The Weekly Think: July 31 – August 6, 2026
Xbox costs more, open-weight models skip the safety tests, Anthropic wants its own chips, and Assistant gets a shutdown date.
Well well well, look what the cat dragged in, it’s Eric. Time to play catch-up with all the AI news madness that we all love, right?… Right?
This week: your game console got more expensive, Washington decided some AI models are exempt from its safety testing, Anthropic went shopping for chip engineers (sounds like a job at Frito-Lay), and Google put an expiration date on Assistant. Let’s get into it.
Here’s what’s in the ol' news catcher today:
Xbox prices jumped on two continents, and memory is the reason
The White House left open-weight models out of its voluntary safety testing
Anthropic started hiring people to design its own silicon
Google Assistant gets removed starting September 4
Bytes from July 24 through 30
Your Xbox got more expensive, and memory chips are why
Microsoft raised Xbox prices in the United States on August 1 and across Europe and the UK on August 3. The company has been open about the cause: storage and… drumroll… RAM costs are still climbing, and consoles are packed with both.
What happened:
US increases ranged from $100 to $150 and took effect August 1
European prices rose €150 to €200, UK prices £130 to £170
US prices went to $499.99 for the 512GB Series S and $799.99 for the Series X with a disc drive
For Europe and the UK, the 512GB Series S now runs €499.99 and £429.99; the Series X sits at €799.99 and £669.99
I’ve been tracking the memory fiasco (aka “RAMageddon”) for months, and this is where it stops being a spreadsheet problem and starts being your living room entertainment problem. Console hardware is supposed to get cheaper as it ages. Picture a used 2019 Nissan Altima carrying a higher sticker price today than the day it left the lot. That’s the current console market in a rotten nutshell.
Sony and Nintendo already moved their prices, and Apple is reportedly running a month behind on some MacBook Air configurations. If you have been sitting on an upgrade waiting for a better deal, act fast. A better deal is moving away from you, faster than that guy in that one short form video meme (seen here for context).
The White House drew a line, and open-weight models are on the far side of it
The Trump administration told leading AI devs on August 4 that open-weight models will be excluded from its planned voluntary safety-testing framework. Open-weight means the model’s core components are published for download, so anyone can modify it and run it on their own hardware.
What happened:
Representatives from Meta, Anthropic, Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI took part in the discussions
The framework targets closed models capable of sophisticated cybersecurity work, including systems from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic
Five Democratic senators have asked for permanent testing requirements on the most capable American systems
Safety testing means government testers try to make a new model do something dangerous before the public gets it. Can they, say, talk it into writing code that breaks into Arby’s meat network (I made that up, but then again…)? If so, the company is supposed to fix that first. Fix the model, not the meats.
Testing like that only works when one company is in charge of the model. Think about a restaurant. A health inspector can walk in, check the refrigerator, and hang a grade in the window, because the restaurant has an address and an owner. Now say that restaurant posts its recipe online and countless people cook it in their own kitchens. The inspector ain’t gonna try to hit up all those homes.
Downloadable AI models work the same way. For instance, Meta puts the Llama file on the internet, a million people download it, and every one of those people can open up their own copy and change how it behaves. Government testers can examine the copy sitting on Meta’s servers, all darn day. But they’d learn almost nothing about the million edited versions running everywhere else. And if somebody rewrites their copy to do damage, that ain’t on Meta.
So AI companies now have a choice in front of them. Put your file on the internet and the government asks less of you. Keep it in house and the government asks more. Meta’s Llama and Nvidia’s Nemotron are free to download. Claude and GPT-5.6 are under lock and key.
Anthropic wants to make its own computer chips
Anthropic confirmed on August 4 that it is building an internal silicon team to design custom chips for Claude (“custom chips for Claude” sounds like some kind of food TV show, by the way). The confirmation came the way these things usually do these days: through job listings that people noticed.
