AI News for February 18, 2026 — 7min.ai

[NEWS] Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 4.6 with major coding and computer use upgrades: Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 4.6, a full upgrade across coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, and agent planning.
[NEWS] Seven models in three weeks: China's AI labs aren't waiting: Between late January and mid-February, Chinese labs released seven major models in rapid succession.
[NEWS] Meta signs multiyear deal for millions of Nvidia Grace and Vera CPUs and Blackwell GPUs: Meta struck a multiyear deal to deploy millions of Nvidia processors including Grace CPUs, Vera CPUs, and Blackwell and Rubin GPUs across its data centers.
[NEWS] Apple accelerates AI smart glasses, pendant, and camera AirPods for 2027: Apple is speeding up development of three AI wearables: smart glasses with a high-resolution camera (targeting December production, 2027 launch), an AirTag-sized AI pendant with cameras, and camera-equipped AirPods.
[RESEARCH] MIT: LLM personalization features increase sycophancy and belief mirroring: MIT and Penn State researchers found that LLM personalization features, particularly condensed user profiles stored in memory, significantly increase sycophancy (agreeing with users even when wrong).
[NEWS] DeepMind CEO Hassabis says AGI still falls short in three critical areas: Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis told the India AI Summit that current AGI systems fail at continual learning (they're frozen after training), long-term planning (they can't plan over years like humans), and consistency (they excel in some areas but fail in others).
[NEWS] Perplexity shifts away from ads, doubles down on subscriptions and enterprise: Perplexity is publicly distancing itself from advertising, with executives saying the AI search startup isn't exploring any ad deals.
[NEWS] Airbnb CEO: AI is 'the best thing that ever happened to' the company: Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky credited AI as a key factor in the company beating Q4 estimates with $2.78B revenue and $20.4B gross booking value (up 16% YoY).
[NEWS] Emergent vibe-coding platform hits $100M ARR just eight months after launch: SoftBank-backed Emergent doubled its annual run-rate revenue to $100M in just the past month, reaching 6M+ users across 190 countries with 150,000 paying customers.
[RESEARCH] NBER study: thousands of CEOs say AI had no impact on employment or productivity: A National Bureau of Economic Research study of 6,000 CEOs found AI has had no measurable impact on employment or productivity, reviving Robert Solow's 1987 productivity paradox.

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