AI news of 23 August 2026

Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

Anthropic's flagship AI model struggles to gain adoption despite strong revenue as cheaper competitors gain traction.

Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive A few interesting numbers in this FT story gathered from "people with knowledge of the matter": Anthropic's "annualized revenue" for July is up to $65bn - it was $47bn in May, and I collected more historic numbers here. Anthropic expect Q3 to be profitable according to the same model they used to declare Q2 profitable. "It also told investors that it had 6,000 customers that spend $100,000 annually or more." As for OpenAI, "annualised revenue has jumped 35 per cent in the quarter to date and is now over $40bn, with the launch of GPT 5.6 in July jolting the company’s performance after a sluggish start to the…

Simon Willison 6d ago

Is it legal to train AI models on copyrighted books? It’s complicated Opens at the publisher in a new tab

Authors question legality of AI model training on copyrighted books without consent.

TechCrunch 6d ago

Quoting Drew Breunig

Developer notes that Fable AI model eliminates need for constant harness improvements that earlier models required.

Simon Willison 6d ago

AI is becoming AI's biggest customer as agentic token usage jumps 14x on OpenRouter

AI agents now consume more tokens than humans on OpenRouter, with usage growing 14x since February.

The Decoder 6d ago

An AI boss fired its first employee but only after humans reminded it of its own rules

AI agent at Andon Labs fired an employee for the first time with human guidance.

The Decoder 6d ago

Who’s behind the new ‘stealth model’ Ox Alpha? Opens at the publisher in a new tab

Mysterious AI model called Ox Alpha generates speculation online about its capabilities and origins.

TechCrunch 6d ago also at TechCrunch

I gave Qwen 3.8 27B a reverse-engineering job and it finished in 30 minutes Opens at the publisher in a new tab

Qwen language model completes reverse-engineering task in thirty minutes.

Hacker News 6d ago

Training AI to Paint with Code Opens at the publisher in a new tab

Research into training AI systems to create visual art through code generation techniques.

Hacker News 6d ago

Memory shortage reportedly drives Nvidia AI server prices up about 15 percent

Memory chip shortage pushes Nvidia AI server costs up 15 percent, raising expenses for cloud providers.

The Decoder 6d ago

AI could make scientists do more work less well, not less work better, study argues

Study suggests AI could worsen research by letting scientists start more projects instead of improving existing ones.

The Decoder 6d ago

Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

Is it legal to train AI models on copyrighted books? It’s complicated Opens at the publisher in a new tab

Quoting Drew Breunig

AI is becoming AI's biggest customer as agentic token usage jumps 14x on OpenRouter

An AI boss fired its first employee but only after humans reminded it of its own rules

Who’s behind the new ‘stealth model’ Ox Alpha? Opens at the publisher in a new tab

I gave Qwen 3.8 27B a reverse-engineering job and it finished in 30 minutes Opens at the publisher in a new tab

Training AI to Paint with Code Opens at the publisher in a new tab

Memory shortage reportedly drives Nvidia AI server prices up about 15 percent

AI could make scientists do more work less well, not less work better, study argues

Latest AI News

Choose sides Choose whose side you're on

Install it as an app

Ready for more?

Spread the word

PWA successfully installed.
Take that, Apple! 😉