BitsMinds

Anthropic Launches Claude for Teachers — Free Premium Claude for Every Verified US K-12 Educator

Anthropic is giving verified US K-12 teachers a full year of free premium Claude, plus a teaching-skills library and curricula mapped to all 50 states' standards. It's built with the AFT, Teach For America, and the Gates Foundation — and it keeps student data out of training.

Anthropic

Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Releases Inkling — a 975B Open-Weight, Multimodal Model Built to Be Customized

Thinking Machines Lab's first broadly available model is open. Inkling is a 975B-parameter mixture-of-experts model (41B active), trained on 45T tokens of text, image, audio, and video, with a 1M-token context — released under Apache 2.0 and tuned on the lab's Tinker platform.

Thinking Machines Lab

Microsoft Trains Its Salespeople to Talk Down OpenAI and Anthropic — and Sell Its Own AI Instead

In an internal FY27 strategy session, Microsoft told sales staff to pitch its in-house MAI models as cheaper and more efficient than OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google — claiming up to 10× the cost efficiency, and quietly swapping rivals out of Copilot, Excel, and Outlook.

TechCrunch

NVIDIA's Nemotron TwoTower Is a Diffusion LLM That Writes Text in Parallel — 2.42× Faster

Instead of generating one token at a time, NVIDIA's open-weight Nemotron TwoTower denoises whole blocks of text at once. It keeps 98.7% of an autoregressive model's quality while running 2.42× faster — and it was bolted onto a frozen 30B backbone without full retraining.

MarkTechPost

China Switches Off AI Companions: New Rules Force Doubao, Qwen, and Yuanbao to Kill Humanlike Agents

China's first national rules on 'anthropomorphic' AI took effect July 15, forcing ByteDance's Doubao, Alibaba's Qwen, and Tencent's Yuanbao to shut down user-created AI companions used by hundreds of millions — a design the new law makes almost impossible to keep.

South China Morning Post

Nobody Gets an A: The 2026 AI Safety Index Grades the Top Labs — Anthropic Leads With a C+

The Future of Life Institute's Summer 2026 index graded nine leading AI labs on safety. Anthropic topped the class with just a C+, OpenAI and Google DeepMind landed at C, Meta got a D+, and xAI, DeepSeek, and Mistral flat-out failed.

Future of Life Institute

South Korea Bets $880 Billion on AI, Chips, and Robots in a Decade-Long National Plan

President Lee Jae-myung's ten-year plan — about 1,350 trillion won — pours money into a 'triple axis' of semiconductors, data centers, and robotics: $518B in new Samsung and SK Hynix fabs, 8.4 gigawatts of data centers by 2029, and a push to take 20% of the humanoid robot market.

Al Jazeera

ByteDance's Seedream 5.0 Pro Pushes China to the Front of AI Image Generation

ByteDance's new flagship image model reasons about prompts, edits with point-and-lasso precision, writes on-image text in 14 languages, and outputs native 2K — at $0.075 an image. Observers already put its quality at GPT Image 2 level.

TestingCatalog

Google Rations Meta's Gemini Access as Compute Runs Short

The Financial Times reports Google told Meta it can't sell all the Gemini capacity it wants — forcing Meta to conserve tokens and delay projects. Even after $180B in AI infrastructure this year, compute has become tech's scarcest resource.

Forbes

What Is Claude Cowork? Anthropic’s Agentic Workspace

Computer-Use Agents: How AI Controls Your Screen

Kling AI: The Complete Guide to 4K AI Video Generation

NotebookLM: Turn Your Sources Into Audio, Video, and More