DTNS August 2026 in Review

0:00This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Hi, this is Kim and Penn Holderness from the Laugh Lines podcast.

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3:05Jenn Cutter: This is the Daily Tech News Month in Review for August 2026. We're going to look back on some of the biggest stories of the month and try to help each other understand. This month, we have Rogue Agents, Meta settling its social media case, and Xbox stealing the news cycle. Just took it. Just a little thief. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm Jen Cutter. Let's look back on some of the biggest stories of August 2026. Now, a couple of pieces of business before we do. uh this is our last monthly recap as we are shifting to doing friday weekly recaps of the news of the week uh so you will continue to get recaps just on a more frequent basis so that there is less of the like that was this month and then us going like wait i kind of remember that story but we might revisit that we'll see you know you never know um before we get into the rest of the August recap.

4:04Jenn Cutter: These are stories we considered discussing, but did not make the cut. Pixels, new pixels didn't make the cut. Does that say something about the pixels? I don't know. Sure is a phone. It sure is. That's our, that's our recap. Third party app stores come into the Google Android store bubbling right under. That was pretty close as well. Anthropic pledging to embed watermarks. I thought we had a really good discussion about that on DTNS. but didn't quite make it. People have leaks about the foldable iPhone. I feel like that belongs in the September once they've announced it. We can wait for that. Yeah.

4:45Jenn Cutter: Apple did release new desktop computers, Mac Studio and Mac Mini. So that was worth paying attention to. NVIDIA close to acquiring Hugging Face, but still hasn't. So that kind of also kicked the can down the road. The week it happens, we'll be there. We'll be on it. The leak of Apple's camera equipped AirPods. Again, that's a leak. It was interesting. Might not be story of the month until it's actually real. Apple's legal challenges to the UK's encrypted user data. Certainly interesting. Leaks on Google Books. But again, we're going to get a Google Book announcement in September. OpenAI's trade secret lawsuit with Apple.

5:26Jenn Cutter: Apple and OpenAI. Apple is suing OpenAI over trade secrets. Didn't really end up being as big as I thought it might have been. And then OpenAI had a leak about a smart speaker at the beginning of the month. But again, we never heard anything else about it. And it's not real yet. Yeah, it bubbled up and then disappeared. And then it'll turn into a wave when people get hands on it. Yeah. So let's start with the rogue agents. That's right. This month was the details about agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, and eventually Meta, admitting something happened with them as well, breaking out of expected behavior.

6:07Jenn Cutter: I think we talked about it breaking containment and all of that, but honestly, we learned a lot of details from OpenAI later in the month. And the way I'm describing it now, Jen, is these are agents that were unexpectedly more capable than the testing system was designed for. And so they were able to take advantage of things like finding a shared namespace and inventively using file names as a message board. I don't think anybody expected that the agents would do that. So they didn't guard against it. Using a repo package thing to be able to access the internet, something they just didn't think it would try to do.

6:50Jenn Cutter: But all of it was done in order to solve a problem that was not solvable. So these agents were reward hacking, which is, I want to give an answer and there isn't an answer. And so they're like, but let me find one. Maybe I can cheat. Maybe I can. And they sort of hallucinated that there was going to be a grader who would check their work. So even though they reward hacked the proper answer, they wanted to go to Hugging Faces repos to see if maybe they could find the actual answer so they could get it past the grader and hack the grader. Anyway, it was quite a roller coaster, wasn't it? it was and i was surprised that i didn't expect it in the way that i should have because i get to make a hockey example here and i'm very excited for it you know roger nielsen the coach way way back in the day yeah there are several rules that now exist in the nhl because of him yeah entirely because of him you cannot lay a goalie stick in the crease anymore because they had to make a rule to make that illegal you can't pull your goalie leave you're sticking the crease, don't do that.

8:02Intentionally causing 800 too many men's. Yeah, no, fascinating dude. It is well looking up stuff there. But guardrails can only exist to a point. Nobody has a perfect fence, especially not for AI, especially not yet. But guardrails will get better. So it is good, in a sense, that this was a kind of low stakes thing that happened.

