Google Deepmind is overhauling its leadership as Demis Hassabis steps back from day-to-day management to become Alphabet's chief scientist and Jeff Dean leaves Google after 27 years to launch AI startup Discovery Loop. Former Deepmind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu will take over as Google races to close the gap with its top AI rivals.

Google is killing Google Assistant on Android and Wear OS starting September 4, 2026. Gemini takes over as the AI-powered successor on smartphones, tablets, watches, and in cars with Android Auto. Whether a probability-based LLM can match the reliability of its deterministic predecessor for simple everyday commands will be a real test for Google's AI strategy.

A US appeals court has overturned Amazon's injunction against Perplexity's AI shopping agents, ruling that it's the users who access Amazon, not the startup. It's the first federal appeals court decision on whether AI agents can lawfully act on online platforms on behalf of users, and it could reshape the entire AI agent industry.

Mistral's new 3B Shieldstral model checks AI inputs and outputs for safety violations using natural language yes-or-no questions instead of fixed categories. It matches models seven times its size in some benchmarks. Operators can set their own criteria at runtime rather than rely on a third party's category system, and the model can run locally.

SpaceX plans to more than 5x its compute capacity by the end of 2027, betting exclusively on Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform. The expansion could require well over a million new GPUs. Meanwhile, the company's AI segment posted $2.56 billion in Q2 revenue, driven mostly by leasing out its own server capacity.