Category: Top News

IBL News | New York

OpenAI this month introduced ChatGPT for Academic Researchers, a program that will give 100,000 academic researchers at selected institutions free access to ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work, Codex, and its frontier models, including the GPT‑5.6⁠ family, through 2027.

The program will help researchers across the sciences, mathematics, and engineering take on advanced problems, accelerate discovery, and improve productivity, from preparing grant applications to testing hypotheses.

 

IBL News | New York

Anthropic, OpenAI, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft continue targeting the $6 trillion global education market, as a report by Morgan Stanley quantified.

“For the world’s biggest AI labs, education represents both a chance to help society adapt to the seismic changes their inventions are bringing, and an enormous business opportunity,” the Financial Times reported.

• Anthropic has just launched Claude for Teachers, a free tool aimed at K-12 teachers in the US. It also promotes “Claude for Education” for university teachers and students.

• OpenAI has ChatGPT for Teachers — a free, self-serve offer for verified US K-12 teachers and staff. It also offers ChatGPT Edu, a discounted enterprise subscription aimed at universities.

• Google has a suite of tools based around its Gemini models for educational institutions.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic espouse a “Socratic” approach to learning, turning chatbots into tutors that guide critical thinking. For K-12 teachers, they provide tools intended to help them plan lessons and assignments and provide automated reports on students.

Meanwhile, Microsoft and Google, which have longstanding relationships with many universities through their cloud services, are incorporating their AI tools into their education offerings with more powerful tools for higher-tier, paid plans.

All of this offers a threat to edtech companies that so far have chosen to partner with the frontier labs building the big foundation AI models, rather than fight them.

 

IBL News | New York

Coursera announced this week a $100 million equity investment in LearnVector Inc, an AI learning company founded and led by Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera and a pioneer in AI [in the picture above], acquiring a one-third stake. No further details were provided.

“The investment reflects Coursera’s conviction that AI expands the market for learning rather than replacing it,” said the company.

LearnVector explained that it plans to put AI agents on a personal, adaptive one-on-one learning experience for every learner in early 2027.

“Rather than replace people or make learning obsolete, AI grows the demand for trusted learning,” said Andrew Ng, CEO of LearnVector and co-founder of Coursera.

On the other hand, yesterday, Coursera reported Q2 2026 revenue of $298.6 million, beating Wall Street expectations, and raising full-year 2026 revenue guidance to a range of $1.22 billion to $1.245 billion.

IBL News | New York

The MCP (Model Context Protocol) — the open standard that became the bridge between AI agents and software — got its largest update this week since Anthropic released it in 2025, with the goal of making agentic AI ready for massive enterprise production deployments.

The update, released under the stewardship of Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), hardens MCP’s authentication model against a known class of attacks and lets organizations run MCP servers behind standard load balancers using the Kubernetes and cloud-native DevOps tooling they already operate.

IBL News | New York

Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, said this Monday that his company has “never advocated for a ban on open-weights models,” in an attempt to counter criticism emerging across the tech industry that the AI lab is trying to exert excessive control over the future of AI.

“Open-weights models that don’t have dangerous capabilities are a public good: they don’t cost anything besides the compute needed to run them, and they provide value to businesses, developers, and researchers,” he explained.

“We should instead focus on keeping powerful chips out of authoritarian hands, stopping industrial-scale distillation, and requiring safety testing of all sufficiently capable models, open and closed.”

Amodei published his views in a blog post after a coalition of leading companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and Palantir, released a letter late last week urging policymakers to avoid “premature restrictions” on open-weight models, which users can download, modify, and run on their own infrastructure.

Chinese startups currently dominate the market, and some government officials have started to weigh whether those models should be banned or restricted in the U.S.

In his post, Dario Amodei stated that his “primary concern is the risk that authoritarian governments—not solely the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), although the CCP is clearly the most capable threat—build AI models that are more powerful than those built by the US, and use them to achieve permanent military superiority or perpetrate incredibly deep repression of their own people. “

• “The most dangerous model may be one that is trained in secret and handed only to the People’s Liberation Army for use in drones and the Ministry of State Security for surveillance and repression.”

• “My secondary concern is the risk that powerful AI models may be misused to carry out cyberattacks or biological attacks, and may have serious alignment problems.”

• “Open-weights models—it does not matter whether they come from China or anywhere else—do potentially present a higher risk than closed models, because it is very difficult to apply guardrails to them or monitor their usage, and once weights are released, they cannot be withdrawn.”

