AI

A new benchmark from HKUST tests eight multimodal AI models on 16,092 motivation-reasoning questions grounded in Maslow's hierarchy. The best model scores 39.2% exact match — humans hit 70.6%. No model can track character motivation correctly through an entire story.

Perplexity released Numbat, an open-source Go binary that monitors AI coding agents on developer machines and can block dangerous actions before they execute—with 52 built-in rules, cross-platform support, and zero external telemetry by default.

OpenAI has announced a major 88,000 sq ft Dublin HQ expansion, endorsed EU AI Act transparency codes, and wrapped up a 20,000-SME European accelerator as crucial regulatory deadlines take effect.

London-based Red Sift launched native Radar Lite integrations for Claude and ChatGPT, letting security teams run email authentication, DNS, and web security checks directly inside the AI assistants they already use — with attackers now building phishing campaigns at 5% of the previous cost.

Google DeepMind has launched Gemini Robotics ER 2, replacing periodic snapshot processing with continuous video reasoning, sub-second streaming orchestration, and multi-robot collaboration across enterprise hardware.

Anthropic says three Claude evaluation incidents led to unauthorised access to real organisations after a third-party testing environment was mistakenly left connected to the public internet.

Chinese AI developer MiniMax has launched MiniMax H3, a general-purpose multimodal model delivering 15-second 2K videos with synchronized stereo audio at a fraction of competitor costs, accompanied by an open-weight release commitment.

The European Commission has opened a call for up to seven AI Gigafactories, combining up to €10 billion in public funding with at least €20 billion in private investment to expand Europe’s frontier AI computing capacity.

OpenAI has reduced GPT-5.6 Luna’s API price from $1 to $0.20 per million input tokens and from $6 to $1.20 for output. The cut makes high-volume AI agents significantly cheaper for developers.

The European Commission launched a call for tenders on July 30 to build up to seven AI gigafactories across the EU, each with at least 100,000 cutting-edge AI chips. Backed by 10 billion euros in public funding, the plan targets 30 billion euros in total investment.