this is still the cheap-and-fast lane rather than the frontier, and the lane is about to get more expensive (Caixin · Artificial Analysis).
Anthropic is in talks to buy Decart for about $6 billion
The Israeli company builds software that makes AI chips run more efficiently, cutting what it costs to train and serve models, and in May it raised $300 million at a $4 billion valuation. Bloomberg reported the talks on Thursday, cautioning that nothing is signed; at that price it would be Anthropic's largest known acquisition, and the stated purpose is to make its existing compute absorb more demand (Bloomberg).
Mistral has European companies underwriting a gigawatt of compute
The French lab said ASML, the travel technology group Amadeus and the shipping line CMA CGM have signed multi-year commitments to fund European data-center capacity, starting at 200 megawatts by the end of 2027 and reaching a gigawatt by the end of 2030. Alongside it, Mistral made its regional endpoints generally available, so customers can pin inference to Europe or the United States for data-residency reasons, and will begin hosting third-party open models, starting with GLM-5.2 from China's Z.ai. Which means a Chinese model, served on European hardware, sold as sovereignty (Mistral · VentureBeat).
░░▒▒▓▓ STATS OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░░░▒▒▓▓ AI ▓▓▒▒░░Google shipped a fast, cheap Flash model and put the price increase on the calendar. Gemini 3.7 Flash arrived on Thursday tuned for coding and agent work, running at roughly 340 output tokens a second where the median reasoning model in its price band manages 68. It costs $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output until the end of the year, then doubles to $1.50 and $7.50 on 1 January 2027. Google's own scorecard puts it ahead of Claude Sonnet 5 and GPT-5.6 Terra in 11 of 18 categories, which is a vendor marking its own homework, and Gemini 3.5 Pro is still nowhere, with no release date given (Google DeepMind · Artificial Analysis · Decrypt).
OpenAI put its flagship on Cerebras silicon and made it fourteen times faster. The Ultrafast preview, announced on Thursday, runs GPT-5.6 Sol on wafer-scale chips from Cerebras at up to 750 output tokens a second for API customers, provided OpenAI invites them; Cerebras' own quarter is in BUSINESS, below (OpenAI · Decrypt).
░░▒▒▓▓ TECH ▓▓▒▒░░Microsoft is folding its two Copilot apps into one and switching several features off. The merge of the consumer and business apps runs from this week into mid-September, ahead of the combined chat, coding, Cowork and agents product Satya Nadella has been calling a Super App. Consumers lose Copilot Podcasts, Group Chat and Deep Research on 18 August, and Mico, the animated blob introduced last year to give Copilot a friendlier face, is retired alongside them. Commercial users mostly get a new name and icon (TechCrunch · GeekWire).
Twitch will feed streamers' work to Amazon's models unless they go and find the switch. A setting added on Wednesday lets Amazon train generative models on channel content, including livestream audio and video, and every account is opted in by default, with the toggle buried in security settings. Asked on a Twitch livestream why it was not opt-in, chief product officer Mike Minton answered: "If this was opt-in, nobody would opt in." He also said he did not know what Amazon had used for model training (TechCrunch · 404 Media).
░░▒▒▓▓ POLICY ▓▓▒▒░░Britain is weighing rules on the AI that designs DNA. Ministers are considering new biological-weapons legislation and gene-synthesis screening that would oblige laboratories to establish who their customers are and flag suspicious sequence orders, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. Officials are also looking at limiting how AI companies work with universities holding large genome-sequencing datasets. It is one of the first serious attempts anywhere to regulate the bio half of the AI risk picture rather than the model half (Bloomberg).
Australia's redesigned news-payment bill reaches TikTok and LinkedIn. Legislation introduced on Thursday would require platforms earning more than A$250 million a year in Australian digital advertising to strike commercial deals with at least eight news businesses, or pay a charge of 2.5% of that digital advertising revenue. Narrowing the base from a platform's total Australian revenue to its digital advertising alone is one of the redesign's larger changes, and it shrinks the pool the charge is drawn from. TikTok is in scope, and so is LinkedIn, after the government dropped an exclusion for professional networking sites. Five percent of the money raised goes to the non-profit newswire Australian Associated Press, and the redesign began after Meta stopped paying for news there (The Conversation · iTnews).
░░▒▒▓▓ INFRA ▓▓▒▒░░Most of the power data-center developers have asked for is never going to be built. US grid operators and utilities have fielded requests totaling 1,066 gigawatts for data-center projects and are likely to commit to about 28% of it, on Wood Mackenzie projections Bloomberg published on Wednesday, with the rest made up of phantom filings and long-shot pitches. Developers shop the same project around several utilities, so the same megawatts get counted more than once (Bloomberg).
Cisco took $4 billion of AI infrastructure orders in a single quarter and the shares fell anyway. Revenue for the July quarter came in at $17.3 billion, up 18% from a year earlier, with hyperscaler AI orders reaching $9.3 billion across the fiscal year, roughly four and a half times the year before. The stock dropped about 5% after hours on Wednesday because executives said a heavier hardware mix will squeeze gross margins (Cisco · Investing.com).
