Character.ai's CEO joins Disney as its CTO
On 18 September 2026 Character.ai said its CEO Karandeep Anand was joining Disney as its Chief Technology Officer, a newly created role, with members of Character's technical team expected to follow.
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Character.ai post-trains its own CAI-Image models on Qwen-Image
Character.ai's CAI-Image family consists of image models post-trained from open-source Qwen-Image and tuned for character-driven storytelling, so the same character stays recognisable across styles, scenes and pages. The company announced the models on 16 September 2026.
iFlytek releases Spark X2.5
On 7 September 2026 iFlytek released Spark X2.5, a 293B-A30B mixture-of-experts model trained and served on domestic compute, focused on code and agent tasks, with open-source on-device models supporting up to 1 million tokens of context.
Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion
On 3 September 2026 Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Hugging Face said it would remain an open platform, and the deal was expected to close in the first half of 2027 pending regulatory approval.
Google releases Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
On 2 September 2026 Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash and Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, a security-focused variant limited to vetted defenders, three weeks after Gemini 3.7 Flash.
Manus resumes independent operations
On 1 September 2026, Manus announced that it had formally resumed independent operations, with its founding team continuing to lead the company as an independent agent lab advancing general AI agents.
Zhipu releases GLM-5.3, rated the strongest open model in cybersecurity
Zhipu released GLM-5.3 on 14 August 2026, a post-training upgrade built on the same base model as GLM-5.2, with large gains on coding and cybersecurity benchmarks; NIST's CAISI later called it the most advanced open-weight model in cybersecurity.
SpaceXAI releases Grok 4.6 for long-running agents
On 12 August 2026 xAI released Grok 4.6, a month after Grok 4.5, aimed at long-running agents. Pricing stayed the same, and the model launched across Cursor, Grok Build and the API.
Manus notifies users of data deletion ahead of its return to independence
On 11 August 2026 Manus published a note saying it would soon operate as an independent company again, setting out when some users' data would be deleted and when access would return.
Zoox wins the first NHTSA commercial exemption for a purpose-built robotaxi
Zoox received the first commercial exemption NHTSA has ever granted for a purpose-built robotaxi, letting the company charge fares for driverless rides and start collecting them in Las Vegas.
Moonshot AI closes a round at a US$35 billion valuation
On 30 July 2026 Moonshot AI closed a round at a US$35 billion valuation, raising about US$3.5 billion two weeks after releasing Kimi K3 — the latest step in a climb from a US$3.8 billion pre-money valuation in October 2025.
MCP publishes the 2026-07-28 specification with a stateless core
On 28 July 2026 the Model Context Protocol project published a specification built on a stateless core, turning MCP into a request/response protocol whose requests any instance behind a plain round-robin load balancer can serve.
Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5
On 24 July 2026 Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 at $5 and $25 per million tokens. Anthropic said it came close to Claude Fable 5's frontier intelligence at half the price.
SpaceXAI releases Grok 4.5, co-trained with Cursor
On 16 July 2026 xAI released Grok 4.5, co-trained with Cursor, and made it the default model in Grok Build. xAI also published its coding benchmark results.
Meta releases Muse Spark 1.1 and opens the Meta Model API
On 9 July 2026 Meta released Muse Spark 1.1, an upgrade built for agentic tasks, with a 1-million-token context and access for developers through the Meta Model API in public preview.
OpenAI launches GPT-Live full-duplex voice in ChatGPT
On 8 July 2026 OpenAI launched GPT-Live, a generation of full-duplex voice models for ChatGPT that can listen and speak at the same time; the smaller model became ChatGPT's default voice model.
Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 5
On 30 June 2026 Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5, its most agentic Sonnet model, at an introductory $2 and $10 per million tokens. On 10 August that price became permanent.
ByteDance releases Seed2.1
On 23 June 2026 ByteDance Seed announced Seed2.1 for Doubao and Volcano Engine users. It has Pro and Turbo models for productivity work and builds on Seed2.0.
Apple introduces AFM 3 and Siri AI at WWDC 2026
On 8 June 2026, at WWDC, Apple introduced AFM 3, its third generation of foundation models, and Siri AI, a more personal assistant for iOS 27. Developer testing began the same day, and the launch was limited in the EU and China.
Microsoft AI launches seven MAI models led by MAI-Thinking-1
On 2 June 2026 Mustafa Suleyman announced seven new in-house MAI models at Microsoft Build, led by the reasoning model MAI-Thinking-1. The group also included coding, image, transcription and voice models, and a healthcare collaboration with Mayo Clinic.
Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.8
On 28 May 2026 Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8, a modest improvement on Opus 4.7 at the same price. Fast mode became three times cheaper, and Claude Code gained dynamic workflows that run hundreds of parallel subagents.