Anthropic wins against the Pentagon, Instinct AI surges, and other tech news
A court rules Anthropics blacklisting unconstitutional, the A2A standard consolidates, Instinct AI raises $250M, and sched_ext lands complete in Linux 7.3 — eight stories from the week.
AI
Anthropic wins its Pentagon blacklist suit
Judge Rita Lin of the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled the Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk unconstitutional, finding it violated the First and Fifth Amendments. The government was ordered to rescind all related directives.
The dispute began over a $200 million classified systems contract. After Anthropic restricted use of Claude for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, the Pentagon applied a retaliatory blacklist. In a 59-page opinion the judge set out the core principle: an empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish critics. It is a precedent recognizing an AI company’s legal standing to set safety terms.
Google’s A2A joins the Agentic AI Foundation
Google’s Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol joined the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) on 20 August. Together with Anthropic’s MCP, the two core standards for AI agents now sit under one governance body.
MCP handles vertical integration between agents and tools. A2A handles horizontal communication between agents — task negotiation, identity exchange, and state management. AAIF membership grew from 49 to over 250 in a year, with AWS, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Cloudflare participating as Platinum members. It marks the turn from proprietary standards toward shared industry ones.
Big Tech
Meta smart glasses close the covert recording loophole
Meta is rolling out a privacy update to Ray-Ban smart glasses: covering the LED indicator during recording now stops the camera automatically. Meta VP Alex Himel confirmed the change.
Previously only hardware tampering that disabled the LED was blocked, leaving the workaround of covering it by hand after recording started. This is the second privacy patch in two months. As smart glasses draw attention as a smartphone alternative, concerns about always-on recording are growing with them.
Samsung’s Exynos 2700 beats Snapdragon in internal benchmarks
Samsung’s Exynos 2700 posted notable results in internal testing: 19 percent ahead of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 on CPU multi-core and 5 percent on peak GPU. It was also 18 percent faster on Llama 3.1 8B inference.
Power draw came in 12.7 percent lower than the Snapdragon Pro. These are pre-production internal results, and no independent verification exists yet. Whether production silicon reproduces the same numbers is the open question.
Startups
Instinct AI raises a $250M Series B
Instinct, the AI assistant founded by 23-year-old Noah Shinn, closed a $250 million Series B co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. Total funding stands at $350 million at a $2.5 billion valuation.
Instinct is an AI assistant that performs real tasks over phone calls and text messages. It entered private beta in February 2026. Shinn left Sierra to found Spear Street Technology in 2025. The valuation jumped from $50 million to $2.5 billion in a matter of months.
AM Intelligence orders 9,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin systems
Indian AI infrastructure company AM Intelligence (AMI) is committing $8 billion and has ordered 9,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems. It is Asia’s first large-scale Vera Rubin deployment, with delivery expected in Q1 2027.
AMI is an affiliate of renewable energy company Greenko Group. Its first 30MW facility is being built in Hyderabad, with subsequent expansion to the US, Finland, and Malaysia toward a total of 1GW. AI infrastructure competition is spreading past the US and China into India.
Open Source
Linux 7.3 merge window opens with sched_ext feature-complete
The Linux 7.3 merge window opened shortly after 7.2 shipped on 17 August. The headline item is sched_ext, the programmable scheduler, reaching feature completeness. A stable release is expected in October.
AMD support expands substantially, with roughly 95 patches going into the UALink infrastructure implementation. Low-power core identification and unified Intel/AMD core type reporting are included, along with hybrid CPU scheduling improvements and gaming performance work.
Bambu Lab AGPL-3 violation, SFC responds publicly
The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) announced Bambu Lab’s AGPLv3 violations at FOSSY 2026. Two violations were identified.
Bambu Studio, based on PrusaSlicer, did not release the source of a proprietary library, bambu_networking. Bambu Lab also issued legal threats against an independent developer’s fork — an attempt to restrict the right to fork that AGPLv3 guarantees. SFC has started “baltobu,” an open-source project to replace the proprietary components. It is a significant test of open-source license compliance in the 3D printing industry.