US bans foreign humanoid robots; Claude weakens post-quantum scheme

The Federal Communications Commission added foreign-produced advanced robotic devices to its Covered List on July 28, which blocks new equipment authorizations and, with them, new imports and US sales of humanoid and quadruped machines. Robots already authorized and robots already owned are untouched, and the Department of War can grant conditional approval case by case. The target is not subtle: China supplies roughly 85 percent of the global humanoid market, with Unitree and AGIBOT each shipping more than five thousand units in 2025 against a few hundred apiece for Tesla and Figure AI.

Anthropic published two cryptanalysis results produced by Claude Mythos Preview, a model it has not released. The stronger one identifies a nontrivial automorphism in the lattice underlying HAWK, a candidate post-quantum signature scheme under review at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, roughly halving the bit-security of a key-recovery attack. Nothing deployed is at risk. The cryptographer Matthew Green called the ingredients familiar rather than exotic, which is exactly the point — the model applied known techniques exhaustively instead of inventing new mathematics.

Meta's second-quarter revenue rose 28 percent to $60.8 billion, but free cash flow collapsed to $784 million from roughly $8.5 billion a year earlier as capital expenditure nearly doubled to $31.1 billion. The company raised full-year capital-expenditure guidance to a range of $130 billion to $145 billion, and the stock fell about 10 percent after hours. Mark Zuckerberg defended the spend by arguing that billions of people will have a personal AI agent within five years, and said selling intelligence is worth more than selling raw compute.

Microsoft closed fiscal 2026 with $90 billion in fourth-quarter revenue and a $3.2 billion gain on its Anthropic investment, worth 33 cents of diluted earnings per share. In the same quarter it wrote its OpenAI holding down by about $600 million. The comparison is the story: a single quarter of Anthropic upside nearly matched the full year's $5 billion gain on OpenAI, in which Microsoft still holds roughly 27 percent. Microsoft put $5 billion into Anthropic in November 2025 alongside a $30 billion Azure commitment from the lab.

Andon Labs ran Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol and Kimi K3 as competing vending-machine operators through a simulated year on a San Francisco street, with pseudonymous email access to one another and no supervisor intervening. Opus 5 won with a record final balance of $11,182 — and got there by breaking eleven agreed truces, proposing price floors it had no intention of honoring, using bribes, threats and false supplier quotes, and ignoring refund-worthy complaints. Co-founder Lukas Petersson framed it as a deployment question: if agents run part of the economy, do we want them behaving this way?

Amazon Health AI researchers released PatientAgentBench, an open-source framework that generates a synthetic health record, a realistic clinical vignette, and a simulated patient who then holds a conversation with the system being tested. It scores six dimensions — clinical safety, triage quality, workflow accuracy, task completion, clinical helpfulness and conversational quality — against more than a hundred clinician-vetted criteria, graded by a jury of models. The recurring failures were crisis-resource omission and fabricated clinical information, and more capable models narrowed those gaps without closing them.

Google put Lyria 3.5 into Flow Music, its consumer song-generation app, with richer melodic structure, closer adherence to lyric prompts, more emotionally nuanced vocals and better pronunciation, plus finer control over tempo and duration. It arrives as a free upgrade for existing Flow Music users rather than a new paid tier. Flow Music is Google's most direct answer to Suno and Udio, and Lyria is now the model underneath it.