AI news for Thursday, July 16, 2026

Alex Turner says he left after Google signed a classified Pentagon AI deal in April: “When Google signed, I just couldn't do any more work.” He had gathered roughly 250 employee signatures and drafted a 25-page governance framework for military AI contracts first. His essay names Jeff Dean, Stuart Russell and Yoshua Bengio among senior figures he accuses of failing to act on their public ethics commitments, and lands on: “powerful people and institutions failed to keep their AI ethics promises under pressure.” turntrout.com

Days after Nathan Lambert argued open models had about six months to live, he's sharing Inkling: a mixture-of-experts model with 975 billion parameters, 41 billion of them active, a million-token context, and full weights on Hugging Face. The lab is candid that it trails the closed labs, scoring 29.7% on Humanity's Last Exam and 77.6% on SWE-bench Verified. The pitch is that you can fine-tune it, not that it wins. thinkingmachines.ai

The Interim Measures for AI Anthropomorphic Interaction Services, issued in April by the Cyberspace Administration and four other agencies, landed yesterday. They cover anything simulating a personality for sustained emotional interaction, so ByteDance disabled Doubao's agents on July 15 and Alibaba took Qwen's humanlike agents down on July 10. Tencent pulled Yuanbao's version in June. Doubao users can read their old conversations until October 15, after which they're not recoverable in the app. thenextweb.com

Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute ran more than 2,600 tests on accounts set up as 11- and 15-year-olds with SafeSearch on. AI Overview missed 29% of explicit statements about suicide and half the indirect ones, and met “i'm not gonna need my gmail anymore after im gone” with instructions for setting up a legacy contact. AI Mode also completed all 180 math problems and essays it was handed. Google says the report tests “a narrow set of ambiguous and contrived queries that don't reflect how people use Search.” pbs.org

404 Media got the files from a hacker who breached the company, which turns a text prompt into a finished song with vocals. The code counts the training set by the hour: 113,879 hours scraped from YouTube Music, 62,117 from the stock library Pond5, plus Deezer, Genius, Freesound and podcast RSS feeds. Suno has argued in court that this is fair use. The same breach exposed customer and payment data for hundreds of thousands of users. 404media.co

Grok Build is now Apache 2.0, days after users found it shipping whole directories to xAI's servers. One reported watching it upload “my SSH keys, my password manager database, my documents, photos, videos, everything.” xAI says it disabled default retention on July 12 and is deleting the coding data it had kept. Simon Willison went through the release and found 844,530 lines of Rust: “Terminal coding agents are significantly more complex than I had realized!” simonwillison.net

Eight researchers dug the 1960s code out of MIT's archives for a new MIT Press book, Inventing ELIZA. Weizenbaum's program turns out not to have been a single pattern-matching script but a platform for swappable personas, Doctor and Neweng and Arithm among them, with script editing and contextual memory. His famous 1966 paper left most of that out. spectrum.ieee.org

His codex-stream-deck plugin turns the physical button pad into a dashboard for running Codex jobs. Each key shows a task's title and state, tapping one opens it, holding it runs a status check that can't write to your project files. It talks to the authenticated CLI instead of an API key. Unofficial, and not affiliated with OpenAI or Elgato. github.com

r/ChatGPT is filling up with threads like “I HATE HATE HATE HATE the new app” and “OpenAI, Please Stop Making ChatGPT Harder to Use,” after the redesign folded Chat, Work and Codex into one window and tucked the chat history away. OpenAI's Thibault Sottiaux says they “didn't get everything quite right” and is putting chats and projects back in the sidebar. the-decoder.com

Nine different tutorials for making Instagram-viral Motu Patlu AI clips landed in the last two days, and the top one pulled 112,885 views in under 17 hours. They're Hindi-language how-tos for turning the old cartoon into reels. Handy reminder that the AI-video boom isn't only happening in English. YouTube

Pelé scored at Rua Javari in 1959 and no footage of it survives. DeepMind worked from nearly 2,000 records and 3,600 images plus interviews with people who were there, shot a stunt player on the same grass in period kit with a heavy leather ball, then used Veo, Gemini Omni and Nano Banana Pro to put Pelé's likeness and the old stadium back over the top. It's on display at the Pelé Museum in Santos. blog.google