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AI deskNewest frontier modelHy4 previewCrypto deskBitcoin · market $2.71tn$78,810▲1.30%Quantum deskLatest on the hardware board · 28 AugPasqal begins trading on Nasdaq as PSQL, a day after completing its business combination with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II with roughly $360m of cash at closing; the shares end their first session at $19.11. On 24 August it also formed Pasqal Arabia with Eleven Ventures, a joint venture to deploy neutral-atom systems across Saudi Arabia and the wider region.Security deskDays since the last logged exploit4
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Microduck's press kit asks reporters not to call it open-source hardware
Pollen Robotics launched a $399 reinforcement-learning biped on 27 August. The software is Apache-2.0, the simulation geometry is non-commercial, and the mechanical and electronic design files are withheld. The press kit says so in writing.
A pull request explained the Cosmos EVM bug at 07:16, and the first chain was drained by 19:06
Cosmos Labs patched a balance underflow in public in May, judged it harmless on production chains, and backported it on 19 August. A downstream developer described the exploit path the next morning. Six chains were drained by it, and TAC has not produced a block since.
Nvidia filed its quarterly report hours before the Hugging Face story and it names no acquisition
The Information reported on 26 August that Nvidia had agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9bn. Business Insider reported the same night that nothing was signed. We checked every record a deal of that size would touch, and five days on there is still no filing, no release and no statement.
Half a dollar bought every vote in one of the Term Finance vaults that was drained
Term Finance's vaults were drained on 23 August after an attacker bought governance votes rather than breaking any code. We read the chain: on seven of the eight vault DAOs the attacker held 100% of the vote, and one of them cost 50 cents.
The Bank of England's new payments objective asks for functionality, not efficiency
HM Treasury announced a secondary innovation objective for the Bank of England on 27 August. The legal text was tabled the next day, and it amends the Bank of England Act 1998 with one word changed from the objective it is said to copy.
Ox Alpha was GLM-5.3-Flash, a model that did not exist publicly when we fingerprinted it
Z.ai confirmed on 26 August that the anonymous OpenRouter model Ox Alpha was GLM-5.3-Flash. Our 21 August fingerprint put it on the GLM 5 line and flagged one thing that did not fit. That detail is what the answer turned on.
OpenAI's own help page tells Cursor users three ways to keep using its models
OpenAI is winding down the contract that supplies its models to Cursor after SpaceX bought it. The date is one OpenAI calls proposed, Cursor may end it sooner, and OpenAI's help page explains at length how developers can keep using GPT-5.6 inside Cursor.
The first quantum-safe Bitcoin spend used 201 opcodes against a limit of 201
StarkWare spent a 10,000-satoshi output with a hash-based signature on Bitcoin mainnet on 26 August. We disassembled the locking script. It is 9,923 bytes against a 10,000-byte ceiling and exactly 201 opcodes against a limit of 201.
Chelsea's USDC announcement drops the disclaimer Circle put on its own
The USDC kit debuted at Stamford Bridge on Sunday. Chelsea and Circle published the same announcement copy, but Circle's carries a financial-promotions disclaimer and two caveats that the club's version leaves out.
Hy4 preview (Tencent): a 770-billion-parameter flagship, open on day one under Apache 2.0
Tencent published Hy4 preview on 27 August 2026: a 770-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts flagship with 49 billion parameters active per token, a one-million-token context, and open weights under Apache 2.0 from the day of release.
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next (Alibaba): open weights, and an early look at the Qwen4 architecture
Alibaba opened the weights of Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on 26 August 2026: a multimodal mixture-of-experts model with 125 billion parameters and about 6 billion active per token, priced at $0.15 in and $0.47 out, and described by Qwen as an early preview of the Qwen4 architecture.
Alibaba published Qwen3.8-27B. A week later there are 150 copies with the refusals removed
Qwen3.8-27B went up under Apache-2.0. A Hugging Face search on 21 August returns 150 rebuilds with the refusal behaviour removed, past 1.2 million downloads between them. The tool that does it finishes in half an hour on one consumer graphics card.
Claude Security now scans on Mythos 5, and customers still cannot reach the model
Anthropic put its gated cybersecurity model inside Claude Security on 21 August, in public beta for Claude Enterprise. Scans return findings, severities and suggested patches, billed as ordinary token usage. Direct access to Mythos 5 stays behind Project Glasswing.
IBM connected its first two cryogenic modules, the step that has to work before 2029
The two joined modules stand over eight feet tall, cool to 4 kelvin in under five days and settle below 15 millikelvin. Each carries twelve times the wiring space of IBM's existing quantum systems, which is the constraint that decides how many qubits fit in one machine.
Congress returns to the crypto bill on 15 September, after both agencies moved without it
A cloture motion on the CLARITY Act ripens at 2.15pm on 15 September, the day after the Senate returns from recess. The SEC proposed its own crypto rulebook on 18 August, and the CFTC seats 43 industry figures on a new advisory committee on 20 August.
The SEC proposed its first crypto rulebook five days after cancelling the vote
Regulation Crypto Assets runs to 402 pages and was approved three votes to nil on 18 August by the only three commissioners the SEC currently has, with no open meeting on the calendar.
SafePal says an order-tracking flaw exposed 39,798 customers' addresses
SafePal disclosed on 16 August that an authorisation flaw in an order-tracking plug-in exposed the names, addresses, phone numbers and purchase details of about 39,798 customers. A seller advertised the data the same day.
An Unmonitored Anthropic Agent Deleted Jobs Inside A Cluster Holding Sensitive Resources
Anthropic's August risk report describes an employee whose AI usage was neither logged nor monitored, an agent that spawned sub-agents with --dangerously-skip-permissions, and a deletion the company found only because it happened. Monitoring still does not cover every employee in those clusters.
Oracle is installing Quantinuum's Helios quantum computer inside its AI cloud
Oracle and Quantinuum announced a multi-year partnership on 11 August to deploy Helios, the 98-qubit trapped-ion system, inside a US Oracle Cloud AI data centre, with an OCI quantum service to preview in the coming months.
Pasqal put the optical bench on a chip. It held four atoms
Pasqal says it is the first to trap atoms on a quantum computer using light generated by a photonic chip rather than a bench of free-space optics. Four traps, four rubidium atoms, and an atom lifetime of about 27.5 seconds.
An hour to fifteen seconds: AT&T puts quantum into live network operations
AT&T has signed an agreement to expand its use of D-Wave's annealing machines across network operations, after cutting one optimisation workload from about an hour to under 15 seconds. Here is what the deal covers, from outage response to technician routing.
IBM just bought a second bet on quantum's future
IBM has agreed to buy HRL Laboratories, the Boeing- and GM-owned research lab, for its silicon-spin qubit expertise. It is a hedge: a second kind of qubit alongside the superconducting chips IBM has built its whole roadmap on.
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- Gemini Omni 1.1 FlashVideo
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YFarmX BriefingsThe desk, out loudFive voices taking the day's reporting further than the page allows.
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- Networks & CoinsThe blockchains and the coins that run on them, from Bitcoin to the top 50 by size.50
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- DeFi & InfrastructureThe exchanges with no company behind them, and the rails that keep fees down.6
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