░░▒▒▓▓ BUSINESS ▓▓▒▒░░Databricks asked for $1 billion, was offered $15 billion, and took $5 billion. The data and AI platform closed the round on Thursday at a $190 billion valuation, above the $188 billion term sheet led by Coatue that it signed in July, with Blackstone, MGX, T. Rowe Price and Sixth Street Growth alongside. Chief executive Ali Ghodsi told TechCrunch he said yes to more than planned because AI is expensive; revenue is past a $7 billion annualized run rate and growing more than 80% a year (TechCrunch · CNBC).
Cerebras shares fell 12% after hardware sales halved. Revenue for the June quarter reached $180 million, up 74% on a year earlier, but hardware accounted for only $54 million of it, around half the previous quarter, with fast-inference cloud revenue nearly quadrupling to make up the difference. The net loss widened to $451 million, and the shares closed down 12% on Thursday, the first full session after the results. Investors focused on the mix and on customer concentration: the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and OpenAI each accounted for roughly a third of revenue in the quarter, and OpenAI's new speed tier will only deepen that (CNBC · Cerebras).
OpenAI's revenue chief is out after eight months, and a security executive has the job. Denise Dresser, previously chief executive of Slack, joined in December to make OpenAI a serious contender for enterprise IT budgets and left on Thursday, the second senior departure in three days. Her replacement is Dali Rajic, until now president and chief operating officer of Wiz, the cloud-security company Google bought this year for $32 billion. The hire comes from cybersecurity rather than from Oracle or Salesforce (OpenAI · CNBC).
░░▒▒▓▓ GEOPOLITICS ▓▓▒▒░░Putin visited the Kuril Islands for the first time, and Tokyo called it unacceptable. The Russian president traveled on Thursday to Iturup, which Japan calls Etorofu, in a chain Soviet forces seized in 1945, whose four southernmost islands Japan still claims, visiting a fish-processing plant and talking to islanders. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi condemned the visit and restated Japan's claim (DW · BBC).
The US ambassador to Israel called settlers besieging two Palestinian families Israeli terrorists. Mike Huckabee, a long-standing supporter of the settlement movement, used the phrase on X about the men who have blockaded two Palestinian families in Qusra since the weekend, and said Israeli security forces had gone in at Washington's request. Israeli forces tried and failed to clear the outpost on Wednesday; on Thursday they evicted several Palestinian families instead, and residents said a recorder holding footage of settler attacks went missing from one house (Haaretz).
░░▒▒▓▓ ALPS ▓▓▒▒░░Waymo has registered a Swiss subsidiary but has not applied for a robotaxi permit. Alphabet's driverless-car unit registered Waymo Switzerland GmbH in the Zurich commercial register on 31 July with CHF 100,000 of capital, at Gustav-Gull-Platz 1 on the Europaallee, the address of Google Switzerland. Its stated purpose is ride-hailing with autonomous vehicles. It has not filed for the pilot permit Switzerland has offered since March 2025, and driverless taxis on Swiss roads are not expected before 2030 at the earliest (NZZ · 20 Minuten).
Beijing is now setting the pace of AI governance, a Swiss tech-critical blog argues. Digital-politics journalist Adrienne Fichter writes on techjournalismus.ch that China has moved ahead of the European Union on global AI rulemaking, pushing its own standards and institutions outward while Brussels litigates its own, and that Europe's remaining advantage is narrower than Brussels believes. Read it as a corrective to the assumption that the AI Act made Europe the world's regulator by default (techjournalismus.ch).
░░▒▒▓▓ REPORTS ▓▓▒▒░░Ramp — August 2026 AI Index: Cracks in the AI thesis. Published on Wednesday by the corporate-card company's economics lab, which reads anonymized spending across its customers: 6.1% of businesses buying AI now pay for model-serving platforms that resell open-weight and Chinese models, up 0.2 points on the month. Adoption growth has slowed at OpenAI and, less sharply, at Anthropic, which leaves both increasingly dependent on existing customers spending more, and some of those customers are moving budget to open weights. Worth holding lightly: this is one card issuer's slice of the market, skewed toward companies that already care about optimizing token spend (Ramp).
░░▒▒▓▓ COMMS DESK ▓▓▒▒░░Karoline Leavitt is leaving the White House podium at the end of the month. Trump announced the departure of the youngest press secretary in the job's history on Wednesday, and said she would become one of his top outside advisers and work with the party on November's midterms. Leavitt said she wanted more time with her family. No successor was named. Whoever takes it inherits a principal who does most of his own talking (Axios · NBC News).
Apple wants to pay publishers every time Siri uses their work. The company is negotiating licensing deals that would give its rebuilt assistant access to current news, with a possible nine-figure budget and, unusually, payment per use rather than a flat fee, the Wall Street Journal reported, per TechCrunch. For anyone licensing content, a per-query model turns editorial output into metered inventory, and the meter belongs to the platform (TechCrunch · Nieman Lab).
░░▒▒▓▓ ONE MORE THING ▓▓▒▒░░Instagram replaced its wordmark on Thursday, the text-only logo at the top of the app, for the first time in ten years. Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram, called the new lettering "sharper and more modern"; it puts old-fashioned curves on the s, the r and the g, and the r no longer joins the letter beside it. Enough people now read the result as Instagzam that TechCrunch felt obliged to note the brand is recognizable anyway, and one reader filed the whole thing under AI slop. Ten years untouched, and the argument is about one letter (TechCrunch · Indian Express).
░░▒▒▓▓ TRACK OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░🎵 Mialon — Overmono, Jaz Karis, Mahalia
Read it again — the desk at Uncertain Futures