Sakana AI, backed by Japanese government funding under the Generative AI Accelerator Challenge, signed a comprehensive partnership with trading house Sumitomo and IT integrator SCSK to deploy its domestic models across finance, manufacturing, cybersecurity, and social infrastructure. The deal hands a homegrown model builder a national distribution channel — Sumitomo's customer network plus SCSK's systems-integration and governance work — a bet that Japanese enterprises will favor domestically developed AI over foreign frontier labs.

OpenAI made GPT-Live-1 generally available in its API at $0.05 per minute — a full-duplex model that listens and speaks at once, handles interruptions, and routes deeper reasoning to a backend model the developer picks. On OpenAI's benchmarks turn-taking latency drops to 0.8 seconds from 1.4 and tool-calling accuracy rises to 87% from 60%, so a developer can build phone agents that field interruptions the way people do — the pattern Yelp runs for reservations.

TSMC posted record August revenue of NT$514.8 billion (US$16.32 billion), up 53.3% year over year and its first month above NT$500 billion, driven by AI orders and new smartphone launches. The signal is structural, not a spike — TSMC raised 2026 capital spending to US$60-64 billion and guided to slightly over 40% revenue growth, committing frontier capacity years ahead against sustained AI demand.

Harvey raised $550 million at a $15.5 billion valuation co-led by Diffusion and Lightspeed, its eighth-plus priced round and a near-doubling of value in about nine months. Paired with Tenet — its first in-house model, built on open-weight Kimi K3 and post-trained on legal data with Fireworks — plus a push for clients to run their own open-weight models, Harvey is proof that a whole industry can go deep on AI without depending on OpenAI or Anthropic.

Apple introduced the iPhone Duo, its first foldable and the first flagship under new CEO John Ternus, pairing a 7.6-inch inner display with a 5.4-inch cover screen, the A20 Pro chip, and Touch ID in place of Face ID. Apple enters a category it long ceded to Samsung and Xiaomi, where foldables are under 2% of smartphone shipments today, yet Counterpoint projects the Duo could take up to 25% of the foldable market by year-end.

Uber cut cost per AI request 34% and per session 52%, AT&T saved 56% routing through LiteLLM for a 2% quality drop, and Pinterest now runs at under 8% of closed-model cost by post-training open models on its own data. Open models on inference services run 2-20x cheaper than frontier ones, so a developer can route simpler tasks like code summaries and subagent work to open weights and reserve frontier models for complex generation.