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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. 55 · Friday, 28 August 2026Happy Friday. Nvidia is reported to have agreed to pay $12.9 billion for Hugging Face, a step past the takeover interest we flagged on Wednesday. OpenAI is testing a Codex mode that keeps working until someone puts it to sleep, a day after its own report blamed a model trained for persistence for breaking into Hugging Face. Software stocks then had their best day of the year, with Salesforce up 22%. And a hundred-odd companies signed a letter asking everyone to please do something about rogue AI agents.
░░▒▒▓▓ TOP 5 ▓▓▒▒░░Nvidia is reported to have agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, the place the open-model world keeps its weights (update)
The takeover interest we covered on Wednesday has become a deal, The Information reported on Wednesday night, at roughly 80 times the startup's annualized revenue. Hugging Face is where developers go to find, host and download open-source models and datasets, the GitHub of AI in the industry's own shorthand, and Nvidia has been an investor since 2023. The strategic logic is defensive: OpenAI, Google, Amazon and Anthropic are all building their own AI chips, and a thriving open-model ecosystem keeps the rest of the market renting Nvidia hardware. Business Insider, which first reported the takeover interest over the weekend, said on Wednesday night that no agreement had been signed and the talks could still fall apart. Neither company has confirmed anything, which for Nvidia is unusual restraint (The Information · CNBC · Business Insider).
OpenAI is testing a Codex setting that keeps working until someone puts it to sleep
WIRED found the feature in the public code base of Codex, OpenAI's coding agent: a "Persistent mode" whose instructions tell the model it will "continue working until put to sleep," a departure from settings that stop after minutes or hours. A companion file describes proactivity, in which the agent writes its own follow-up tasks across sessions, draws on what it knows about the user to pick among them, and may message that user unprompted, though it is told to do so sparingly. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the company is testing this and said there are no immediate plans to launch. The timing is the story. OpenAI's technical report a day earlier identified the model behind the Hugging Face breach as an internal research model trained to be highly persistent, and said it had been taken offline (WIRED · Gizmodo).
Software stocks had their best day of the year, and Salesforce its second-best day ever (update)
Salesforce closed up about 22% on Thursday, the biggest one-day gain in its history bar one, after the earnings beat and raised guidance we covered yesterday, and the expanded Anthropic partnership announced alongside the results. Okta and CrowdStrike, which reported the same night, rose sharply alongside it, and the rally spread through the software names that had spent the year being sold on the theory that AI would eat them. Chief executive Marc Benioff told investors it was time to stop the SaaSpocalypse talk, which is easier to say on a day the stock adds a fifth of its value. The underlying quarter was fine rather than good: revenue grew 11%, two points slower than the previous quarter and about 6.4% excluding the Informatica acquisition; $2.53 of the $5.90 in headline earnings per share came from gains on strategic investments (CNBC · Seeking Alpha · Salesforce).
More than 100 companies signed an open letter asking the world to defend itself against AI-driven attacks
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and AWS put their names to a joint letter on Thursday warning that AI-enabled attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated in the coming months, and calling for new public and private partnerships to raise security standards. The signatory list runs to cybersecurity firms including CrowdStrike, Okta and Fortinet, plus Visa, Mastercard, AMD and Broadcom. The letter asks the cybersecurity companies to test their defenses continuously against frontier cyber capabilities, and governments to coordinate and fund the response. It also carries the signature of Hugging Face, which was hacked last month by a model belonging to one of the other signatories (TechCrunch · Engadget).
Kioxia and Sandisk plan to spend more than $31 billion in Japan on the memory the AI buildout is eating
The two flash-memory partners said on Thursday they will invest through 2032 in production infrastructure at Kioxia's Yokkaichi and Kitakami plants, including a new Kitakami facility in Iwate prefecture targeted to start operating in the fiscal year beginning April 2029. Kioxia's case is that agentic AI applications will keep flash demand expanding for years, which is the supply-side answer to a squeeze that has already pushed up the price of phones and laptops. The money is contingent on Japanese government support that has not yet been granted, so the announcement is at this stage a very large request (Kioxia · Bloomberg).