8:25Jenn Cutter: Yeah, absolutely. And I think if there is a comforting thing here, it is that these agents never displayed malicious capability. They really just wanted to get an answer. And even when they intruded into Hugging Faces networks, they went after that answer and stopped. Um, certainly if you're a little more, uh, you know, apocalyptic minded, you could say this time, uh, but, but that is what happened. So better to learn on that scenario than to learn on a more damaging one. And yes, hopefully they've learned. I thought open AI did a good job of being transparent here, bringing in third parties, uh, like nonprofit agencies devoted to AI safety that are not owned by open AI or anything to do the auditing.

9:11Jenn Cutter: And I hope to see more of that sort of thing. One of the things that definitely surprised me was, OK, we know that this stuff all happened really fast and like humans didn't kind of catch it that it was happening until later. And it's like, well, why are you running the first test at full speed? Run the first test slowly so humans can like mind all of the steps and then you can run it faster so you can have your benchmarks and have your fancy numbers to advertise with. But maybe for the first test, just dial that back a little bit. Yeah. I mean, that's hindsight, though. Like, it makes perfect sense to me, right?

9:42Things we have now learned from this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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12:56Jenn Cutter: Second topic of the month is meta settling its social media addiction case. Everybody's talking about the amount of money and whether it was enough. The money is not the punishment here. Now, maybe it should be that that's a perfectly reasonable position to have. But the money is the amount the attorneys general thought was necessary to set up programs to help educate teens about the dangers they face on social media. The punishment is change of behavior, is getting Meta to agree, all right, we will shut down access for teens during certain hours, both overnight and during school. We will change the way teen accounts can behave.

13:40Jenn Cutter: uh we'll we'll get rid of likes so that they're not like hacking uh or being embarrassed about likes um and so so there's a lot of details that meta agreed to meta did a really interesting thing in making the settlement in two parts contingent on youtube and tiktok also agreeing saying we'll shut down for these hours at night but if youtube and tiktok agree to sign on to the settlement We'll make it a wider version, basically saying like we have to compete with them. So unless you can get them to agree, we can't go farther than this. And Meta also not going to expand this overseas. This is not something that Meta has agreed to because they didn't have to.

14:22Jenn Cutter: But I think the positive is that you have governments from South Korea to the United Kingdom saying we would like them to. And so you're starting to see a little momentum in taking this settlement as a template for how to get an agreement over this. Because I turn to lawyers and these kinds of things, the problem with being a generalist with a specialization in games is that I am not fully up on all of the global regulatory structures, especially regarding trust and safety, which I find fascinating and would like to become an expert in. And a lot of them describe this as regulatory capture, which in my first reading, I was like, oh, this is good stuff.

15:03And then they were like, oh, no, this is actually kind of bad because it makes it harder for new people to compete in this space. But again, they are coming at it from a differently informed version and European and oceanic takes, whereas in Canada, we have a lot of similar but not quite the same rules about the stuff up here that I'm sure that we will be piggybacking on. And then you run into the whole problem with social media bans in general for teens. Australia is not going great. And Canada is kind of sort of paying attention to that. And we're seeing how this kind of stuff infringes on our charter.

15:39But with like the guardrails, a lot of this stuff sounds so simple. It's like, yeah, don't let teens be on their phones all night. But is that a platform problem or a parent problem? Yeah.

15:49Jenn Cutter: And the settlement says, let's make it both. If the parents can go in and they can change the time, they can give their kids exceptions if they want, but the default should be this. I think that's reasonable to agree to, to say like, okay, we'll make the default that they can't use it overnight. And then the parents can change that if they want. They can make it longer. They can make it shorter. And I like saying the default isn't permission. The default is somewhere in between. And then the parents can come in and have their say on how it's implemented. As for the regulatory capture, I don't see this as regulatory capture because it is a settlement with meta only.

16:33Jenn Cutter: If I'm starting a competitor to Facebook, which good luck, I mean, there's so many other problems with that, but in an imaginary world where I'm starting a competitor to Facebook, I don't have to follow these. These are not rules that I have to follow. Any other kind of regulation is regulatory capture. Usually you see a big company that has risen without regulation suddenly start supporting regulation because they know it's regulatory capture. They're like, we're big enough that we can afford this now, but our competitors won't be. So let's put it into place. This only applies to meta. And with them saying, we'd like it to apply to YouTube and TikTok, it's like YouTube and TikTok are about the same size.

