OpenAI launches GPT-6 Astra with higher prices and critical cyber capabilities
OpenAI began rolling out GPT-6 Astra on September 3 and president Greg Brockman closed the press briefing with 'welcome to the AGI era.' The model costs $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output, was trained on more than 100,000 GPUs at Stargate in Texas, and is the first OpenAI model rated Critical for cyber capability. Its most powerful cyber features are gated. Two hours earlier, Sen. Bernie Sanders announced a bill to ban superintelligent AI.
The FTC and 22 states are suing Amazon (AMZN) for allegedly inventing a bidder to raise ad prices
The FTC and 22 states sued Amazon on Monday, alleging a hidden surcharge in its search ad auctions extracted tens of billions of dollars from more than a million advertisers over seven years. The complaint quotes Amazon's internal documents throughout.
Goldman Sachs raises its 2035 humanoid robot forecast nearly fivefold to 6.48 million units
Goldman now sees 6.48 million humanoid robots shipping in 2035, up from 1.38 million, a $138 billion market. The driver is a price curve crossing labor costs, and Amazon's $72 billion in modeled savings is the proof it already works.
Nvidia's (NVDA) $3.5 billion MediaTek deal turns the chips built to replace its GPUs into an ecosystem play
Nvidia is buying $3.5 billion of MediaTek convertible bonds as MediaTek joins NVLink Fusion to build custom XPUs. The bigger reveal is NVHBM, Nvidia's custom memory claiming 30% more bandwidth than HBM4E, with Amazon's Trainium4 first in line.
Rogue AI agents attacked Hugging Face. Its defenders turned to a Chinese open-weight model.
About 700 OpenAI test agents took part in an attack on Hugging Face in July, and the reports published Aug. 26 read like the case against open-weight AI. Except the frontier models Hugging Face reached for refused to help analyze the attack, and its responders ran a Chinese open-weight model instead. Washington has already picked a side.
Sony and Warner publishers sue Anthropic over alleged use of pirated lyrics weeks before a possible $2 trillion IPO.
Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and 33 affiliated publishers sued Anthropic and its two founders personally in San Jose federal court on August 28, seeking up to $150,000 per song. The complaint itself cites a report that Anthropic is eyeing a $2 trillion IPO as soon as October.
Meta (META) could spend $10 billion a year on Anthropic even after restricting its own engineers from using its tools
Meta is one of Anthropic's largest customers and is spending hundreds of millions a month on its tools, the New York Times reported, two months after Meta limited engineers from using Claude Code.
China's Moonshot wants up to 30% of the revenue to put its Kimi K3 model on Azure, AWS and Google Cloud
Reuters reports the Chinese startup is negotiating to host Kimi K3 on Azure, AWS and Google Cloud, and wants up to 30% of the revenue. It would be the first big China AI-US cloud revenue-share deal.
OpenAI's data center chief left five months in, as the company commits $1.4 trillion to compute
Chris Malone, OpenAI's head of data centers, has left after about five months, the latest senior exit as the company pours money into compute.
Amazon (AMZN) is working to fully automate its delivery stations, internal documents show
Internal documents reviewed by Business Insider describe Project Tetromino, an Amazon effort to fully automate delivery stations, the last manual stop before drivers. Amazon calls the figures inaccurate.
Anthropic could file for its IPO within days. Investors are discussing $2 trillion, twice the valuation it set in May.
Bloomberg reported on Aug. 20, 2026, that Anthropic may make its IPO filing public by the end of August. The company is considering an offering large enough to equal or top the record raise set by SpaceX (SPCX). For a potential October market debut, investors have floated a $2 trillion valuation, more than double the $965 billion figure Anthropic established in May.
Pennsylvania will not permit a data center until the town says yes. The state has fully permitted five of more than 100 proposed projects.
Governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order on Aug. 18 barring Pennsylvania's DEP from issuing a data center permit before the project secures local approval. The state's own count puts more than 100 projects in public databases, 15 with permit applications filed, and five holding every permit needed for a first phase.
ECB researchers say an AI stock market correction is likely, even if AI delivers. European households hold €440 billion of US tech stock.
