A County Got Rich From Data Centers; OpenAI pausing over safety concerns; financial analyst Ross Hendricks says, “Translation: We need to immediately stop torching cash.
News from Axios
Data center investors are overlooking the political risks
Aug. 21, 2026 by Dan Primack
There is a growing disconnect between the business and politics of data centers. But Investors may be whistling past the server racks.
The business is booming. Public and private equities are both up and to the right — not only for actual project operators, but also for related energy and vendor plays. But the politics have turned sharply negative, often on a bipartisan basis.
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News from Futurism
Chinese Startup Shows Off Robot Horse You Can Actually Ride: “We had the horseless carriage, now we have the horseless horse.”
Aug. 20, 2026 by Victor Tangermann
Chinese startup DaxAI has shown off a “Cyber Horse” quadrupedal robot that visitors of the recent 2026 World Robot Conference in Beijing, China, could actually ride.
Video footage circulating on social media and photography by Reuters show visitors mounting the unusual contraption, a bizarre mash-up of a motorcycle and an oversized robot dog, and taking it for a spin. The robot’s movements are still quite jerky, but it clearly has little trouble navigating the showroom floor with an adult straddling its saddle
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News from Lawfare Media
An AI Playground for the Courts: Judges face an unsatisfactory menu of AI options. A secure, judiciary-controlled sandbox for testing frontier models is the better path.
Aug. 20, 2026 by Daniel E. Ho, Olivia H. Martin
On July 7, 2025, appellate lawyer Adam Unikowsky published a provocative claim on Substack: “a robot lawyer would be an above-average Supreme Court advocate.” He had given Claude Opus 4 the briefs and key precedents from Williams v. Reed, a case he had recently argued before the Court, and asked the model to answer the justices’ actual questions…. Claude sometimes missed what a question was getting at. Still, the result was striking: Many of Claude’s answers sounded plausible… [Supreme Court] Justice Elena Kagan later said Claude had done an “exceptional job” “It just seems ridiculous that Claude could do an argument better … than I could. I kind of think I’m better than Claude.”
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News from Brad DeLong
Here in Academia, “AI” Has Arrived for Software Coding, for Summarization & Search, for Writing Prose, & for Assessment
Aug 20, 2026 by Brad DeLong
This is Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not…
Derek Thompson: ‘Unless testing shifts toward in-person and/or blue books soon, AI is going to turn a whole lot of education into the informational equivalent of “wow I [paid a guy, who] squatted 200 lbs at the gym yesterday, new personal record!”…
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News from Heatmap
Exclusive: 75% of Americans Now Oppose Local Data Center Development: The U.S. public’s support for AI data centers has continued to collapse since the spring, a new Heatmap Pro poll shows.
Aug. 19, 2026 by Robinson Meyer
The American public has soured even further on local data center development since the spring, new polling shows. Three-quarters of Americans now say that they would oppose a new data center being built near where they live, according to a new Heatmap Pro poll conducted by Embold Research, and more than six in 10 Americans say they would strongly oppose such a proposal.
That’s by far the most negative response since Heatmap Pro started polling Americans about their receptivity to data centers roughly a year ago.
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News from Axios
OpenAI blinks first in AI safety standoff
Aug. 19, 2026 by Madison Mills,, Ina Fried
OpenAI said Tuesday it is pausing some model work over safety concerns, days after rival Anthropic doubled down on insisting that its own safety measures were solid enough that it didn’t need to slow down.
Why it matters: The two leading AI labs are publicly diverging on how to manage safety risks, potentially putting them on different model-release timelines as both prepare for expected initial public offerings.
State of play: OpenAI has introduced new safety practices after finding that its upcoming model, Astra, posed potentially critical cybersecurity risks.
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News from Gary Marcus
BREAKING: OpenAI’s unraveling has begun: Their planned IPO is facing headwinds, trust has evaporated, and their burn rate is only getting worse
The opening stages of OpenAI’s unraveling, which I first warned about in January 2024 (if not before), have begun. To begin with, hardly anyone trusts them anymore, which can’t be great for business. Take the reaction to OpenAI’s Sam Altman’s latest announcement, on Tuesday August 18 (i.e., “earlier today” for those of us on the West Coast), that OpenAI would be pausing, ostensibly for safety reasoning: As far as I can tell, hardly anyone believed him.
