August 14, 2026

05 Sci-Tech

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Anthropic is sharing access to its most advanced AI model Mythos with the EU after the region sought access over months due to cybersecurity concerns.

The European Commission confirmed to CNBC on Monday that it had “several productive meetings” with the American AI firm.

“We welcome the latest developments on potential future access,” EU tech sovereignty spokesperson Thomas Regnier said in emailed statements, adding that the bloc aims to get a clearer idea of the potential risks that the technology poses.

Anthropic initially rolled out Mythos to a limited number of companies in April as part of Anthropic’s cybersecurity venture Project Glasswing, with the model excelling at identifying security flaws and weaknesses in software. The launch prompted a wave of concern over cybersecurity threats from bad actors.

“Let’s not forget that Mythos is not one off, a new wave of powerful models are coming to the market,” Regnier said. “This is a shared challenge, and we are intensifying our discussions with like-minded partners, including the United States.”

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Anthropic, which operates AI chatbot Claude, did not disclose the size or the terms of the offering.

Artificial intelligence giant Anthropic has confidentially filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States, teeing up what could become a watershed moment for Wall Street’s AI frenzy.

The move, announced on Monday, sets up a high-stakes test of whether investor appetite for the AI revolution that has reshaped white-collar work around the world can match the sky-high expectations surrounding the booming sector.

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Despite the challenges posed for Israel’s defense industries at home and abroad by the war that began on October 7, 2023, exports continue to break records: $19.2 billion in 2025, the Ministry of Defense reports. This is a jump of about 30% from 2024, as well as a doubling in five years and a quadrupling in a decade.

A record number of GTG (government-to-government) deals were reported totaling about $10 billion – over 50% of the transactions. This reflects a growing trend in the industry, in which defense ministries act as an umbrella for major deals. This stems from the requirement to transfer knowledge and production lines abroad from the transactions, in amounts that may reach about 30% in many cases.

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At least 282 confirmed cases of Ebola have now been reported in Congo’s ongoing outbreak as authorities in Brazil said they were looking into two suspected cases.

The two patients who recently arrived in Brazil from Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where the outbreak is ongoing, exhibited symptoms such as fever and chills.

The first patient is a Belgian traveller who came from Uganda to Rio de Janeiro. The Evandro Chagas National Institute of Infectious Diseases, of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), administered initial testing, which came back positive only for malaria. The patient remains isolated and the people who had contact with him are being monitored, according to health officials.

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Expereo is a world-leading Managed Network as a Service provider that connects people, places, and things anywhere. Solutions include Global Internet, SD-WAN/SASE, and Enhanced Internet. With an extensive global reach, Expereo is the trusted partner of 60% of Fortune 500 companies. It powers enterprise and government sites in more than 190 countries, with the ability to connect to any location worldwide, working with over 2,300 partners to help customers improve productivity and empowering their networks and cloud services with the agility, flexibility, and value of the Internet, with optimal network performance.

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Thousands of households across the UK could suddenly find they lose access to premium television channels, including popular content from Sky. The huge block follows a major crackdown on illegal streaming with Police confirming that they have shut down a large illicit data centre.

It’s thought this platform was supplying thousands of users with unauthorised access to premium sports broadcasts, blockbuster movies, and subscription-based television channels. The operation has now caused widespread disruption to pirate streaming networks across the country, leaving many unable to access the services they were enjoying without paying for official subscriptions from Sky.

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Last month many mathematicians were shocked by OpenAI’s announcement that artificial intelligence had solved geometry’s famous “unit distance” problem.

For some, the achievement was exciting. But researchers also worry that AI technology, if left unchecked, will change their field for the worse. To address those fears, a group of mathematicians, computer scientists, and math historians have released guidelines to prevent AI from steamrolling their discipline.

Among their most important prescriptions: disclose the use of AI in research, ensure all papers are peer-reviewed and level the playing field between academia and for-profit companies through, for instance, legal resources and public funding.

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On April 15, technology podcaster Dwarkesh Patel published a two-hour interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. For roughly forty minutes, Patel asked one question six different ways. The question was this: If American-made compute trains AI models with the serious cyber-offensive capabilities Anthropic’s Mythos Preview demonstrated — and that compute is sold to a strategic adversary — what responsibility does the seller bear?

Huang’s answers hovered a safe distance away from the question. AI is a “five-layer cake,” he told Patel, and ceding any layer to China would be industrial suicide. The Chinese, he argued, already have enough compute to do whatever they intend to do, so marginal sales do not change the strategic balance. By the end, Patel was visibly worn down. Huang accused him of arguing from extremes and of thinking in absolutes.

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Anti-data center activists typically cite concerns about water usage, pollution, or the cost of building the data centers themselves.

Many individuals are sincere in their activism. But public opinion on data centers is likely being shaped by foreign actors, according to a report from the Bitcoin Policy Institute. (RELATED: CHRIS JOHNSON: AI Data Centers Can Win Over Skeptics. But It Must Learn From Fracking) 

BPI’s head of research Sam Lyman explained Wednesday that China uses social media as a “gain of function for their propaganda” on The Hill’s “Rising.”

