Google has repurposed its experimental CC tool into an agentic AI assistant designed for households, allowing up to six family members to share emails, a calendar, and a task list with one shared account. The agent sends daily briefings on upcoming events and can handle logistics like registration forms or shopping lists, though it asks permission before acting. CC previously existed as a solo daily-briefing feature before Google redesigned it based on tester feedback.
Researchers led by Jonas Lescroart and Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz of the Programa de Investigación de Félidos Bolivia identified a new small feline species, Leopardus tilcayo, in the Bolivian Yungas, marking the first new cat species found in over a century. Nogales-Ascarrunz first noticed the animal at a wildlife rehabilitation center, mistaking it for a kitten before genetic testing revealed it didn't match any known species. The team also made new findings about tiger cat subspecies during the same research, published in Current Biology.
NASA scientist Robert Wagner discovered a massive new lunar crater while performing a routine data check on imagery from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The impact, likely caused by an object roughly the size of a six-story building sometime between April and May 2024, created a crater 728 feet wide and 141 feet deep, the largest fresh impact site the orbiter has ever recorded.
A newly unsealed filing in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveals internal communications showing employees at both companies recognized their AI tools could jeopardize the publishers whose content trains them. The filing suggests executives were aware of this risk even as they continued developing and deploying the technology.
Rare Beauty, the cosmetics brand founded by Selena Gomez in 2020, directs 1% of its sales revenue to the Rare Impact Fund. The fund is pursuing a goal of raising $100 million to broaden access to mental health resources for young people.
PrismML, a startup founded by Caltech researchers led by CEO Babak Hassibi, has released Bonsai 2 27B, a compressed version of Alibaba's open-source Qwen3.8 27B model that shrinks it from full size down to 5.9 GB. The compressed model retains about 98% of the original's benchmark performance, up from 95% in the prior Bonsai release, while being small enough to run on PCs and possibly high-end smartphones. The company has raised a $22.25 million seed round and counts Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica as an advisor.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. named eight new members to the 16-seat US Preventive Services Task Force, the federal panel that grades preventive care services like cancer screenings and statins on an A-to-D scale that determines insurance coverage. The appointments come after Kennedy spent over a year sidelining the panel, canceling meetings and firing two of its leaders earlier this year. Several new appointees share ideological alignment with Kennedy and the Trump administration, including critics of COVID-19 vaccines and gender-affirming care, plus a non-physician health economist.
Meta AI has released Muse, a personified AI agent app for iPhone, with a companion Mac app added nine days later and web access at muse.ai. Users can customize the agent's name and avatar, and while the app is free with weekly usage limits, paying subscribers get expanded access. The Mac version can work across apps, files, calendar, notes, and messages, with user-controlled permissions.
Anthropic published a blog outlining measurement standards for tracking AI development pace, revealing that its Claude chatbot now completes most tasks end-to-end from a high-level prompt with human supervision on 26 percent of the company's AI R&D work. The company also said AI performs at least large chunks of work under close human direction on more than 90 percent of its research, though it stressed Claude isn't fully autonomous on any measured task category. The disclosure came alongside proposals for tracking AI agent oversight and compute usage as ways to gauge how fast frontier AI development is progressing.
Anthropic released three metrics measuring AI-driven research progress, human oversight of AI agents, and internal compute allocation, publishing its methodology so other AI labs can adopt similar tracking. The move follows CEO Dario Amodei's weekend call for a coordinated industry slowdown, which drew support from leaders at OpenAI, SpaceX and Google DeepMind. One finding showed roughly 30,000 AI agents simultaneously performing research and engineering tasks on Anthropic's main internal platform.
In a discussion on WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast, hosts Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, and Leah Feiger debated the growing focus on 'recursive self-improvement' (RSI), the idea of AI systems autonomously building successive, increasingly uncontrollable AI models. Schiffer argued that RSI appears to be replacing AGI as the industry's go-to buzzword once AGI began to seem less achievable, serving more as a marketing and geopolitical narrative than a rigorous technical concern.
The FAA announced that laser strikes on aircraft fell for a third consecutive year, with 4,470 incidents reported between January and July 2026, a 24 percent decline from the same period in 2025. California and Texas logged the most reports overall, while New Mexico and Hawaii topped the list per capita.
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