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.
US appeals court: an AI agent is a tool, not a trespasser
On 4 August 2026 the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated the injunction that had blocked Perplexity's Comet assistant from logging into Amazon accounts on a user's behalf, in Amazon.com Services LLC v. Perplexity AI (No. 26-1444). The lower court had granted that injunction on 9 March 2026. The reasoning matters more than the outcome. Amazon had argued that Perplexity gained unauthorised access to its servers under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — the 1986 anti-hacking statute. The appeals court disagreed on who was doing the accessing: the assistant is a tool, not a person for statutory purposes, and it is the user, logging in with their own credentials, who reaches Amazon's servers. The panel acknowledged there is "little to no existing caselaw directly dealing with how to ascribe responsibility for AI agents", let alone under the CFAA, and applied the rule of lenity — where a criminal statute is ambiguous, it is read narrowly. This is the first appellate answer to a question every agentic product now runs into: when software acts on your behalf inside your own account, is that you or the vendor knocking on the door. The answer here is "you". Amazon's trademark and state-law claims survive, so the dispute is not over, and a decision from one circuit does not settle the country — but automation vendors now have something to point at. wujec.ai does not yet have a profile for Perplexity or its Comet browser assistant; that gap is on our list.