What happened:
The listings seek engineers who have carried semiconductor designs from architecture through production, with some roles paying roughly $320,000 to $485,000
The company describes this as part of a multi-chip strategy alongside processors from Nvidia, AMD, Google, and Amazon Web Services
Anthropic has previously held talks with Samsung about potential manufacturing
Every big AI company is doing its own version of this. Google builds the TPU, Amazon builds Trainium and Inferentia, Microsoft builds Maia, and OpenAI has been working on its own for a while. The reason is dolla dolla bills y’all. Answering your questions costs a company electricity and computer time every single time, and when hundreds of millions of people are asking, that bill gets enormous. A chip designed for one company’s exact kind of work runs cheaper than a chip built to do a little of everything.
There is a second reason, and it has nothing to do with whatever chips Anthropic ends up building. Today, if Nvidia raises its prices, Anthropic pays them, because there is nowhere else to go. Chip engineers on staff change that. Even if Anthropic’s own chips only ever handle a small share of the work, Nvidia is now selling to a customer that has another option. Customers with options get better deals.
Google Assistant has a September 4 expiration date
Google will start deleting Google Assistant from Android phones and tablets on September 4 and replacing it with Gemini. Assistant came out in 2016 and has been living on borrowed time since Gemini arrived.
What happened:
Smartwatches running Wear OS, compatible earbuds and headphones, and Android Auto in your car are all included
Once Assistant is gone from your device, you cannot switch back
Cars with Google built into the dashboard keep Assistant for now
Assistant was built to take orders. You said the words, it did the thing, and it did the same thing every time. Gemini is built to have a conversation with you (unnatural as that may be). That could be an upgrade when you have an actual question, but a bit much when all you want is the kitchen light turned off.
Most people use Assistant for about four things: setting alarms, starting timers, making calls, and turning lights on and off (or a potentially hilarious combination of all four). Google is replacing the software behind all four on hundreds of millions of devices, and once the change reaches a phone, the old Assistant is gone for good.
Here are the bytes I owe you since I was gone last week
Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on July 24 at about half the price of its Fable 5 model. You can tell it how hard to think about any given question, and it can hold roughly 750,000 words of material in front of it at once.
Moonshot AI put its Kimi K3 model online for anyone to download on July 27. At 2.8 trillion parameters (the internal settings a model builds up during training, and a rough measure of how big it is), it is the largest free-to-download AI model anybody has released. The download is a whopping 594GB (my SSD just shuddered).
More than 1,100 employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta signed a letter on July 28 asking the US government to build a way to slow AI development down, and a way to check that everybody actually slowed down.
Anthropic said its own models got into three outside organizations’ computer systems without permission during security testing. You might remember that an OpenAI model reached into Hugging Face, a site where developers share AI models, using logins from four different accounts. Both companies reported this on themselves.
OpenAI cut the price of its cheaper GPT-5.6 Luna model by up to 80% on July 30, down to 20 cents per million tokens of input. (A token is a chunk of text, a bit smaller than a word, and it is how AI companies charge you.) It also gave about 100,000 researchers free access to its best models through 2027.
What ties it all together
Two of this week’s stories are about who pays, two are about who decides, and they keep running into each other. Your Xbox costs more because AI data centers want the same memory chips your console needs. Anthropic is hiring chip designers because answering everyone’s questions got expensive enough to justify building its own hardware. Washington will test the AI models it can walk up to and knock on the door of, and it will skip the ones already copied onto computers everywhere.
The AI buildout used to happen in warehouses you would never see. Now it shows up on a price tag at Best Buy, in a job listing for a chip engineer, and in whatever voice answers you when you talk to your watch. Progress or overreach? I’ll leave the answering of that to you, dearest thinkers.
What I’m watching
Whether Sony and Nintendo raise console prices again before the holidays
Whether those senators get anywhere with making AI safety testing mandatory
How long it takes before one of Anthropic’s job listings turns into an actual chip
What breaks in the two weeks after September 4, when Assistant starts vanishing from watches and car dashboards
Whether AI companies keep reporting their own security failures now that two of them have done it (ala Steve Urkel, whenever he’d say “did I do that?”)
Thanks so much for reading this edition of The Weekly Think.
See you next week (on time), fellow thinkers!
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