The Gates Foundation is investing at least a billion dollars over two years to make AI tools more widely available in health, education, and agriculture. Bill Gates warns that more than 90 percent of the training data behind early language models came from English sources, and that speech recognition fails 60 percent of the time in Yoruba. The market, he says, is “a terrible guarantor of equal opportunity.”
Agility Robotics has unveiled Digit 5, the next version of its humanoid robot for warehouses and factories. The robot can now work alongside people without safety fences. It spots people using AI and sensors and, according to the company, stops or steps aside. It also gives off visual and audio signals to warn anyone nearby.
Agility is the first partner for Nvidia's Halos safety platform for robotics. Digit 4 was the first humanoid robot to pass an independent OSHA safety review on a production line, Agility says.
Digit 5 lifts up to 22.7 kg, 40 percent more than its predecessor. The battery charges in 9 minutes for 90 minutes of runtime, which the company says allows more than 20 hours of work per day. Swappable grippers let it handle different jobs, from moving bins to loading machines. The robot stands 1.81 m tall and weighs 129 kg.
Digit 4 logged over 65,000 hours with customers like GXO, Amazon, and Schaeffler, according to Agility. At GXO it moved around 100,000 bins with about 98 percent accuracy. The company points to orders worth more than $300 million. First deliveries start in early 2027, including in the EU. The robots are built in Salem, Oregon, in a factory that can produce up to 10,000 units per year.
Apple is shipping its rebuilt “Siri AI” after years of delay, built on Google’s Gemini models and running partly on the device, partly through Private Cloud Compute. Early testers praise multi-step requests and screen context, but report hallucinations and gaps with personal context. In the EU, the assistant stays unavailable for now.
OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google want to slow down frontier AI development, citing safety concerns. But critics from across the industry and politics are pushing back. Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez calls the initiative a “cartel by another name” designed to shut out competitors, and the White House and Trump himself are opposing the move.
OpenAI has hundreds of contract workers reading real ChatGPT conversations and rating them on a scale of one to seven, partly to reduce flattery and human-like behavior, 404 Media reports. The prompts are anonymized but can still contain sensitive data. Users who don’t want their chats reviewed by humans have to actively disable the “Improve the model for everyone” setting, which is on by default.
Anthropic has told investors it will turn a profit for the second straight quarter, but the claim rests on an adjusted metric that leaves out costs like stock-based compensation. Gross margins run above 80 percent, according to the Financial Times, though that figure comes before revenue-sharing payments to partners like Amazon and the cost of training models.
Quarterly revenue jumped 14-fold from a year earlier to $11.5 billion, and the annualized run rate hit $65 billion at the end of July. SemiAnalysis analyst Joey Brookhart says investors expect $120 billion in annualized revenue by year's end and nearly triple that by the close of 2027.
Anthropic plans to go public on the Nasdaq at a possible valuation of $2 trillion or more. Rather than release its prospectus last week as expected, the company shared the documents with only a small group of investors at first. At the same time, CEO Dario Amodei publicly called for slowing down AI development. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed the call. Altman told Fortune that OpenAI won't go public this year.
The Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) has officially weighed in on the Navier-Stokes problem, one of seven Millennium Prize Problems announced in Paris in 2000, each worth $1 million. The problem asks whether the equations governing fluid motion in three-dimensional space always have a smooth, complete solution.
The CMI says "the Navier-Stokes problem has apparently been settled" and hopes "to see waves of new human understanding unleashed as the innovations behind this work are analyzed and interrogated." The solution is now under review. "The process is deliberately unhurried, but we will provide updates," the institute writes. It also notes that the "increasing ability of new technologies to accelerate mathematical research has heightened this sense of anticipation."
The potential solution comes with a bitter dispute. Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster accuses OpenAI of redirecting resources toward the problem after rumors about his research leaked, using his drafts in training data, and rejecting his co-author, Levent Alpöge, who works at Anthropic, from authorship.
Sam Altman is doubling down on his call to pump the brakes on AI, at least a little. He wants a uniform, nationwide safety framework for advanced AI but says the industry shouldn't wait for lawmakers, even though international coordination needs U.S. government support. To that end, OpenAI now sets explicit safety protocols before training runs that could bring major capability jumps, and Altman hopes other companies "will learn from our approaches and propose their own." He also makes clear that "pacing" doesn't mean "stopping." Progress will "continue to be" rapid, just not as fast as it could.
Pacing will be well worth this cost; no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring.
Sam Altman, OpenAI
Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, former Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Elon Musk all backed better-controlled AI development. According to The Information, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have been talking for months about self-regulation through an independent oversight body. Smaller players like Cohere worry this could turn into a cartel.