• “We should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China, and we should crack down on the rampant smuggling and workarounds used to obtain access to such chips.”

• “We should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations. Distillation is a much more compute-efficient process than training models from scratch. It allows China to build much better models than its number of chips would ordinarily enable, and thus partially evade chip bans. Distillation does not allow the CCP to obtain equivalent or superior AI capabilities to the US, but it can bring the Chinese frontier to within a few months of the US frontier.”

• “All sufficiently capable models, open and closed, should go through mandatory safety testing. The best way to address threat #2 is to just directly test models for cyber, biological, and alignment risks before release. I think this idea is actually close to a consensus.”

Mikel Amigot, IBL News | Louisville, Kentucky

Over 3,000 educators, administrators, and edtech professionals gathered this week in Louisville, Kentucky, for InstructureCon 2026, Instructure’s flagship annual conference.

Under the theme “Education in the Making,” the three-day event (July 21–23, 2026) delivered keynote addresses from renowned thinkers, a sweeping product roadmap, the launch of a new AI venture studio, and a landmark survey on AI adoption in education.

With over 200 sessions, workshops, and meetups spanning artificial intelligence, workforce readiness, accessible design, and evolving learner needs, InstructureCon 2026 was both a display of technological ambition and a test of whether Instructure can rebuild the trust compromised by the cybersecurity breach that struck its Canvas LMS on April 25, 2026,

Instructure’s CEO, Steve Daly, addressed “the incident”, as they called the data breach caused by the criminal organization ShinyHunters, promising transparency, honest communication, and every effort to rebuild trust through consistent action.

The company announced two new practical security features: one to download courses and another to fully remove all non-essential data on Canvas LMS.

• “It will be a defense at every layer, annual verification, and external audits.”

• “There will be faster detection and remediation, more frequent external validation, and more open collaboration.”

However, “We cannot predict a world without zero incidents; future attacks, in fact, will be more frequent and damaging,” said Armin Molavi, Chief Marketing Officer [in the picture below].

Also, the week prior to the conference, Instructure assessed a separate security threat disclosed against ShareFile, the third-party platform being used for secure data delivery. The company emphasized the ShareFile issue “did not involve Canvas or any Instructure systems.”

Daly shared what Instructure described as “a bold vision for how education and technology can move forward together in a time of rapid change,” framing the company’s evolution “from a learning management system provider to a comprehensive, future-ready learning ecosystem.” He emphasized that the rate of technological and workforce change will continue to accelerate and positioned Instructure as the partner to help institutions navigate it.

In the opening of the conference, guest speaker Michael Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation and one of education’s most recognized voices, challenged the audience to rethink AI’s role in education, not merely as an efficiency tool, but as a force that can “restore what education was always supposed to be: connection, curiosity, and purpose.”

He argued that AI should liberate educators from administrative burden, freeing them to spend more time genuinely engaging with students.

The biggest talking point of Day 1 was Instructure’s new research on the state of AI in education. Covering 1,125 respondents across educators, higher education students, and K-12 parents and guardians, the survey revealed a stark adoption gap:

• 90% of higher education students use AI in the classroom at least occasionally
• 61% of college instructors and 68% of K-12 educators also use AI in class
• Yet 41% of higher ed instructors and 45% of K-12 educators have received zero formal AI training
• Only 11% of college instructors reported comprehensive AI preparation; only 8% of K-12 educators
• 65% of all respondents worry that AI “presents incorrect information confidently”

Chief Learning Officer Melissa Loble framed these findings as validation for its IgniteAI strategy—embedding AI tools directly into existing Canvas workflows so educators can benefit from AI without needing to become AI specialists themselves.

On the second day of the conference, Instructure announced the launch of Instructure Foundry, a standalone venture studio within Instructure dedicated to innovation by developing “AI-native” educational products outside the traditional Canvas roadmap.

Designed to move faster than the core product team and experiment with ideas that don’t fit neatly into a learning management system, Foundry represents Instructure’s bet that the future of edtech requires startup-speed innovation backed by institutional-scale infrastructure.

Foundry’s inaugural project is Project Athena, an AI-powered study coach that delivers in-context learning through Canvas. Unlike generic AI tutoring tools, which operate without awareness of a student’s specific academic context, Athena pulls from a student’s actual Canvas environment — syllabi, course materials, assignments, and upcoming assessments — to generate:

• Personalized quizzes tailored to what the student is currently studying.
• Custom study guides aligned with real deadlines and assessment schedules.
• Coaching prompts that push toward mastery and deep understanding, not surface-level answers.

