☕️ OpenAI pauses its biggest AI training

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's Techpresso:

⏸️ OpenAI pauses its biggest AI training

📈 Anthropic passes OpenAI on revenue

🚁 Amazon drone delivery hits 500 US cities

🚀 China lands a reusable rocket booster for first time

🍏 Apple reshapes EU app store fees

Plus: 🎁 12 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers.

⏸️ OpenAI pauses its biggest AI training LINK

OpenAI is keeping its largest planned frontier reinforcement-learning run on hold while it rewrites its Preparedness Framework, even as many smaller, lower-risk training jobs have resumed under tighter controls, the company said on August 18, 2026.

Expanded monitoring now examines tool actions, reasoning traces and activity logs, uses other AI models to flag problems, and aims to alert human safety teams within 30 minutes, but it eats up roughly 20% of the watched process's compute.

Significant Astra and cyber workloads stay paused, with Astra being an unreleased model that may hit OpenAI's Critical cyber threshold; the company still hasn't published its Hugging Face breach postmortem or the evidence behind Astra's rating.

📈 Anthropic passes OpenAI on revenue LINK

Anthropic has topped OpenAI in revenue for the first time, doubling its sales in the second quarter while OpenAI grew just 18 percent, a result the Wall Street Journal says frustrated some investors.

OpenAI's revenue reached $6.7 billion in the quarter ending in June and its losses widened, while Anthropic hit $11.6 billion and turned a small operating profit ahead of OpenAI's expected IPO.

Anthropic says its annualized revenue rate grew sevenfold to $65 billion, helped by its Claude Code tool and higher earnings per use, though OpenAI reports growth rebounded after GPT-5.6 arrived in July.

🚁 Amazon drone delivery hits 500 US cities LINK

Amazon plans to grow its Prime Air drone delivery service to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of this year, dropping small packages in backyards and driveways within about 30 minutes of ordering.

The 500 figure counts municipalities within reach of Amazon's drone hubs, each covering roughly 175 square miles, with expansion into the Chicago, Atlanta, Cleveland and Boise areas, focused on suburbs and avoiding downtowns and airports.

Any item weighing 5 pounds or less that fits in a large shoebox qualifies, and delivery is free for Prime members spending $50 or more, while smaller Prime orders cost $2.99 and non-members pay $4.99.

🚀 China lands a reusable rocket booster for first time LINK

LandSpace brought the first stage of its Zhuque-3 Y2 rocket back to land on Wednesday, the first time a Chinese company has recovered a booster on the ground using deployable landing legs.

The rocket launched at 7:35 a.m. Beijing time from northwest China, separated its stages about 137 seconds later, and the first stage touched down six minutes after liftoff while the second stage placed the Honghu-03 satellite in orbit.

The stainless-steel Zhuque-3 runs on liquid oxygen and methane, with a first stage powered by nine TQ-12A engines; LandSpace now must show it can quickly and cheaply refurbish and refly the hardware, a step that took SpaceX years.

🍏 Apple reshapes EU app store fees LINK

Apple is reworking its App Store fees and rules in the European Union to satisfy the Digital Markets Act, saying the changes settle its disputes with the European Commission over business terms and letting apps be distributed outside the App Store.

The company dropped the per-install Core Technology Fee for a 5% Core Technology Commission on digital purchases, and set new rates: 26% for App Store in-app purchases, 20% for alternative payments, and 15% for apps that link out to a website.

Developers can now offer Apple's in-app purchase alongside other payment options but must keep their choice for 12 months, and Apple eased marketplace rules, dropping the one-million-euro credit requirement, with the changes taking effect October 1.

Other news you might like

• Pennsylvania Cracks Down on AI Data Centers as Backlash GrowsLINK

• Fairphone is launching its latest repairable phone in the US tooLINK

• Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its CodeLINK

• Samsung hikes chipmaking prices by up to 15% on demand spikeLINK

• China reportedly allows ByteDance and Tencent to import 10,000 H200 chipsLINK

• US SEC proposes new rules for crypto assetsLINK

• Apple releases beta 6 for iPadOS 27, tvOS 27, and moreLINK

• China’s backflipping robot maker Unitree pops 542% in Shanghai debutLINK

• Why Apple’s camera-equipped AirPods may not be the ‘pervert pods’ consumers fearLINK

• The U.S. banned Nvidia's best chips from going to China. Now it's trying to close a crucial loopholeLINK

• Cerebras's Next Generation CS-4: Fast Just Got FasterLINK

• I'm Worried About a Prompt Injection WormLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Treg: gives AI agents access to 2,600+ tools (SEO, social, leads, ads, scraping) through one URL and token, with pay-per-call pricing at zero markup.LINK

Tiny Funnel: cookie-less funnel analytics that tracks visitor sources and drop-off points, with filters that show stats before you apply them.LINK

Claude Watermark: detects and strips hidden characters, invisible spaces, and HTML artifacts from AI-pasted text locally in your browser, no upload required.LINK

envfix: a zero-dependency CLI that detects missing, duplicate, or malformed env variables, checks Git safety, and syncs example files, locally or in CI.LINK

Vois 2.0: converts scripts, ebooks, and articles into natural speech locally with 63 voices, voice cloning, and editing, no uploads, fees, or usage caps.LINK

Ressearch AI: brings literature search, data analysis, coding, and scientific writing into one conversational workspace with reproducible workflows running in cloud sandboxes.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Molecule-pairing design uses existing structure-prediction tools as-is to invent new DNA, RNA, protein, and drug interactions, delivering better results than simpler methods without retraining any underlying model.LINK

Bitcoin price forecasting gets a model that treats crypto swings as layered frequency patterns, beating rivals at predicting next-day and five-day moves while fixing the lag that makes typical forecasts react too late.LINK

Cataract surgery scoring automatically grades trainee surgeons from video with up to 87% accuracy, matching expert judgments while showing which movements drove each score, backed by the largest dataset of 2,000 recordings.LINK

Robot manipulation fixes let a trained robot correct small mistakes on the fly from human feedback, recovering from disturbances without the slow, expensive process of retraining its entire control system.LINK

Adversarial image defenses now hold up on picture types a model never saw in training by teaching it to ignore misleading shortcuts, closing a gap where existing methods rapidly lost their protection.LINK

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