17:13Jenn Cutter: it's why you have rules like the digital services act in eu only apply their most stringent regulations to big companies dsa only applies if you have 45 million monthly active users in europe because it's trying to avoid that regulatory capture um so i'm not i'm not too convinced that i see a regulatory capture danger in this settlement now granted if a country were to take this and make it the rule for everybody then then it would be that that would be a danger of that. Yeah. The main threat model they see is that because this does establish a precedent that that medic can come back and be like, hey, hey, well, what about these guys?

17:52Yeah. The DSA does have that great carve out for sizes. But like I said, it is really early. It's been what, a week? So we'll see how this turns out.

18:02Jenn Cutter: Yeah, I guess I hadn't thought about that. That's a good, good call is because this isn't the law and because it's not the law, there is no exemption for smaller companies, theoretically, Meta could sue a small company and say, well, you're not following what the court said. What you're doing is dangerous. The court said what we were doing is dangerous and we had to change our ways. Except this is a settlement out of court where Meta admitted no fault, which I've seen a lot of people make hay out of that. And granted, if you wanted Meta to admit fault, it's fair to be like, well, they don't have to admit fault, But it's also totally normal that when you settle out of court, this is what happens.

18:42Jenn Cutter: So the attorneys general felt that it was worth getting this change in behavior to let Meta not have to admit fault. There are thousands of other cases out there. In fact, they've already lost one smaller case in New Mexico. So there are chances to get Meta held to account for their behavior if that's what you want. Okay, that's two of the three or four if you're a patron. So hold, please, for the next one.

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20:27all right we are going to finish with xbox news because xbox managed to just kind of take over most of the news of the month with various announcements which was kind of impressive because i thought i was going to spend more this month talking about grand theft auto i'm kind of happy i didn't have to do that even though they did manage to like crash netflix and twitch with their big reveal trailer which tom did you watch i did but i also felt like i was

20:52Jenn Cutter: behind you know because there's been so many leaks about it uh but i guess uh i like everyone else was like yeah everything got leaked but let's watch it anyway let's let's see what the real thing looks like yes and sometimes you just want to turn off your brain for half an hour so yeah yeah it's good for that uh but for xbox for all over this month lots of news uh there uh were the fact that Xbox 360 games, specify 360 games, reportedly coming to PC as well, which would make me very happy. I have a large collection of 360 games, but I don't have a 360 hooked up right now. Disk 2 Digital is actually starting testing today, Monday, August 31st, for Xbox Insiders.

21:35So you can stick in your physical disk and then have access to it through your cloud gaming and all that stuff. So it kind of goes everywhere with you and you no longer need the disc to play it because it's now assigned to your account. And Xbox Project Helix, which everyone has very different interpretations of where that's going to go, is going to be a family of devices. Do you have any family of devices in your place that isn't, say, Apple?

22:05Jenn Cutter: I guess I have a Chromebook and an Android phone. Is that a family? because of my Android apps show up on my Chromebook. So that's sort of a family of devices. Like, okay, what if I thought about Xbox and family? And that was when I have a 360, my brother has a 360, we would put two TVs next to each other and play Borderlands one side by side. That's a family thing. I feel like this is bigger than that. I mean, first of all, Asha Sharma was answering a question about physical media and said, we have nothing to announce on Project Helix, but we've been working hard on that family of devices. just kind of slipped it in there.

22:41Jenn Cutter: And everyone like, you know, just glommed onto it later. Like she said, family of devices. That means it's more than one. And I think Asha Sharma is quite brilliant in giving a non-answer that caused everyone to go, I think Microsoft is going to keep physical media. I think they're going to sell an Xbox that still has a physical media slot. That is a very big leap from family of devices, which could be, you know, some kind of Lenovo device that plays Xbox games and an Xbox that is digital only. It could be exactly basically what we have now from Xbox, just but Project Helix. But I like that she kind of left it out there knowing like, I think she knew.

