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Saturday, August 29Real: 1 · Security: 2 · Other News: 0 · Upcoming: 1
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What’s Real

Audio+2Aug 25

Image: blog.google

Gemini on Mac now dictates cleaned-up text into any window

Anyone writing on a Mac can now speak into whatever window is open and get back text with the filler words stripped out and mid-sentence corrections already applied. Google said on Aug. 25 that the Gemini app for macOS handles dictation this way across desktop applications. That replaces the older routine of recording speech in one place, transcribing it, and pasting the result into the document where the work actually lives.

SOURCES · blog.google

Curious whether AI can do something yet? Submit a question and we’ll track it for you.

Text

Can AI build a small working app end to end from a written spec?

YesEvidence ↗ · Flipped “Sort of” → “Yes”, Aug 10
Notable:ReplitCodexClaude CodeCursor
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Security

Money Moves

Market Watch

The AI stocks Wall Street fund managers are adding, trimming, or dropping.

Open the tracker for the latest holdings.

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AI Entanglements

Who invests in, buys, supplies and powers whom across AI.

Open AI Entanglements
AgentsAug 28

Image: The Threshold Report/GPT Image 2

Anthropic's automated researchers raised scores on 10 alignment tests

Anthropic published research yesterday describing automated systems that read the alignment literature (that is, work on getting models to behave as intended), propose post-training methods, and run 30-minute training tests to see whether those methods hold. Across 10 benchmarks that measure misaligned behavior, the paper reports an improvement on every one, with no drop in overall performance. If the approach works outside Anthropic's own tests, safety teams could try far more mitigations than they can evaluate by hand. The paper puts the automated search at about $4 per hour in API inference, against $150 per hour for a human researcher.

Positive - Anthropic's automated researcher reduced misaligned behavior across all 10 tests without sacrificing broader model performance.
SOURCES · techcrunch.com
RobotsAug 28

Image: The Threshold Report/GPT Image 2

93 US cities and counties dropped Flock contracts in August

In August 2026, 93 cities and counties ended their contracts with Flock Safety, according to Secure Justice's updated tracker, which counts 214 such exits since 2021. The departures followed objections over surveillance, data sharing, cost, and misuse of the systems. Local officials can undo an AI camera deployment after it is installed, and in a single month 93 of them did.

Negative - Dozens of jurisdictions unilaterally withdrew Flock's surveillance systems instead of resolving data-sharing and misuse concerns through agreed safeguards.
SOURCES · arstechnica.com
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Other News

Compute & InfraAug 28

Image: The Threshold Report/GPT Image 2

New Jersey makes large data centers report power and water use

Data centers above 100MW in New Jersey will file reports twice a year covering energy use, how much of it goes to cooling versus computing, water use and where the water comes from, and on-site and backup power. The governor also signed a law ending the state's $500 million tax-credit program for data centers. Existing sites are covered as well, so state regulators get a recurring record of what the largest facilities consume as AI-driven demand for power and water grows.

SOURCES · datacenterdynamics.com

Upcoming

Announced or reported, but not yet real or available.

TextAug 28

OpenAI proposes ending Cursor's access to its models on November 12

Waiting on: Effective date - OpenAI has proposed November 12, 2026 as the cutoff, and the access it supplies to Cursor is still running.

openai.com
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