Anthropic's infrastructure spend hit half a trillion, robots are working city streets, and Claude broke a cryptosystem faster than humans could. Ten stories.
🤖 AI
Claude found cracks in encryption
Claude Mythos Preview invented a new attack technique called Möbius Bridge and sped up cracking a reduced-round version of AES by 200–800x, while also spotting a symmetry in the HAWK signature scheme that collapsed its security from 2⁶⁴ to 2³⁸ operations. Real-world systems weren't affected — Anthropic broke down the details in its research writeup.
Hoffman and Pincus launch agents for office grunt work
Startup Prentis — founded by Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn co-founder) and Mark Pincus (Zynga founder) — is raising $100M at a $1B valuation, training models to run a computer the way an office worker would. It's already landed $50M in contracts, and its Hive-32B model beat GPT-5.4 and Opus 4.6 on computer-use benchmarks, as TechCrunch reported.
Grok can now build a whole site from a single prompt
xAI rolled out Build Mode for SuperGrok Heavy subscribers: describe what you want in text, and Grok generates and publishes a site, app, game, or dashboard with a live preview. Projects get shared via a grok.me link or your own domain, xAI said.
💻 Software
MCP just shipped its biggest overhaul since launch
MCP version 2026-07-28 drops sessions and the initialization handshake — every request is now self-contained, so servers can run on serverless and edge infrastructure without being pinned to a specific instance, the developers explained in the announcement.
⚙️ Robots & hardware
Apple is building a Siri-powered smart home hub
Bloomberg learned that Apple will ship a speaker with a 7-inch screen running a new version of tvOS, in both desktop and wall-mounted versions, for $350. Apple TV 4K and HomePod mini are also getting updated with new AI chips, Bloomberg reports.
A robot started cleaning apartments in San Francisco
The humanoid Tau shows up to clean for $30 an hour, but it's actually a human operator plus AI running it live, invite-only for now. The owner has to be home for the entire visit, according to the company's site.
Amazon is launching 5,105 satellites to beam internet straight to iPhones
The company is finishing a network built on Globalstar, which it bought for $11.6B, placing satellites in a 510–580 km orbit. The service will deliver voice and data directly to smartphones with no extra hardware needed, PCMag reported.
China starts mass-producing lithography machines — ASML drops 6–8%
A consortium including SiCarrier and Huawei will produce five DUV machines in 2026 and twenty in 2027 for SMIC — these are previous-generation tools, not the EUV machines ASML has a monopoly on. Volumes are still tiny, but the market sold off anyway, according to Bloomberg.
💰 Business
OpenAI and Nvidia are lining up a $500B data center in Ohio
Nvidia is discussing a $250B backstop to lease a 10-gigawatt facility from SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary, plus roughly another $350B for chips. The guarantees are needed because loss-making OpenAI can't get a credit rating on its own, the New York Times reports.
Companies have stopped paying top dollar for AI
Cursor compared the cost of running the same task: GPT-5.5 came out to $10,000, while Composer paired with Opus 4.8 cost $1,339. Businesses are mixing expensive flagship models with cheap open-weight ones for routine work, saving the top-tier models for complex work, according to MSN.
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