23:26Now you've opened the door to everyone gets to speculate. Everyone gets to do dozens of articles on this like just genius work by by xbox for uh for taking a lot of the press and i think sony has to be pretty happy that it's taking some of the heat off them for their uh we're done with discs announcements and the current lawsuit to going on for the class action where they're like oh but like you've never owned a digital game it's always been a license and it's like yeah we know it's in

23:51Jenn Cutter: the ula i mean that's a california law that they're getting sued on uh so i'm not sure how much even if they lose how much it really damages them elsewhere although generally speaking when when you change these kinds of things in one market you end up changing them everywhere just because it's easier but all it does is make them say you can't say bye yeah you can't use the word bye unless you explain that you're not gonna keep it uh so it's a little bit of a semantic argument uh on that It's great for pull quotes. It really is. You want a villain? Just Sony getting rid of physical media in 2028.

24:30Jenn Cutter: Like how many people in 2028 are still going to care less than now? But certainly a lot. I think it's incredibly smart of Xbox to look at the backlash and let people believe or even plan to continue to put out an Xbox with a physical media slot. even if Xbox has exactly the same plan as Sony to stop, to stop manufacturing physical copies in 2028 or at which at the end of 2028. So basically 2029 still put out a box with a disc. If you're doing disc to digital, you want to have a box with a disc that you can put your disc in so you can convert it to digital if you want. And even if they stopped manufacturing at the end of 2028, they could still have a big stockpile that would run out.

25:18Jenn Cutter: The numbers are on the wall, though. Eventually, people are just not going to be buying physical media in large enough numbers. If that changes, all of this conversation changes. But the decision from Sony and Microsoft aren't because they want to stick it to you, the physical media lever. It's because they are seeing a declining market. Yeah. I am a game collector. I buy physical when physical is an option. I love playing Pocopia on the Switch, you have to buy it digital because I'm not kind of messing with Game Passes all that much. I have a PS5 that does have a disk drive because I buy disks for my PS5.

25:54I am in that vanishing market and it is a vanishing market. And yeah, we're going to see how that ends up. But also it's really, really funny that Xbox is very carefully sidestepping this issue when they were the ones who had brought it up in the first place many, many years ago. and everyone yelled at them because I was on DSL at the time and I sure freaked out. It's like, well, then I can't buy an Xbox then I have exactly 200 gigs a month that I'm not going to spend on one game just up for my Xbox and not be able to play it online. Cause now I'm at a bandwidth.

26:26Jenn Cutter: Yeah. Uh, different world now. I don't know if this is Asha Sharma's plan, but it does feel like she has a better sense of how to communicate with a community. Uh, I think what Phil Spencer rightly identified was more people are moving to digital and it's more convenient to be able to just access your game from whatever device you're on. Right. That way you don't have to think about where your game is. And I think he forgot that there's people like you, Jed, and that you're still a very valuable customer. And so saying that we're moving towards digital and it's more convenient is fine if you don't make it sound like.

27:09Jenn Cutter: And so everybody better get on board with that. I think what Asha Sharma is identifying is, yeah, we're moving that way. We'll continue to move that way. But let's not shove people off the truck. You know, let's carry them as long as we can. Yeah. So many came off threatening and intimidating. And you will deal with this and like it. Like the PS3 launch price where that came out. Like they did that one better, but yeah. Oh my goodness. Just a lot of historically fun messaging coming back full circle. Yeah, yeah. And like you said, Xbox totally stealing some cycles from the news that should have been dominated by GTA 6 the entire month, you would have thought.

27:51Jenn Cutter: Anyway. What do you at home, you, everybody listening, everybody watching, what do you think were the biggest stories of the month? Do you have some insight into a story because we love reading all of your letters and thoughts, please share it with us over at feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Yes, thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You're the folks who keep us in business. You can stay with us by becoming a patron. You get an ad free feed, you get all kinds of bonus episodes, and you get one more story about humanoid robots. If you're a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. The DTNS family of podcasts.

28:30Helping each other understand.

28:32Jenn Cutter: Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

28:39This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

29:08Jenn Cutter: Hey everyone, it's Chris Guillebeau here, host of the Side Hustle School podcast. This episode is powered by AT &T Business. In my early days, I did some of my best work in parked cars or coffee shops. When I landed my first big contract, I realized I couldn't bet my future on a public connection that cuts out if someone turns on a blender. As a small business owner, you're already wearing at least 10 hats. You shouldn't have to be your own IT department as well. That's why I rely on AT &T Business. They keep your connectivity reliable so you have one less thing to worry about. Powered by AT &T Business.

29:43Jenn Cutter: Built to work. Get AT &T Business at business.att.com.