Markets opened on a fresh rate scare after U.S. employers added 162,000 jobs in August, nearly triple forecasts, while unemployment held at 4.1%, pushing Treasury yields higher as investors reassessed the Fed’s next move. Washington, meanwhile, imposed drone tariffs of up to 100%, Britain opened £100M of sovereign-AI procurement, and the FTC and 22 states sued Amazon over alleged hidden ad surcharges affecting more than 1M sellers. In tech, John Ternus took over Apple, GoPro agreed to a $285M sale to Starman Optical, and SB Energy filed for an IPO after revenue rose 66% to $139M despite a $3.21B loss. Oura also filed after nine-month revenue jumped 74% to $1.21B. AI pressed further into work as Uber cut 3,300 jobs, Google launched Pics, and Meta moved to Slack for its agent ambitions.
We’ve published our Monthly AI Deck for August 2026. Check it out here.
Top 5 AI Highlights
[1] 🚀 OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra for Daybreak customers, calling it a “generational leap” and the start of the “AGI era.” Built on its largest-ever training run using 100,000+ GPUs at Stargate Texas, Astra scored 62.7% on ARC-AGI-3 with the standard harness, versus Claude Opus 5 at 30.2% and GPT-5.6 Sol at 7.8%; a new provider-adapter harness lifted Astra to 99.9%. More from OpenAI, ARC Prize, and Artificial Analysis.
[2] 💰 OpenAI will wind down model access through SpaceX-owned Cursor, citing a change-of-control clause; ChatGPT Ads reached a $1B annualized revenue run rate in under 200 days. More from OpenAI and CNBC.
[3] 💰 Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab is in talks to raise more than $1B at a $40B+ pre-money valuation, below the $50B+ valuation it sought last year. More from The Information.
[4] 🧠 Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 for general use and Mythos 5.1 for trusted partners, touting stronger coding, knowledge work, and long-running problem-solving. Fable 5.1 is 25% cheaper for typical workloads and up to 45% cheaper for highly agentic use; both models watermark text outputs. More from Anthropic.
[5] ⚖️ A federal judge overturned the Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, ruling that the government violated the company’s constitutional rights. Separately, Anthropic signed a $35B cloud deal with Nvidia-backed Lambda; Nvidia will hold the lease on and supply chips to a Hut 8-built Texas data center. More from Axios and Wall Street Journal.
✨Open Source AI Development
[1] 📈 Moonshot AI, developer of K3, filed confidentially for a Hong Kong IPO and is in talks to raise a pre-IPO round at a $50B valuation. More from The Information.
[2] 🔐 Z.ai released GLM-5.3’s weights under a new license requiring companies with $10B+ in trailing 12-month revenue to pass a security review before hosting the model. Separately, Z.ai reported H1 2026 revenue up 5x YoY to ~$142M, with open platform and API revenue up 28x to ~$122M and net loss down 12% YoY to ~$308M. More from The New Stack, Bloomberg, and The Information.
[3] 🧠 Tencent released Hy4 Preview, a 770B-parameter open model with a 1M-token context window, saying it narrowly outperformed GLM-5.3 and Kimi K3 in internal engineering tests. More from Bloomberg.
[4] 🤝 Together AI announced a deal to use compute infrastructure from Humain in Saudi Arabia, expanding capacity for serving open models while shifting some data-center development outside the U.S. More from The New York Times.
[5] 💻 Perplexity open-sourced Lily, a local AI inference engine built with Rust and custom Apple Metal kernels to run Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on Macs, reporting 1.23x faster prefill and 1.35x faster decoding than MLX-LM in its testing. More from MarkTechPost.
Founder’s Corner
Token volume is up 600x in 2 years and growing
Source: X
What We Read This Week
- OpenAI is letting some major customers pay only when its AI completes tasks, as Salesforce and other AI providers test outcome-based pricing. (The Information)
- OpenAI is committing $1B to its new Daybreak initiative, offering subsidized AI model access, training, and technical support to utilities, local governments, regional banks, and other critical infrastructure operators as AI-enabled cyber threats accelerate and resource-constrained defenders face growing pressure. More from Axios.
- Google approached Disney, Universal, and other studios to license characters and films for its AI tools, but legal and union concerns stalled the deals. (Los Angeles Times)
- Anthropic’s Model Hardware Standard lets models such as Claude operate factory robots, microscopes, and other equipment through a model-agnostic standard built on MCP; Nvidia’s physical-AI business already generates about $10B in annual revenue, and Jensen Huang sees 10x growth over the next decade, with Chinese humanoid-robot makers among its customers. (Dupple and Wall Street Journal)
- CXMT sued the Pentagon over its designation as a Chinese military company, saying it has no military affiliation and that its chips are not used for military purposes. (Reuters)
- Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA) is investing $3.5B in Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek (TAI: 2454). (Axios)
- Big Tech’s Q2 “other income” topped $160B, driven by gains on AI investments, raising concerns that paper profits are overstating the AI boom. (Financial Times)
- A look at Tim Cook’s 15-year tenure at Apple: its market cap grew from less than $350B in 2011 to $4.6T, revenue rose from $157B in FY 2012 to ~$477B in FY 2026, and shares climbed 2,258%. (Bloomberg)
AI Fundraising News (Aug 28 — Sep 3)
- Agentrys: AI chip-design automation agent company, raised $24.5M, including a $5.4M pre-seed round and a $19.1M seed round
- Aslan: AI national security agent company, raised $20.8M
- Atira: AI sales engineering platform company, raised $17.5M, including a $2.5M pre-seed round and a $15M seed round
- Catch: AI executive administrative agent company, raised a $5M seed round
- Cognition: AI software engineering agent company, reportedly set to raise around $1B
- DataAgent: AI cloud security company, raised a $10M pre-seed round
- Empirik: AI IT-outage prevention company, raised a $21M seed round
- Faro: AI clinical-trial optimization company, raised a $37.3M Series B
- Félix: AI-powered remittance platform company, raised a $200M Series C
- HiddenLayer: AI model and agent security company, raised a $100M Series B
- iPronics: AI infrastructure optical networking company, raised a $125M Series B
- Konko AI: AI patient coordination platform company, raised $6M
- Lyte: AI robotics company, raised a $165M Series C
- Orchestra: AI data workflow automation company, raised a $3.3M seed round
- Owner: AI restaurant operations agent company, raised $240M
- PSI: AI physics research company, raised a $58M seed round
- Reframe: AI industrial robotics company, raised a $40M Series A extension round
- Thinking Machines Lab: AI research company, in talks to raise $1B+
- Tripo AI: AI 3D asset generation company, raised a $446M Series B
- TrustedRouter: AI model routing platform company, raised a $1.25M seed round
- Visko: AI interactive video world generation company, raised a $10M pre-seed round
- Wafer: AI inference optimization agent company, raised a $40M Series A
- Wonderful: AI enterprise agent deployment company, raised a $550M Series C
- Zeit AI: AI autonomous data engineering company, raised $5M