░░▒▒▓▓ STATS OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░░░▒▒▓▓ AI ▓▓▒▒░░Google is moving its AI safety team out of DeepMind and into the lobbying department. From September 1 the roughly 90-person AI responsibility team, which tests models for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear risk and studies the psychological effects of chatbots on users, reports into Google's global affairs organization rather than the research lab. Google says the team keeps its research mission, its compute, its headcount and its right to publish externally. Some DeepMind staff have told reporters they expect it to lose independence and early access to unreleased work. The move is part of a wider reorganization that has turned a semi-autonomous lab into a product division, and follows Demis Hassabis stepping aside as DeepMind's chief executive earlier this month (PYMNTS · Digitimes).
DeepMind let outsiders test a model without either side seeing the other's homework. In what the lab calls the first double-blind evaluation of a proprietary frontier model, Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite was scored against confidential benchmarks from the benchmarking consortium MLCommons and the Singapore AI Safety Institute inside a Google Cloud Confidential Space enclave, with the auditor AVERI running the prompts through OpenMined's secure computation. The evaluators never saw the model weights and Google never saw the test questions, which is meant to stop the oldest trick in benchmarking: training on the exam. For anyone who has to defend a vendor's benchmark claim in public, this is the first version of that claim with a chain of custody (Google DeepMind · The New Stack · MLCommons).
Moonshot wants a 30% cut from Microsoft, Amazon and Google for hosting its Chinese model. Reuters reported on Wednesday that the Beijing lab is negotiating revenue-sharing deals that would put Kimi K3 on Azure, AWS and Google Cloud, asking for up to 30% of the revenue those services generate. The talks are early and may produce nothing, with the split, data access and token auditing all unresolved. Any deal would be the first significant revenue-sharing arrangement between a Chinese AI developer and a major American cloud provider, at a moment when Washington is still arguing about whether open Chinese weights are a competitive problem or a security one (Reuters · Seeking Alpha).
Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk, the human workforce it once sold as artificial intelligence. The marketplace announced its shutdown on Tuesday, effective September 30, after 21 years of paying people small sums to label data, transcribe audio and fill in surveys; at its peak it carried more than 500,000 workers. We covered the beginning of the end in early July, when Amazon said it would stop accepting new customers. Jeff Bezos used to describe it as artificial artificial intelligence, a joke that has aged into a business model. SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI close the same day, taking Amazon out of the human-data-collection business entirely, just as Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific compete to sell exactly that (CNBC · Quartz).
░░▒▒▓▓ TECH ▓▓▒▒░░Australian police arrested two men in Perth over the TeamPCP supply-chain hacks. Ruben Ian Thomson, 21, and Louis Michael Gaebler, 23, face 14 charges between them after a joint investigation by the Australian Federal Police, Western Australia Police and the FBI. The group is blamed for compromising the vulnerability scanner Trivy, which then carried the malicious code onward into everything that trusted it, including the model-routing library LiteLLM and the AI recruiting startup Mercor, and is suspected of breaching the European Commission's cloud infrastructure and targeting developer tooling that reaches GitHub and OpenAI. Police put the reach at more than a thousand organizations, half a million stolen credentials and at least 300GB of exfiltrated data (TechCrunch · ABC News).
The FBI seized the tools a Chinese state-linked group used to route attacks through hijacked devices worldwide. The Justice Department said on Wednesday it had taken down domains behind QScan and QTRouter, built by a group called QTFY that court filings tie to a Nanjing company selling hacking services to China's Ministry of State Security and the People's Liberation Army. QScan infected internet-connected devices around the world; QTRouter blended them with rented servers and commercial proxies so that traffic appeared to originate near the target. Named victims include NASA, the Federal Reserve, the Energy Department, the Justice Department itself, the National Institutes of Health and the US Senate, over activity running from 2018 to this year (The Register · CNBC).
░░▒▒▓▓ POLICY ▓▓▒▒░░The draft executive order creating an American AI regulator has stalled inside the administration. The order, circulated in recent weeks, would have set up a self-regulatory organization for companies building state-of-the-art models, an arrangement closer to the body that polices stockbrokers than to a federal agency. It has not moved. The White House framework for pre-deployment testing of frontier models, finished in early August, still has not been published either, which leaves the United States with an AI policy consisting largely of export controls and tariffs (The Information).
Washington is weighing semiconductor tariffs that would reach laptops, servers and games consoles. Politico reported the administration is considering a new round of duties covering chips and the products built around them, including the data-center servers the AI buildout runs on. Officials have indicated the exemptions granted in January may not carry over, which is why the companies doing the building spent Thursday warning about the cost. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick favors capping duty-free chip imports at a volume pegged to each company's committed US production (CNBC · Tom's Hardware).