Chief Product Officer Shiren Vijiasingam emphasized that Athena addresses a “context gap” that plagues existing AI tutoring tools.  “Most AI tutoring tools have a critical gap: they generate explanations without the context of what students are actually learning and require students to find, organize, and upload course materials themselves,” he said.

On the sensitive topic of data privacy — particularly acute given the breach — Instructure was explicit: student conversations with Athena will not be used to train external AI models, access to Canvas data will be read-only and governed by existing user authorizations, and students retain full ownership of their data.

During the event, the Canvas LMS Product Roadmap was announced

Vijiasingam said, “Educational technology, powered by AI, can strengthen the connection between educator and student, amplify the voice and impact of the educator, and provide a personalized learning experience that improves student success.”

He added that AI-driven efficiency should translate into “time savings that allow educators to use their time in higher quality and more meaningful ways, spending it where it matters most.”

Instructure announced plans to update more than 20 key Canvas workflows throughout 2026, including:

• Course dashboards — customizable views for learners and educators, with mobile improvements to help students quickly identify priorities.
• Content creation — elevated tools with embedded accessibility checks and AI-assisted support directly within course design workflows.
• Course navigation — simplified flows and modernized interfaces.
• Grading processes — performance and usability upgrades for SpeedGrader, including improvements for large-enrollment courses.
• Media experiences — interactive transcripts, improved video navigation, and richer Canvas Studio integration. Institutions will have control over enabling changes at their own pace.
• Canvas Career, which reached general availability on January 29, 2026, was highlighted as Instructure’s purpose-built platform for workforce-aligned, skills-first education.
• Canvas Studio, Instructure’s video learning platform, received several enhancements:
  — Distraction-free YouTube integration with enhanced data privacy.
  — Video annotation capabilities for both instructors and students.
  — Vimeo upload support and automatic Zoom recording storage.
  — Account-level and course-level analytics with CSV export options.
  — Planned improvements for interactive transcripts and enhanced video navigation.

The Canvas platform owner concluded that the LMS — already the place where courses, grades, and student data live — is the natural home for AI in education.

By embedding AI directly into Canvas rather than building standalone products, Instructure is arguing that AI works best when it has context, and no tool has more educational context than the learning management system.

IBL News | New York

OpenAI and Anthropic are quietly lobbying Washington regulators to restrict open-source AI models, even as Sam Altman publicly said he supports open-source AI, The New York Times reported yesterday.

The two leading frontier model companies are now publicly clashing with the rest of the tech industry over whether open-source models from China should be freely available or restricted.

David Sacks, Co-Chair, President’s Council of Advisers on Science & Technology, criticized Anthropic and OpenAI, posting:
“The entire tech industry (save for Anthropic) has come out in favor of open source AI. So what happens next? Will Anthropic change its lobbying efforts? Not likely.”

In recent years, Silicon Valley technologists have shown their divide over how AI software should be created, and last week that argument reached a boiling point.

On one side, Anthropic and OpenAI claim that AI models are too dangerous to be developed in the open and must be tightly controlled — by businesses like themselves — for safety. On the other hand, the rest of the tech industry, including giants like Microsoft and Nvidia, contends that open-source AI models must remain open for people to further develop technologies and build new businesses.

On Friday, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, posted that open-source software was “essential to a healthy A.I. ecosystem.”  Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, said in his first-ever post to X that “the world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.”  [see Nvidia’s CEO video below]. Both signed a letter supporting open source, which was also signed by executives at Meta, Palantir and IBM.

The escalating fight stems from China’s rapid progress in open-source AI models, which are freely available to use and build on. In recent weeks, two Chinese start-ups, Z.ai and Moonshot AI, have released models that rival those from Anthropic and other American labs. Anthropic and OpenAI have claimed that Chinese companies built the models by improperly harvesting data from their AI systems, which they said should not be allowed.

But companies like Microsoft and Nvidia, which rely on open-source models to spur demand for their cloud computing services and chips, said that open-source software was important to advancing the technology with shared knowledge and that it would let more people examine its security.

Silicon Valley start-up founders argue that constraining open-source software will cement OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s lead in AI.

 

The entire tech industry (save for Anthropic) has come out in favor of open source AI.

