There is a version of this story where I tell you that AI voice assistants had a bumpy start but are now clawing their way toward reliability. I would like to tell you that story. The evidence will not let me. Twelve months ago, Amazon and Google both made big bets. Google retired the Google…
First reported by Politico on August 13 and confirmed by CoinDesk on August 14, the August 19, 2026, White House crypto summit at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building was not a photo opportunity; it was an operational agenda. By shifting the focus from the broad, aspirational rhetoric of the March 2025 summit to the granular…
On July 28, Sam Altman told a podcast audience that OpenAI might need to pace the rate of AI development. Three weeks later, the company did something more concrete than pace. OpenAI has formally paused its largest planned reinforcement learning training run for its next-generation models, codenamed Astra, and halted portions of RL training across…
Treasury published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on August 17 to implement Section 3 of the GENIUS Act — the first concrete regulatory action from any agency since a seven-agency backlog caused a missed July 18 rulemaking deadline. By defining what it means to issue, offer, and sell payment stablecoins in the United States, the…
Tether International, S.A. de C.V. announced on August 13 that KPMG U.S. issued an unqualified opinion on its 2025 financial statements — the first time a Big Four accounting firm has audited the company behind the world’s largest stablecoin. The audit, conducted under AICPA standards and U.S. GAAP, confirmed that as of December 31, 2025,…
If you have ever spent an afternoon troubleshooting why your smart camera suddenly requires a monthly fee just to show you a video clip, you know the feeling of being a tenant in your own home. You buy the hardware, but you only rent the functionality. On August 12, 2026, Apollo Automation and the Open…
“This new realm of AI has completely spun Zero Trust on its head,” Intelligence Community CIO Douglas Cossa told attendees at the DoDIIS 2026 conference in Tampa, highlighting the fundamental conflict between autonomous agents and legacy security: agents need expansive, independent access to function, while traditional models are built to restrict it. Because no unified…
I spent last Tuesday trying to get my smart home to actually act like a home, rather than a collection of disconnected apps fighting for my attention. It usually involves three different logins and a prayer. But with Amazon’s July 2026 adoption of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for Alexa+, the friction is finally starting…
What Agent Plugins Is Agent Plugins is a technical specification designed to bring interoperability to the AI agent ecosystem. It provides a standardized directory structure and manifest format that allows developers to package AI capabilities—specifically Agent Skills (pre-defined tasks or functions an agent can perform) and MCP servers (which provide context and data via the…
Agent disclosure rules under Article 50(1) of the EU AI Act require AI system providers to inform users when they interact with AI. Learn about the four cumulative criteria, penalties, and the Code of Practice gap.