Episode Details

Independent benchmarks keep punching holes in vendor launch claims, from xAI's Grok 4.7 to Xiaomi's open-weight MiMo-V2.6, while a coalition of safety experts and evaluator groups just set the first hard bar for what a legitimate outside AI reviewer actually looks like. Amazon locked Meta's shopping agent out of its store as agentic-commerce turf wars begin, Treasury Secretary Bessent and a UN scientific panel both weighed in on who's accountable for OpenAI's Hugging Face agent breach, and nearly $200 billion in US data-center projects were blocked or delayed in the first half of 2026 on local opposition. Also covered: OpenAI recruited Terence Tao and eight other mathematicians to referee its own disputed math claims, and a security researcher caught ChatGPT's ad-tracking cookie hiding behind an "analytics" label.