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Iran has claimed that it has deployed a new air defence system to take down a United States MQ-9 Reaper drone near the Strait of Hormuz earlier this week. Iran’s state-sponsored media said the American drone– that costs between $16 million and $30 million per unit– was brought down near Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz using a locally developed system called Arash-e-Kamangir.

If the claim is correct, the interception marked the first combat use of the defence system named after the legendary Iranian character Arash-the-Archer. It would mean Tehran has retained its military capacity to repel US and Israeli attacks despite months of war in the Middle East.

Iranian media claimed the drone was brought down over regional waters during an operation to protect the country’s airspace and maritime borders. “This operation, which was carried out using a system with hidden capabilities, is a clear and decisive message from Iran,” Iran’s Fars news agency quoted unnamed officials as saying.

However, so far, no independent source has corroborated the Iranian claim of a new interception system.

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A Blue Origin rocket exploded on Thursday night as the company conducted a static fire test.

The New Glenn rocket, which was being tested at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, “experienced an anomaly” during a “hotfire test,” Blue Origin confirmed on social media, as reported by WOFL.

“All personnel have been accounted for. We will provide updates as we learn more,” the post from Blue Origin added.

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SAN FRANCISCO: Artificial intelligence company Anthropic said Thursday (May 28) it had raised US$65 billion in a new funding round that values the Claude maker at US$965 billion, more than its archrival OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

The latest fundraising round confirms Anthropic’s place as one of the most significant players in AI, with the startup led by Dario Amodei having drawn fans for its coding powers and state-of-the-art models.

Anthropic’s rise came by doubling down on delivering generative AI to enterprise clients rather than general users, the path initially chosen by archrival OpenAI.

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OpenAI’s Sam Altman has said mass white-collar layoffs have not materialized, while Anthropic has warned of major disruption

The heads of two leading artificial intelligence companies have offered sharply different forecasts on whether the technology will trigger mass job losses. The split comes as as Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and other tech giants continue large-scale layoffs tied to AI restructuring.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Tuesday that AI is unlikely to trigger a global “jobs apocalypse,” admitting that he had been wrong about how quickly the technology would eliminate white-collar jobs.

“I’m delighted to ⁠be wrong about this, I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than ​has actually happened,” Altman told Commonwealth Bank of Australia CEO Matt Comyn.

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Google’s AI boss, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind is in a real mood to make science-fiction come alive, and he’s in a hurry to do it. After dropping a bombshell last week about AGI or Artificial General Intelligence (a type of AI that matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks), the Google AI boss is now on record saying that this feat is just 3-4 years away. So by 2029-2030 humanity may find itself at even stranger crossroads than now as it grapples with automation and serious job loss fears.

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The rivalry between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk has officially reached the Moon. NASA announced on Tuesday that it had selected Bezos’s Blue Origin to carry out the first in a planned series of three uncrewed lunar missions aimed at preparing for a future Moon base, handing the company a contract worth about $230M. The mission, expected no earlier than fall 2026, will use Blue Origin’s Blue Moon cargo lander to transport scientific payloads and test technologies near the Moon’s south pole. While SpaceX remains deeply involved in NASA’s Artemis programme, the decision marks a symbolic win for Bezos in the increasingly intense billionaire battle shaping the future of space exploration.

Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin takes centre stage in NASA’s Moon base ambitions

For years, NASA’s idea of building a long-term human presence on the Moon existed mostly as an ambition tied to the Artemis programme. Tuesday’s announcement showed the agency is now moving into the practical phase.NASA administrator and entrepreneur Jared Isaacman said the first three uncrewed missions will help test landers, rovers, cargo systems and survival technologies needed to support astronauts on the lunar surface in the future. More than a dozen additional missions are expected later as the agency works towards creating an operational Moon base sometime in the next decade.The first mission will target the Shackleton de Gerlache Ridge region near the lunar south pole, an area scientists believe may contain water ice. NASA sees the region as critical because future explorers could potentially use the ice for drinking water, oxygen production and rocket fuel.

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What began with GPUs has expanded into full-stack AI factories comprising accelerated compute, high-speed interconnects, liquid-cooled systems, inference software, autonomous agents, reference architectures and the ecosystem needed to build and operate them at scale. 

Full-stack AI factories are part of the broader ecosystem that NVIDIA is helping define and build. NVIDIA closely collaborates with global system partners such as Cisco, Dell, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro to bring AI infrastructure to enterprise data centers. NVIDIA also relies on a curated ecosystem of AI software partners to build AI solutions for each enterprise’s use cases. This ecosystem supports a choice of models, across proprietary and open options.

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A back molar found in a Siberian cave is believed to be the oldest evidence of dental treatment. About 59,000 years ago, someone carefully drilled a cavity in the tooth to ease a toothache.