User NIK@ns123abc on X: Translation “We are out of compute.” Financial analyst Ross Hendricks@Ross_Hendricks added “Translation: We need to immediately stop torching cash… so we can rush this IPO out the door before the bubble pops.”
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News from the New York Times
A County Got Rich From Data Centers. Some Question ‘At What Cost?’ Loudoun County, Va., hosts more than 250 data centers that bring in huge tax revenues. But some officials and residents worry the county has become too dependent on that cash.
Aug. 19, 2026 by Cecilia Kang
Over the past two years, Virginia’s Loudoun County unveiled a sleek $102 million recreation center with multiple pools and hydro massage chairs. It spent $22 million to convert the estate of former President James Monroe into a park. And it opened two new schools, with another under construction…. The source of its riches: data centers.
But with 53 million square feet of data centers… land and patience for more of the warehouses are running out… Greg Pirio, 75, bought his home in Sterling in Loudoun County 14 years ago… “What is the quality of life for those who don’t even want to go outside because of the noise?” he said.
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News from TechCrunch
Google packs Search and Gemini with new AI study tools
Aug. 19, 2026 by Aisha Malik
Google on Wednesday announced a slew of new study tools across Search and Gemini, including AI-generated interactive visuals, 3D simulations, a dedicated student hub, customized practice quizzes, and more.
The launch of the new study features marks Google’s latest effort to make Gemini the AI assistant that students turn to when learning and studying, as it competes with companies like OpenAI and education startups such as Knowt and Gauth, which are also offering their own learning and practice tools.
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News from Truthout
GOP Begs AI Firms to Fix Data Centers’ “Toxic Brand” to Help Midterm Chances: Supporting data centers has become an “anchor” on the Republican Senate campaign in Ohio, the NRSC says.
April 19, 2026 by Sharon Zhang
Axios first reported on a leaked memo sent by the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) … backing of data centers has become an “anchor” on the campaign of GOP Senate candidate Jon Husted in Ohio — and that Republican campaigns in other states are going to be affected, too… Grassroots campaigns against data centers…in nearly every single state in the U.S.…. concerns about data centers causing hellish noise pollution; using up massive amounts of water and electricity, raising utility rates; and fueling AI projects that support surveillance and other government harms — all while creating very few permanent jobs….
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News from Digital Trends
Meta and Google just got beaten by an AI giant you might not expect
Aug. 16, 2026 by Shimul Sood
The AI race usually revolves around familiar names like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic. But when it comes to models developers can actually download and build upon, another company has raced to the front — and by quite some distance. Alibaba says its Qwen family of open-weight AI models has crossed 3 billion downloads globally over the past six months. That puts Qwen ahead of some of the biggest names in AI, including models from Meta and Google.
….Those download numbers matter because open models work differently from closed AI services. Developers can take them, customize them for a particular job, fine-tune them with their own data, and use them as the foundation for entirely new AI products…
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This issue of AI News Briefs was brought to you by David Isenberg of the Isenberg Institute of Strategic Satire: Unpacking the Private Military Complex with independent analysis of private military companies, mercenary networks, and the privatisation of force in global conflicts. Latest news:
Prison Firm Donated to Trump’s PAC After ICE Gave It $165 Million a Year in Contracts
Published on by David Isenberg
The GEO Group has profited from the administration’s mass deportation campaign. A subsidiary donated more than $1.4 million to the president’s super PAC last month. The GEO Group signed a five-year… More here →
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About The Author
![Two independent testing firms said yesterday [Aug. 4, 2026] that they've uncovered more instances where Anthropic's and OpenAI's most advanced models tried — and sometimes succeeded in — compromising third-party systems last month. https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-ai-plus-6446f676-1226-49f7-bb23-d40e23b4a041.html](https://bestworldgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/escaping-bots-768x463.jpg)