South Korea's media regulator says Meta's teen limits should apply everywhere, not only in America. The Korea Media and Communications Commission told Reuters on Thursday that the curbs Meta agreed to in its US settlement, covering recommendation algorithms, visible like counts and re-engagement notifications, would ideally extend to young users worldwide, and pointed to seven bills before the Korean parliament on youth protection online. The settlement is an American one, but in agreeing to it Meta has published a working specification of the rules it says it can live with, and regulators everywhere have the receipt (Reuters, via BusinessWorld · RTÉ).
░░▒▒▓▓ INFRA ▓▓▒▒░░AWS will deploy 2 million more Nvidia chips, and 100,000 of them are reserved for the US government. The two companies announced on Wednesday that Blackwell Ultra, Rubin and Rubin Ultra processors will go into AWS data centers across 2027 and 2028, on top of the million-plus committed earlier this year, along with Nvidia's Vera CPUs and a set of AI factories built for federal work on secure infrastructure. Neither company shared financial terms; TechCrunch puts the order at tens of billions of dollars on GPU unit costs (Nvidia · Amazon · TechCrunch).
░░▒▒▓▓ BUSINESS ▓▓▒▒░░DeepSeek made about $70.7 million in seven months, ten times last year and a rounding error next to its American rivals. The Chinese lab booked roughly 475 million yuan of revenue through July with an API gross margin of 82.9%, against a net loss of around 715 million yuan, The Information reported on Wednesday. Anthropic and OpenAI each run tens of billions in annualized revenue. The gap has a mechanism: American developers increasingly use Chinese open-weight models, but the money lands with the US inference providers hosting them, so China's labs are capturing Western workloads without capturing Western revenue (The Information · The Standard).
A four-month-old assistant startup is raising at $2.5 billion. Instinct, founded in April by Noah Shinn, a former researcher at the customer-service AI company Sierra, is closing about $250 million co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark, taking total funding to roughly $350 million. Its product answers a call or a text and then goes off to handle email, calendars, bookings and shopping. It launched a few months ago. DeepSeek, two years into shipping frontier open models, earned less in seven months than Instinct has raised in four (The Information · Wall Street Journal).
░░▒▒▓▓ GEOPOLITICS ▓▓▒▒░░The Himalayan flood has killed more than 470 people, with over 1,500 still missing (update). The disaster we covered yesterday has grown considerably: a glacier collapse on the Nepal-Tibet border on Wednesday sent a wall of mud and rock down the valley. The UN's resident coordinator in Nepal says 35 bridges were wiped out and about 25 miles of road destroyed, which is slowing the search. About 90 Americans are among the missing, alongside pilgrims and trekkers from around the world. Nepal has deployed 30,000 security personnel to the valleys, and officials expect the toll to rise (NPR · Al Jazeera).
The CIA director flew to Moscow to tell Russia not to attack a NATO member. John Ratcliffe delivered the warning in person this week, and also pressed Russia to cut economic and military support for Iran; sources told CNN that the likeliest targets of any escalation are the Baltic states or Poland. President Trump called the visit "very sort of semi-routine." The last CIA director to make the trip was William Burns in 2021, sent to warn Vladimir Putin against invading Ukraine; the invasion followed three months later (CNN · CBS News).
░░▒▒▓▓ ALPS ▓▓▒▒░░Switzerland's weather service now issues thunderstorm warnings written by a neural network. MeteoSwiss put the system into operation this summer after four years of development, the first time it has used deep learning to issue warnings rather than to forecast. Every five minutes it reads national radar and lightning data and calculates the probability of hail, heavy rain and lightning for the hour ahead, pushing alerts to app users by location and hazard type. It was trained on the supercomputers in Lugano, which are otherwise busy with the country's sovereign language models (SWI swissinfo.ch · MeteoSwiss).
The Swiss army is building a drone and robotics center, and has not yet decided where. Defence Minister Martin Pfister, armed forces chief Benedikt Roos and armasuisse director Urs Loher announced the Centre for Unmanned Systems on Thursday, pairing a technology hub with a military command so that drones and ground robots can be developed, tested and pushed into service faster. A drone battalion for reconnaissance, strike and defense follows in 2028, fed by its own recruit school from spring 2027. The site is still being chosen, the money rides on the 2027 armaments program, and a working group is still reviewing who may legally down a drone, which is a candid way to launch a center of excellence (SWI swissinfo.ch · VBS · Watson).