It was a Neanderthal who had done it. The tooth, Chagyrskaya 64, is a lower left second molar recovered from Chagyrskaya Cave in the Russian Altai Mountains. A huge, odd-shaped cavity extends to the almost complete occlusal floor of the tooth crown, reaching well into the pulp chamber.

The researchers report in the May 13 issue of PLOS One that this concavity cannot be explained by decay, wear, or geological processes alone. Rather, it was made with a small, pointed stone tool to treat severe dental decay.

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A suspected Ebola case has sparked concern in Austria amid fears the deadly disease may have already spread to Europe. Health officials in Austria said the patient became ill shortly after returning from Uganda, where they are believed to have contracted the newly identified Bundibugyo strain.

It comes as the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo is hampering the Ebola outbreak response. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Ituri province in the east of the country was at the centre of a “catastrophic collision of disease and conflict”. In a statement posted on X, Tedros said the WHO could not “build community trust or isolate the sick while bombs are falling”.

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Artificial Analysis and IBM Software Innovation Lab are launching ITBench-AA, the first in a new series of benchmarks evaluating models on agentic enterprise IT tasks, starting with Site Reliability Engineering tasks where frontier models score below 50%
ITBench-AA’s SRE tasks benchmark model performance on Kubernetes incident response, where models and agents must diagnose live systems by reading logs, tracing dependencies, and identifying root-cause entities across complex infrastructure. The underlying ITBench dataset has been developed by IBM, leveraging deep expertise in enterprise IT operations.

Texas A&M Scientists have developed a nasal spray that reduces inflammation in the brain. The spray is being heralded as a potential effective treatment for dementia and Alzheimer’s patients. Research leader Dr. Ashok Shetty said, “Brain age-related diseases like dementia are a major health concern worldwide. What we’re showing is brain aging can be reversed, to help people stay mentally sharp, socially engaged and free from age-related decline.”

Go Deeper

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China now requires people working in AI at private firms to secure travel approval before leaving the country. According to Bloomberg, the restrictions apply to individuals working in state-owned firms, startup founders, and those employed by private companies, as the central government considers them important strategic assets. China has already been limiting international travel for key individuals such as senior researchers at public educational institutions, nuclear scientists, and even top executives of government-owned companies, but extending the restriction to private firms and individuals is an uncommon move, even for Beijing.

There’s no official guidance yet on which roles, expertise, or seniority will be included in the travel ban. However, Bloomberg sources say that the individuals added to the list were assessed based on their impact on China’s AI ambitions, not just where they work or their position within their company. This move is an expansion of a former government directive wherein some AI engineers had mandatory reporting of any overseas travel plan, although they were still free to go abroad as needed.

This shows that Beijing considers AI as a strategic advantage and that the people leading the industry are considered crucial for the country’s advancement. This news comes months after Meta’s surprise purchase of Manus AI, which China wants to unwind to prevent the U.S. from acquiring Chinese AI talent and intellectual property. Although the two aren’t directly related, the report says that the new policy is designed to protect against the leaking of key technologies, such as the one being developed by the Chinese startup that moved to Singapore.

 

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Millions of AI agents and tools around the world have been imperiled by a critical vulnerability that can allow hackers to breach the servers running them and make off with sensitive data and credentials to third-party accounts, a security researcher is warning.

The vulnerability is present in Starlette, an open source framework that its developer says receives 325 million downloads per week. Thousands of other open source projects are also vulnerable because they require Starlette to work. The framework is an implementation of the ASGI (asynchronous server gateway interface), which allows large numbers of requests to be efficiently processed simultaneously. Starlette is the base of FastAPI and other widely used frameworks for building services in Python apps, as well as many others.

Trivial to exploit, millions of servers exposed

ASGI, and by extension Starlette, have access to servers running the MCP (model context protocol), which allows AI agents from major providers to access external sources, including user data bases, email and calendar accounts, and all manner of other resources. To connect with these external systems, MCP servers store credentials for each one, making them especially valuable storehouses for attackers to breach.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-48710 and under the name BadHost, is trivial to exploit and works against most systems that aren’t behind a properly configured firewall. Besides FastAPI, other widely used packages—including vLLM, and LiteLLM—are also affected. BadHost affects Starlette versions prior to 1.0.1, which was released Friday.

“A single character injected into the HTTP Host header bypasses path-based authorization in Starlette, the routing core of FastAPI,” researchers from Secwest wrote. “Through FastAPI, this primitive (now tracked as CVE-2026-48710 and branded BadHost by the discoverers) reaches a large segment of the Python AI tooling ecosystem: vLLM (where the bug was discovered), LiteLLM, Text Generation Inference, most OpenAI-shim proxies, MCP servers, agent harnesses, eval dashboards, and model-management UIs.”

BadHost carries a severity rating of 7 out of 10. Secwest said the classification “materially understates” the threat it poses to people using other apps that depend on Starlette. X41 D-Sec, the security firm that discovered it, described it as having “critical severity.” X41 D-Sec partnered with fellow security firm Nemesis to create an online scanner that can check if a given server is vulnerable.