Everything that mattered in tech over the last 24 hours, in about two minutes.

🤖 AI / ML

Anthropic posts its first quarterly operating profit

Q2 2026 revenue came in at $11.5B — more than 14x year-over-year — with positive adjusted operating income for the first time, as compute cost per revenue dollar fell from 71 cents to 56 cents between Q1 and Q2. A frontier lab turning profitable this early reshapes the “AI is a cash furnace” assumption that’s been priced into the whole sector. — Forbes, CNBC

Grok 4.6 ties GPT-5.6 Sol on Artificial Analysis

SpaceXAI’s release keeps the 500K context window and $2/$6-per-million pricing while pushing DeepSWE from 54 to 65.9 and APEX-Agents from 47.1 to 57.5 — a coding/agent-focused upgrade rather than a context or price play. It ships day-one in Cursor, OpenRouter, Vercel, and Cloudflare. — VentureBeat, x.ai

Google ships Gemini 3.7 Flash

A refinement rather than a new pretraining run, 3.7 Flash jumps DeepSWE v1.1 from 49% to 65.3% and AutomationBench from 17% to 30.4%, targeting coding and agent workloads. Introductory pricing of $0.75/$3.75 per million tokens holds through year-end before roughly doubling in 2027. — MarkTechPost, DeepMind

OpenAI previews Ultrafast mode for GPT-5.6 Sol

Built on Cerebras hardware, Ultrafast runs at up to 750 output tokens per second — 14x standard throughput — at the same intelligence level, in limited API preview for select customers. Inference speed is becoming its own competitive axis, separate from model capability. — OpenAI, Cerebras

🛠 Development

GitHub Copilot’s Agent Plugins 1.0 goes GA

The open standard for packaging agent skills and MCP servers — built jointly with AWS, Anysphere, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Vercel — is now generally available across VS Code, Copilot CLI, the Copilot SDK, and the Copilot app. Write a plugin once, run it on any compatible agent client; existing plugins keep working with no forced migration. — GitHub Changelog

Codex CLI adds cross-harness skill portability

Version 0.147.0 lets /import pull in Cursor-managed skills directly, adds a portable Agent Plugins catalog search, persistent conversation sections, and an --approve-for-me flag for auto-reviewed approvals. Skill portability across coding agents lowers the switching cost that used to lock teams into one harness. — GitHub Release, TGWise

VS Code 1.133 improves Claude session handling

The release lets developers switch providers mid-session without reconfiguring the agent host and use Claude with an existing API key when GitHub sign-in isn’t available, alongside live HTML preview refresh. — VS Code

🏢 Big Tech & Startups

Stripe finalizes its $7B+ OpenRouter acquisition

The deal values the AI model gateway — 8M users, 400+ models — at more than 5x the $1.3B valuation OpenRouter carried after its Series B in May. A payments company buying the routing layer is a bet that metering AI traffic is the same business as metering payments. — TechCrunch, Bloomberg

Databricks raises $5B at a $190B valuation

The round, led by Coatue with Blackstone, MGX, and T. Rowe Price among the backers, comes six months after a round that valued the company at $134B. Databricks says it’s now crossed $7B in revenue run-rate, up more than 80% year-over-year, with proceeds earmarked for AI-agent tooling. — Bloomberg, CNBC

CodeRabbit raises $143M Series C at $1.5B valuation

Revenue is up more than 5x year-over-year, with the AI code-review platform now running 2M+ reviews a week for 17,000+ customers including Nvidia, BMW, and Adyen. The company is also committing $10M+ to keep AI code review free for open-source maintainers over the next year. — BusinessWire

🔐 Security & Cloud

Clop’s PTC Windchill campaign widens to Shell, GE, and Philips

Clop is claiming 43 victims from exploiting CVE-2026-12569, a CVSS 9.8 deserialization flaw in PTC Windchill and FlexPLM that affiliates were reportedly abusing as a zero-day weeks before PTC shipped a patch in June. Philips says it has contained its incident; Shell and GE are still investigating claims that blueprints, facility photos, and project plans were stolen. — BleepingComputer, Tech Times

China-nexus actor exploiting VMware vCenter, deploying ransomware

A suspected China-based group is chaining CVE-2026-59310 (directory traversal, CVSS 9.8) and CVE-2026-59309 (auth bypass) in vCenter Server to plant backdoors and, in at least one case, Babuk-derived ransomware. More than 360 IPs across 47 countries have been hit since early August. — The Hacker News

Patched macOS Screen Sharing flaw exploited for cryptomining

CVE-2026-65400 lets attackers authenticate to macOS Screen Sharing without valid credentials; Dutch NCSC confirmed root access and Monero miners planted on internet-exposed Macs with port 5900 open. Apple patched it August 6 — exploitation was already underway days later. — Help Net Security, The Hacker News

France’s tax authority breach hits 678,000 people

Attackers used a compromised employee login and a third-party account to access DGFiP systems between June and July, taking names, addresses, taxable income, and withholding rates. A stolen-credential breach at a national tax agency is a reminder that MFA gaps on legacy internal accounts remain a top-tier risk even at well-resourced institutions. — Help Net Security, BleepingComputer

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