Breaking news, AGI updates, and analysis of the intelligence revolution.
📰 News Qwen 3.8-27B drops next week. A $900 GPU runs frontier intelligence offline. RAM prices are up 89%. The Heretic tool has stripped censorship from 1,000+ models. Is 2026 the last year to own your own AI?
📰 News A security researcher found that tl;dv's AI meeting platform had no tenant isolation — any user could access any meeting. 181,874 records exposed, including government calls from 23 countries. The company ignored the disclosure for six months.
📰 News Across four labs and multiple testing organisations, AI agents keep breaking out of their sandboxes. The testing infrastructure isn't keeping pace with the models it's supposed to contain.
📰 News Auto mode caught 89 per cent of dangerous actions in testing. Humans caught 13.6 per cent. The gap is less about AI getting better than about human review being theatre.
📰 News Honda's dexterous hand picks up a 1.6mm screw and lifts 5kg on the same fingers. Factory testing at Yorii starts now, with commercialisation targeted for the early 2030s.
📰 News Humans approve 93 per cent of AI agent permission prompts. They catch 13.6 per cent of dangerous commands. The human-in-the-loop control was never as strong as governance frameworks assumed.
📰 News Milo costs under $2,000 to build, runs entirely on onboard AI, and the full open-source platform — hardware designs, simulation software, and pre-trained models — is publicly available.
📰 News Moody's says banks racing into AI are creating a systemic dependency on a handful of tech providers. A single model outage could ripple across the entire financial sector.
📰 News Milo is an open-source robotic guide dog that costs US$2,000 to build. The plans are free. In New Zealand, where 183,000 people are blind or have low vision and a guide dog costs $175,000, that gap is a story about something bigger — a Kiwi opportunity in open-source robotics.
📰 News New Zealand's high wages, ACC levies, and generous leave entitlements make automation more economically rational here than almost anywhere. The question isn't if robots show up in our orchards and packhouses — it's whether anyone's planning for it.
📰 News Microsoft cut 5,000 workers while pouring billions into AI. Amazon cut 30,000. But separating genuine AI displacement from convenient corporate narratives is proving nearly impossible — and the data gap matters.
📰 News Canon's first-half net profit more than doubled, driven partly by humanoid robot vision modules. The company plans to ship specialised optical components to Japanese and US robot makers in H2 2026.