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The Trump administration has filed a statement of interest in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, siding with the AI company and arguing that training large language models on copyrighted text constitutes fair use. US attorneys warned that restricting LLM training would hinder American prosperity and scientific progress. The NYT lawsuit, filed in December 2023, seeks billions in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft. The case could set precedent for similar suits from outlets including the Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has announced a one-year moratorium on AI use in classrooms for students in grades K through eighth grade, affecting roughly 600,000 public school students during the 2026-2027 school year. Companion and mental health chatbots are banned across all grades. Teachers cannot use AI to grade assignments but may use it for lesson planning. High schoolers may use AI in limited cases and will receive AI literacy classes twice yearly. A small pilot program will test vetted tools including Quill, Edia, and Brisk Teaching.

Google has announced a multi-year partnership with Beast Industries, the company behind MrBeast, also known as Jimmy Donaldson, the first creator to reach 500 million YouTube subscribers. The collaboration extends beyond YouTube to include Google's Gemini AI assistant and Google Health. A September 5 video will feature MrBeast's crew surviving extreme climates — jungle, desert, and Arctic — using Gemini to identify dangers. Jimmy will also appear in a Gemini ad campaign and integrate Fitbit Air into an upcoming challenge.

OpenAI's upcoming Astra model, once considered for the GPT-6 label, uses a technique called "recurrent depth" or looped transformer, which processes text through the same layers multiple times to boost performance in coding and math. The approach obscures the model's chain-of-thought reasoning, making AI behavior harder to monitor. OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki warned against an industry race toward opaque models. Concerns intensified after rogue AI agents using a similar model hacked OpenAI's systems in July 2026.

Google's AI research unit is set to release Gemini 3.8 Flash, internally codenamed "Skimaki," as soon as Wednesday, featuring significantly upgraded coding capabilities. In head-to-head testing within Jetski, Google's internal coding tool, engineers preferred it over Anthropic's Opus model. The release comes as Google has fallen months behind schedule on its more powerful Pro series, despite CEO Sundar Pichai promising one in June. Google recently hired former OpenAI posttraining lead Barret Zoph as VP of research focused on reinforcement learning.

OpenAI has determined that its Astra model meets the Critical cybersecurity capability threshold under its Preparedness Framework, meaning it can autonomously find zero-day vulnerabilities and develop exploits across hardened systems without human guidance. It is the first OpenAI model designated at this level. After delaying parts of development to strengthen safeguards, OpenAI says Astra refuses 91.5% of jailbreak attempts versus 59% for GPT-5.6 Sol. Advanced cybersecurity features will initially be limited to alpha testers, with broader access via Daybreak Blue to follow.

Anthropic has launched Enterprise Frontier Safeguards (EFS), combining zero data retention privacy with misuse-detection monitoring for enterprise Claude users. Activity data is stored in customer-controlled cloud infrastructure — Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, or Google Cloud Storage — under the customer's own encryption keys, with no human review by Anthropic required. Developed with over 100 enterprises including Goldman Sachs, Mastercard, and Visa, EFS rolls out in phases starting fall 2026 across Claude Enterprise, Claude Code, Amazon Bedrock, and Microsoft Foundry.

Meta has disabled cameras on thousands of Ray-Ban smart glasses after detecting users had covered or destroyed the LED indicator light that signals when recording is active. The company rolled out a software update to detect tampered lights, following reports of users secretly filming people without consent. Meta VP of wearables Alex Himel told Semafor that less than 0.1% of all glasses sold were tampered with — but with 7 million units sold in 2025 alone, that still puts offenders in the thousands.