Half a million Swiss digital mailboxes, and almost nothing in them. Swiss Post has been celebrating nearly 500,000 new users of its digital letterbox, the service meant to carry physical mail into an app. In his Friday column for the tech-critical site DNIP, Reto Vogt reports that he looked inside his own and found it essentially empty, and argues the adoption figure measures how many people installed the app rather than how much post now arrives that way (DNIP).
░░▒▒▓▓ RESEARCH ▓▓▒▒░░An AI system found an immune signal in a breast cancer that oncologists had written off as immune-cold. The Allen Institute for AI ran its AutoDiscovery system across The Cancer Genome Atlas, one of the most comprehensive cancer datasets ever assembled, and surfaced a stronger immune signature in invasive lobular carcinoma than the field had recognized, a subtype long assumed not to respond to immunotherapy. Researchers at the Providence Swedish Cancer Institute validated the finding on an independent patient dataset and in the laboratory. Invasive lobular carcinoma accounts for roughly 15% of US breast cancer diagnoses, so an entire class of patients may have been ruled out of a treatment on a mistaken premise. Providence Swedish is now pointing the system at its own patient records (Ai2 · GeekWire).
░░▒▒▓▓ ROBOTICS ▓▓▒▒░░SoftBank is in talks to take control of 1X at about $6 billion, well below what the robot maker wanted last year. The Norwegian-American developer of the NEO home humanoid, backed by OpenAI, tried last autumn to raise $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation and brought in less than half that, The Information reported. A majority stake would give SoftBank a second robotics platform and give 1X the runway to get NEO into houses, which it has not yet managed for a single paying customer. OpenAI discussed buying the company outright last year and the talks went nowhere (The Information · The Star).
░░▒▒▓▓ PAPERS ▓▓▒▒░░Apple — grading an answer against a checklist beats giving it a single score. In a preprint posted Monday, Apple's machine-learning group takes on a narrow but load-bearing problem: how to reward a model for answering a question well when "well" means several things at once. Rather than train against one overall preference score, the reward signal used in post-training to tell a model which answer was better, they generate a rubric per question, grounded in the documents actually retrieved, and split it into separate buckets for accuracy, composition, safety and general quality, the last of which carries groundedness. Scored across composition, grounding and instruction-following, the result improves on an instruction-tuned baseline by 6.5%, and on flat rubrics by 4%. The practical reading for anyone publishing model-written copy: the way to make a model stay tied to its sources is to write the grading criteria from the retrieved documents themselves, not to hope a general thumbs-up covers it (arXiv · Apple).
░░▒▒▓▓ COMMS DESK ▓▓▒▒░░Gemini has a branding problem, and TechCrunch thinks it is the industry's problem too. Google's argument for its assistant is that users should not have to work out which tool a task needs; its app then offers chat, Spark and Daily Brief as three separate destinations, each with an icon and a slot in the navigation bar. Writing on Wednesday, TechCrunch argues that AI companies keep exposing their own internal architecture to consumers, largely because product teams want visible credit for their work. For the desk: an org chart that leaks into the interface is a naming problem downstream of a governance problem, and no amount of launch copy fixes it (TechCrunch).
░░▒▒▓▓ ONE MORE THING ▓▓▒▒░░On the day the world learned who is reportedly buying it, Hugging Face opened preorders for a duck. Microduck is a $399 open-source biped from the company's Pollen Robotics unit, 25 centimeters tall and under 800 grams, with 15 motors, a camera, a small lidar and a beak that doubles as a gripper rated to lift its own body weight. It waddles, crouches, roller-skates, picks up small objects and gets back up when pushed over. Chief executive Clem Delangue says the team designed it to be "made to move, ready to fall," which is either a robotics philosophy or a note to Nvidia's integration team (TechCrunch · Axios · Engadget).
░░▒▒▓▓ TRACK OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░🎵 Mannaka de(from Ukareteiru Hito twilight edition EP) — OGRE YOU ASSHOLE
Quack — from the Uncertain Futures desk
The Uncertain Futures — all the news that fits the context window.
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