News
What's happening in robotics and AI — curated by the wujec.ai editors.
White House puts a voluntary frontier-model testing framework on the table
In the first days of August 2026 the White House gathered the largest American AI developers — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta — to walk them through a finished framework for government safety testing of frontier models. The document itself has not been published. What is known about the mechanism comes from reporting rather than from an official text. Participation is opt-in: a developer may hand a model over to the government for evaluation for up to 30 days before public release, and the framework may also stipulate which trusted partners get early access. It is explicitly not a licensing regime — the administration has ruled out turning it into mandatory preclearance, and there is no enforcement mechanism behind it. The framework grew out of a June 2026 executive order on AI and cybersecurity, which told the administration's cyber team to build tests of whether American frontier models can facilitate cyberattacks. Who will actually run the evaluations is still unsettled: some reporting points to the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) at the Commerce Department, other accounts to the Office of the National Cyber Director, with the NSA also named as a candidate. For the catalogue this matters in a practical way. If the largest laboratories join in, a 30-day pre-release evaluation window becomes part of the release calendar for models such as the Claude, GPT and Gemini families — a step between "model finished" and "model available" that until now did not exist in the United States.
Jeff Dean leaves Google after 27 years to automate the scientific method
Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist and the engineer behind much of the infrastructure the modern web runs on, is leaving the company after almost 27 years. The departure was announced on 5 August 2026 alongside a wider reshuffle of Google's AI leadership, in which Koray Kavukcuoglu was promoted to senior vice-president leading Google DeepMind. Dean is not leaving alone. He co-founds Discovery Loop with Sanjay Ghemawat, the Google Senior Fellow who built much of that infrastructure with him; Oriol Vinyals, a vice-president of research at Google DeepMind and technical lead on Gemini; and Quoc Le, a co-founder of Google Brain. It is difficult to name four departures that would cut deeper into one company's research bench. Discovery Loop is set up as an independent public benefit corporation and aims to use AI to automate scientific and engineering research. Its declared starting point is deliberately recursive: autonomous experiment loops whose first subject is the machine-learning algorithms the company itself depends on — a system that runs experiments to improve the thing running the experiments. Google's response is unusual for a departure of this size. Rather than treating it as a loss, the company is a founding investor, will act as the startup's cloud partner, is supplying compute for its first year and plans to collaborate on a shared research framework for ML systems and infrastructure.
Google Assistant gets a shutdown date: 4 September, and Gemini takes the microphone
Google has told users by email that Google Assistant will begin shutting down on Android and Wear OS on 4 September 2026, with Gemini taking over assistant duties. The rollout will take a few weeks to reach every device, and once it lands on a given phone there is no way to switch back. The cut covers smartphones, tablets, Wear OS watches, headphones and cars running Android Auto. Assistant survives for now in vehicles with Google built-in, on Google Home speakers and on Google TV devices, which Google says will move to Gemini in later stages. The handover was originally planned for 2025 and slipped by a year. The reason was capability rather than schedule: Gemini was comfortably ahead on knowledge questions, summarisation and open conversation, but behind on the unglamorous work an assistant actually does most often — setting a timer, toggling a light, controlling the device in front of you. The extra year was spent closing that gap. It is a large bet expressed as a maintenance notice. Assistant shipped in 2016 and has run on well over a billion devices; replacing it with a generative model everywhere at once means every routine voice command now goes through an LLM. Google's current workhorse model, Gemini 3.6 Flash, has its own profile in the wujec.ai catalogue.
Gemini 3.6 Flash →Google releases Gemini 3.6 Flash across Search, Android and Workspace
Gemini 3.6 Flash, released July 21, 2026, continues Google's strategy of fast, production-friendly frontier models woven into its products — Search AI Mode, Android assistants and Workspace. It balances low latency with strong multimodal reasoning, and powers robotics work through the Gemini Robotics line.
Gemini 3.6 Flash →