Etched announced a $700 million round at a $21 billion valuation on August 18, per the company's announcement, led by Jane Street - which is both the lead investor and the first paying customer, having taken delivery of the first commercial rack of SOHU inference chips last month. The raise doubles Etched's valuation from $10.3 billion in under 30 days. SOHU etches transformer weights directly into silicon at manufacturing: very fast on fixed architectures but unable to run arbitrary models. Read what SOHU can and cannot do.

Anthropic's second company-wide Risk Report raised the probability of catastrophic harm from misalignment from "very low" to "low." The same report says Anthropic built an internal model, Model 2, that beats the frontier Mythos 5 on a new benchmark, with no plan to release it externally. The safety benchmark designed to catch this acceleration has saturated - it can no longer distinguish incremental gains at precisely the moment Anthropic says it is seeing the acceleration the test was built to catch. Read our take.

Google shipped an open-source Customer Support and Returns Agent as a zero-trust reference architecture built on ADK and Gemini. Three controls: cryptographic write signatures via Cloud KMS, a gVisor sandbox with zero network egress for generated code, and a lightweight model that checks every outbound action against policy before it reaches the database. It ships with an attack playground where a crafted return reason triggers a $10,000 unauthorized refund. See the blueprint.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens for users aged 13 to 17 on August 18, and it switches on automatically from age-prediction signals. Study Mode redirects homework-completion requests to guided reasoning instead of direct answers. Break reminders surface periodically, linked parents can set Quiet Hours, and trained personnel review flagged conversations in limited high-risk situations. Not available in the EU, UK, or Switzerland at launch. Read what changes for under-18 accounts.

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