AI News for August 18, 2026 — 7min.ai

[NEWS] OpenAI signs 20-year Ohio lease with Nvidia guaranteeing up to $105B: OpenAI signed a 20-year lease for the PORTS-Pike campus in southern Ohio, around 8 gigawatts of IT capacity and the largest data center project announced to date.
[NEWS] Anthropic's run rate jumps to $65B, up from $47B in May: Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate topped $65 billion at the end of July, up from $47 billion in May and just $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to a regular investor update.
[NEWS] Qwen3.8-27B benchmarks beat Claude Opus 4.6 Max on coding tasks: Alibaba published benchmark results for Qwen3.8-27B, the dense multimodal model it open-sourced under Apache 2.0 earlier in the week: 61.7 on SWE-bench Pro, 90.3 on LiveCodeBench v6, 70.7 on its CoWorkBench office-work benchmark and 84.3 on OSWorld-Verified.
[NEWS] AirTag tracking names Amazon as the rare-book destroyer booksellers suspected: A bookseller planted an AirTag in a rare book from a bulk order and 404 Media tracked it to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, identifying the specific company behind a practice booksellers had only suspected.
[TOOLS] Cursor launches Origin code hosting hours before a 6-hour GitHub outage: Cursor began rolling out Origin, its own code hosting platform, to paid users on Monday morning.
[NEWS] Groq raises $350M at $3.5B, half its pre-Nvidia-deal valuation: Groq raised $350 million led by Disruptive, with Nvidia participating, at a $3.5 billion valuation.
[NEWS] Wispr raises $280M at $2B valuation, six months after its last round: Wispr closed a $280 million Series B led by Menlo Ventures at a $2 billion valuation, bringing total funding to $361 million.
[NEWS] Waymo veterans put driverless excavators on three commercial sites: Bedrock Robotics says excavators running its autonomous AI system are now working without human operators on three commercial construction sites in Texas and Nevada, including a water treatment facility.
[OPINION] Gruber calls Claude's watermarking a 'perversion of writing': Daring Fireball's John Gruber attacked Anthropic's plan to watermark Claude's text output, arguing the model should pick words because they are best for the user, not because they help make output detectable.
[NEWS] DOJ opens antitrust probe into Andreessen Horowitz board seats: The Justice Department is investigating whether Andreessen Horowitz partners are improperly serving on the boards of competing AI companies, an antitrust question centered on interlocking directorates.

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