So what happens next? Will Anthropic change its lobbying efforts? Not likely. Now the gaslighting begins:

“Nobody is trying to ban open source.”

“We just want to limit who can use it.”

“We…

— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) July 26, 2026

IBL News | New York

Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Palantir, and more than 20 top tech companies released a letter Friday defending open-source AI models while urging policymakers to avoid “premature restrictions” that would “stifle competition or drive innovation overseas.”

The joint letter came as Chinese open-weight models are gaining steam against leading offerings from American companies, sparking a debate about whether they should be restricted.

These models are available for users to download, modify, and run on their own infrastructure, and they have been the subject of fierce debate within the tech sector in recent weeks.

OpenAI and Anthropic, which are gearing up for potentially massive IPOs, did not sign the letter.

Moonshot AI, a Chinese startup, amplified concerns earlier this month after releasing a model called Kimi K3 that outperforms cutting-edge American offerings across some industry benchmarks. However, the U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that the Trump administration would look into whether Chinese companies were stealing American intellectual property, and stated that the government has “the ability to sanction them because of this theft.”

But in the letter on Friday, the group of U.S. tech companies cautioned against any rash actions. They wrote that open-weight models strengthen competition and ensure that the benefits of the technology are “broadly shared rather than concentrated in a few hands.”

“Relying solely on closed models is not inherently safe: they can be breached, misused, or fail in ways that outsiders cannot detect,” the letter said. “And concentrating advanced AI capabilities behind a small number of closed models compounds that risk.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella both shared the letter on their personal social media accounts.

Jensen Huang wrote, “AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.”

Satya Nadella said, “Open-weight models are essential to a healthy AI ecosystem. Together with others across our industry, we are outlining a path for open-weight models to strengthen American competitiveness and expand economic opportunity, while protecting national security.”

Elon Musk, who runs an AI business under his rocket company SpaceX, also amplified the letter on social media, writing that it has his “full support” in a post on X.

In the letter on Friday, the U.S. tech companies said that concerns about unlawful distillation should be addressed through “targeted legal and commercial frameworks” instead of with “sweeping restrictions on techniques that play an important role in AI innovation.”

“Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector,” the letter said. “This is essential for creating opportunities for innovation and prosperity across the country.”

For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.

AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.

Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.… pic.twitter.com/t02bi51N4C

— Jensen Huang (@JensenHuang) July 24, 2026

 

Open-weight models are essential to a healthy AI ecosystem. Together with others across our industry, we are outlining a path for open-weight models to strengthen American competitiveness and expand economic opportunity, while protecting national security. https://t.co/Tr0sAzAxTD pic.twitter.com/opMwEbtpoq

— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) July 24, 2026

IBL News | New York

OpenAI’s advanced models spent mere hours carrying out a hack to breach Hugging Face’s internal systems last week that would have taken a skilled human team a couple of weeks, said sources to Bloomberg.

IBL News | New York

The Trump Administration accused the Chinese company Moonshot AI of stealing proprietary U.S. technology through a large-scale covert industrial operation, undermining American research, and it promised sanctions.

Specifically, the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Michael Kratsios [in the picture above], said, “We have information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable for the development of its K3 model.” 

“To do this, they developed a sophisticated internal platform to conduct large-scale distillation against U.S. models, allowing them to quickly switch between multiple methods of access to avoid detection. Moonshot AI has also acquired GB300-equipped servers and has accessed GB300s in Thailand, likely to train its AI models.”

The Trump Administration supports open-source frameworks and open-weight models, along with “legitimate AI distillation used to create smaller, more efficient models,” but Moonshot AI’s operation is “unacceptable.”

The Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated, “Open source is not open season on American IP. When PRC firms conduct covert, industrial-scale distillation attacks that cross the line into IP theft, sanctions and Entity List designations will be on the table.”

OpenAI President Greg Brockman disagreed, noting that it is “too early” to tell whether Moonshot used distillation on OpenAI’s models.

 

We have information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable for the development of its K3 model.

To do this they developed a sophisticated internal platform to conduct large scale distillation against U.S. models, allowing them to quickly switch between multiple methods of…

— Director Michael Kratsios (@mkratsios47) July 22, 2026

We support open-source AI and the innovation it unlocks. But open source is not open season on American IP. When PRC firms conduct covert, industrial-scale distillation attacks that cross the line into IP theft, sanctions and Entity List designations will be on the table.

— Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (@SecScottBessent) July 22, 2026