AI News for March 18, 2026 — 7min.ai

[NEWS] Microsoft merges Copilot teams, shifts Suleyman to building frontier models and superintelligence: Microsoft is merging its consumer and commercial Copilot teams under new EVP Jacob Andreou, who will report directly to CEO Satya Nadella.
[NEWS] OpenAI releases GPT-5.4 mini and nano, optimized for coding and subagents but up to 4x pricier: OpenAI released GPT-5.4 mini and nano, compact models built for coding assistants, subagents, and computer control.
[NEWS] Mistral AI launches Forge, an enterprise platform for training custom AI models on proprietary data: Mistral launched Forge, an enterprise model training platform that goes well beyond fine-tuning.
[NEWS] OpenAI ditches 'side quests' strategy to focus on coding tools and enterprise customers: OpenAI CEO of Applications Fidji Simo told employees the company will narrow its focus to coding tools and enterprise customers.
[NEWS] Pentagon fires back at Anthropic, begins building LLM replacements for Claude: The DOD filed a brief arguing Anthropic poses a "substantial risk" to national security, urging a judge to reject Anthropic's bid to reverse its supply chain risk designation.
[RESEARCH] Mamba 3 open-source release claims nearly 4% improvement over Transformers with inference-first design: Albert Gu (Carnegie Mellon) and Tri Dao (Princeton) released Mamba-3 under Apache 2.0, the latest version of their alternative to the Transformer architecture.
[RESEARCH] DeepMind publishes cognitive taxonomy for measuring progress toward AGI: Google DeepMind released a paper identifying 10 cognitive abilities hypothesized as essential for general intelligence: perception, generation, attention, learning, memory, reasoning, metacognition, social cognition, navigation, and tool use.
[NEWS] Nvidia launches Nemotron Coalition with Mistral, Perplexity, and Cursor to build open frontier AI models: Nvidia launched the Nemotron Coalition at GTC 2026, partnering with Mistral AI, Perplexity, and Cursor to co-develop open frontier AI base models.
[NEWS] Nvidia restarts H200 production for China after flood of orders and US export licenses: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company has been licensed for "many customers in China" and is restarting H200 manufacturing.
[NEWS] 149 retired judges file brief supporting Anthropic against Pentagon blacklist: A group of 149 retired federal and state judges filed a brief calling the Pentagon's supply chain risk designation of Anthropic "unlawful." The judges wrote the DoD "misinterpreted the statute and ignored the necessary procedures." The judges emphasized Anthropic isn't trying to force a contract but asking "only that it not be punished on its way out the door." The brief joins Microsoft and other tech companies in challenging the Pentagon's authority to use supply chain risk labels as a punitive tool against companies that set contractual limits.

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