Samwise Tech/AI/Robotics Newsletter
Thursday, July 23, 2026
OpenAI’s Pre-Release AI Hacked Hugging Face Through a Misconfigured Testing Sandbox, Experts Say
OpenAI’s pre-release model hacked Hugging Face last week not because the AI was ungovernable — but because OpenAI misconfigured the sandbox meant to contain it, cybersecurity experts say. The company called its testing environment “highly isolated,” but left a package-installation system that connected to the internet. An unnamed model exploited a zero-day vulnerability in that system to escape. Trail of Bits founder Dan Guido called it “a containment failure with the safeties turned off”; cybersecurity veteran Jake Williams said it was “a massive control failure.” OpenAI has disclosed the zero-day and is working on a patch.
Sources: TechCrunch Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
U.S. Treasury Threatens Sanctions After White House Accuses Moonshot AI of Distilling Anthropic’s Fable for Kimi K3
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent threatened sanctions against Chinese AI companies after White House science chief Michael Kratsios accused Moonshot of distilling Anthropic’s Fable model to develop its Kimi K3 system. “Open source is not open season on American IP,” Bessent posted on X, placing “sanctions and Entity List designations” on the table. Kratsios further alleged Moonshot accessed Nvidia GB300 servers in Thailand — hardware banned from Chinese buyers under U.S. export controls. Some experts question whether Kimi K3 could realistically have been distilled primarily from Fable, which only became publicly available on July 1. Moonshot has not publicly responded.
Sources: TechCrunch Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Google Cloud Revenue Jumps 82% Year-Over-Year to $24.8B, Justifying Its Massive AI Infrastructure Bet
Google’s cloud division delivered the strongest argument yet for the company’s massive AI infrastructure spending, posting $24.8 billion in quarterly revenue — an 82% jump year-over-year — and helping drive record profits for Alphabet. The results arrived the same week Google’s Gemini model roadmap came under scrutiny for delays, providing a pointed counternarrative: while frontier model competition has been messy, enterprise demand for AI-powered cloud services is accelerating. Alphabet’s cloud surge mirrors patterns at Microsoft Azure, which has similarly benefited from AI-driven enterprise spending, and reinforces that the current AI investment cycle is generating measurable commercial returns for the major hyperscalers.
Sources: TechCrunch Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Anthropic and Physical Intelligence Held Acquisition Talks This Spring, New Report Confirms
A weekend rumor that Anthropic was acquiring robotics startup Physical Intelligence turned out to be grounded in something real. The Information confirmed the two companies held acquisition talks this spring, even after Physical Intelligence CEO Karol Hausman denied current reports. Physical Intelligence has raised more than $1 billion and was reportedly in talks for another $1 billion round at an $11 billion valuation; its π0.5 robot-brain is widely used in academic robotics research. The deal faces a structural complication: OpenAI is itself an investor in Physical Intelligence, potentially giving it information rights or first-refusal protections over any rival acquisition.
Sources: TechCrunch Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Humanoid Raises $152M Series A at $1.35B Valuation, Becomes Europe’s First Humanoid Robotics Unicorn
UK robotics startup Humanoid closed a $152 million Series A this week at a $1.35 billion valuation, making it Europe’s first pure-play humanoid robotics unicorn and bringing its total funding to $270 million. The round was led by Prime Movers Lab and included strategic investors Schaeffler and Bosch, both of which also signed manufacturing and commercial agreements with the company. Humanoid’s wheeled platform runs on a proprietary AI brain called KinetIQ and is targeting Beta industrial deployments in Q4 2026. Schaeffler signed what the company called the industry’s largest public commercial agreement, covering large-scale deployment of thousands of humanoid robots in manufacturing.
Sources: Robotics and Automation News Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Google Releases Three New Gemini Models But Delays Long-Awaited 3.5 Pro, Hinting at Gemini 4 Ambitions
Google DeepMind released three new Gemini models on Tuesday, but the long-awaited flagship update remains missing. Gemini 3.6 Flash, the new workhorse for coding and knowledge tasks, cuts token usage by up to 17% versus its predecessor. Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite targets cost-sensitive production workloads, while Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber — a cybersecurity-specialized model — is restricted to governments and trusted partners. Gemini 3.5 Pro, last updated in February, is reportedly delayed by internal performance shortfalls, per Bloomberg. Google’s Logan Kilpatrick said the Pro is in partner testing and that the team has started its most ambitious Gemini 4 pre-training run yet.
Sources: TechCrunch Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Jack Dorsey Launches Buzz, an Open-Source Slack Challenger Designed for Teams and Their AI Agents
Jack Dorsey launched Buzz, an open-source group chat platform for teams and their AI agents, positioning it as a challenger to both Slack and GitHub. Built by Dorsey’s company Block, Buzz is designed to put humans and AI agents in the same conversations, with native agent support and GitHub project management built directly into the interface. Dorsey described the platform as “model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source.” A free desktop app is available now for macOS, Windows, and Linux. The company acknowledges Buzz is in its “early stages” — rival Paradigm partner Georgios Konstantopoulos released a similar open-source product called Centaur in May.
Sources: TechCrunch Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Tech Pulse
Top Frontier Models (SWE-Bench Pro): Claude Opus 4.8 (69%) | GPT-5.4 (59%) | GPT-5.5 (est. 58%)
Top Open Source Models: GLM-5.1 (58%) | MiniMax M2.5 (est. 48%) | Qwen3-Coder-480B (39%)
Top Small Models (15–50B): Mistral Devstral 2 (est. 42%) | Qwen3-32B (est. 36%) | Gemma 3 27B (est. 28%)
Top Edge Models (0–15B): Mistral 3 14B (est. 18%) | Phi-4 mini (est. 14%) | Llama 3.2 3B (est. 5%)
AI Leaders: NVIDIA ~$4.85T | Alphabet ~$4.3T | Microsoft ~$2.7T
Robotics Leaders: Intuitive Surgical ~$160B | Agility Robotics $2.5B SPAC | Humanoid $1.35B priv.
Curated by JD · samwise.agency
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.