Five European Central Bank researchers wrote on Aug. 17 that "a correction of current stock market valuations is likely," even if the technology succeeds. European households hold around €440 billion of US tech stock, and the authors say there is less room to cut rates against a crash than in 2000.
You can trade single-stock options premarket starting August 17 at 7:30 a.m. ET. The first session includes Nvidia (NVDA), Tesla (TSLA), Apple (AAPL) and 18 more.
Cboe Options Exchange begins trading single-stock options at 7:30 a.m. ET on Monday, Aug. 17, two hours before the regular open. Limit orders only, no market or stop orders, and trades in the new sessions do not count toward the day's high and low.
Amazon offered $90 for Globalstar (GSAT). Insiders are selling $12 million near $83
Amazon agreed to pay $90 a share for Globalstar. In one week, three insiders sold or filed to sell about $12 million of GSAT stock near $83, none under a trading plan.
President Donald Trump bought Snowflake (SNOW) before it doubled. The filing tells a different story.
President Trump's disclosure shows three Snowflake (SNOW) trades in 17 days: a buy, a sell, and a buy. Walking the full record, rather than a single-line alert, shows why the round trip points to an automated model, not an insider bet.
Meta backed Texas's data center audit. Its $10 billion El Paso project sits outside the grid Abbott froze.
Governor Abbott's office said Meta will comply with the state's data center standards. Meta's largest Texas campus is not on the ERCOT grid, and the Texas Tribune reported the same day that its Fort Worth and El Paso abatements ran through Delaware shell companies. CleanSpark, whose entire 885 MW Texas portfolio is inside ERCOT, backed the audit on its own.
Max your 401k match, Roth IRA and HSA before you touch a single stock. Index funds come next, individual stocks come last.
The order I'd actually go in: 401k match, then Roth IRA and HSA, then a broad index fund (or X Money if you want zero market risk), then mega-caps and dividend ETFs, then single stocks last.
Anthropic is building AI chips and paying up to $850,000 to teach Claude how to design them.
Anthropic confirmed Wednesday it is building an in-house Custom Silicon team for Claude, the first time it has said so publicly. The job listings pay $320,000 to $485,000 for the chip designers and $500,000 to $850,000 for the researcher teaching Claude to do the design work.
Musk says memory demand grows 200% a year against 20% supply. The new Micron (MU) and SK Hynix (SKHY) plants open in 2027 and 2028
Elon Musk did the memory math out loud on SpaceX's call: supply up 20% a year, demand up 200%. Microsoft put $25 billion of its capex on memory and Amazon named it too. The plants that would fix it open in 2027 and 2028.
The AI trade rallied Monday. Memory fell as much as 8% at the open even as chip prices kept rising.
Micron (MU) has lost a third of its value since June 25 and SanDisk nearly half. CoreWeave and Vertiv fell about half as far, and Nvidia rose. Memory contract prices never fell. What changed is the rate of increase, which went from 93-98% a quarter to a forecast 13-18%.
Michael Burry posted three charts making the AI bear case. Two of them show the selling already happened.
Burry shared three Bloomberg charts on the AI trade. One maps the circular deals around Nvidia (NVDA). The other two show big tech forward multiples back at or below their 10-year averages, with Apple (AAPL) the lone expensive name and the only megacap missing from the circular map.
Anthropic says it never asked to ban open-weight AI. Dario Amodei does want China cut off from Nvidia (NVDA) chips.
Dario Amodei answered the Nvidia-hosted open-weights letter on July 27, three days after Anthropic became the only major AI lab to skip it. He says a ban was never the ask. What he does want is China cut off from US chips, a crackdown on industrial-scale distillation, and mandatory safety testing for every capable model, open or closed.
About $25 billion of Microsoft's (MSFT) AI budget is memory getting more expensive. Wednesday says whether that grew.
Microsoft told investors in April it would spend about $190 billion on capital projects this year. Around $25 billion of that increase bought nothing new, it was the same buildout at a higher price after memory costs rose. Microsoft reports Wednesday after the close, two hours after the Fed decision.