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.
From 2 August a chatbot in the EU must say it is not a person — and the Commission can now fine
The European Commission announced on 31 July 2026 that from 2 August its AI Office, together with national authorities, begins enforcing the AI Act's transparency rules. The date matters more than the rules themselves: the obligations have been on the books since the regulation entered into force, but until now nobody was collecting on them. What applies from 2 August comes from Article 50 of the regulation. Chatbots, agents and avatars must make clear that the user is dealing with a machine and not a person. Deepfakes and other generated or manipulated content must be visibly labelled and additionally carry a machine-readable marker, so that detection does not depend on a human noticing. The same article covers emotion recognition, biometric categorisation and AI-generated text published on matters of public interest without human review. The Commission has issued guidelines, a code of practice and a set of harmonised icons for labelling AI content, and published a first list of more than 180 organisations that have signed the code of practice on transparency of AI-generated content. The penalties are the part that changes behaviour. Breaches can cost up to 15 million euro or 3 percent of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher; for EU institutions the ceiling is 750,000 euro, and the regulation requires proportionality for small businesses and small mid-caps. Supervision falls to national market surveillance authorities, the AI Office and the European Data Protection Supervisor. One more date is worth writing down now. Under Article 111(3) of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, providers of general-purpose AI models placed on the market before 2 August 2025 have until 2 August 2027 to bring them into compliance — a full extra year for the generation of models that was already shipping when the rules landed. Several of the models in this catalogue fall into that window.