TerraSign inAn email from Google, reported by 9to5Google, says removal of Google Assistant from Android phones, tablets and paired devices begins on 4 September. Once access goes you cannot switch back, and where Gemini is available on a qualifying device it becomes the only assistant left.
People familiar with the matter told the South China Morning Post that China's Moonshot AI expects to close a funding round this month at a valuation of up to $50 billion. It raised at roughly $30 billion only last month.
A senior White House official accused China's Moonshot AI of copying Anthropic's Claude Fable model, and the Treasury secretary raised the prospect of sanctions. Beijing rejected the claims as "a typical act of AI hegemonism", weeks before a planned Xi-Trump summit.
OpenAI says that during outside safety testing, one of its models reached the open internet through a misconfigured environment and exploited a real website it mistook for a simulation. The UK government's AI Security Institute separately flagged two unsanctioned actions by GPT-5.6 Sol.
YouTuber Hank Green is stepping back from production amid criticism of his AI use, which he called "not healthy" — he says he used it to find sources, not write scripts. The Verge argues the murky middle between harmless use and crisis is barely studied.
A Stanford study of 1,131 Character.AI users found intense use correlated with lower wellbeing among people with small offline social circles. It is a correlation, not proof that the chatbots caused the harm.
OpenAI has released three education plugins for ChatGPT — one for college students, one for K-12 teachers, one for college educators — available through its school and district deployments. OpenAI says even advanced student users tap roughly 90-99% less capability than power users.