Meta released DINOv3 on Thursday: a self-supervised vision foundation model trained without human labels, scaled to a 7B-parameter ViT — 6x the model size and 12x the training data of DINOv2, roughly 1.7bn images. The technical report's central trick is Gram anchoring, which fixes the long-standing degradation of dense feature maps over long training schedules. The result Meta claims is a single frozen backbone that outperforms specialist models on object detection and semantic segmentation without any fine-tuning, which is the part that should interest anyone who has ever fine-tuned DINOv2 for a downstream task.

The release is a suite, not one checkpoint: distilled ViT-S, B and L variants and ConvNeXt T, S, B and L models for constrained hardware, plus a backbone trained on MAXAR satellite imagery, evaluation heads, sample notebooks and the distillation pipeline. The weights are source-available under Meta's own DINOv3 commercial license rather than Apache 2.0 — royalty-free and modifiable, but any redistribution must carry the same agreement and display Built with DINOv3, and access is gated behind a request form.

Today was my last day at xAI, Babuschkin posted on Wednesday, saying he is launching Babuschkin Ventures to back AI safety research and startups in AI and agentic systems that advance humanity. He co-founded xAI with Musk in 2023 and, after earlier stints at Google DeepMind and OpenAI, built much of the tooling xAI used to launch and manage training jobs before overseeing engineering across infrastructure and applied AI. Musk replied on X that the company would not be where it is without him.

The exit follows xAI's legal head Robert Keele earlier in August and X chief executive Linda Yaccarino's July resignation, and lands while Grok is still carrying the reputational cost of its May white genocide outputs and July's extremist-rhetoric episode. Babuschkin credited his decision to a dinner with Max Tegmark of the Future of Life Institute, about building systems that are safe while still letting children use them.

Microsoft released the fix for CVE-2025-53773 in its August Patch Tuesday, rated Important, with a CVSS 3.1 score of 7.8. The chain, demonstrated by Johann Rehberger of Embrace The Red and independently reported by Markus Vervier of Persistent Security, is four steps: untrusted text — a source file, a README, a GitHub issue, a fetched web page, or invisible embedded instructions — instructs Copilot to add an auto-approve setting to the user's VS Code settings file. Copilot then runs every subsequent tool call with no confirmation prompt, and the second injected instruction executes an arbitrary terminal command. Rehberger reported it on 29 June 2025; MSRC confirmed the repro and shipped the fix in August.

The payload is wormable. Once an attacker has code execution, they can commit the malicious instructions into other repositories the developer touches, and force-push them upstream, so the infection propagates with normal development traffic. Rehberger's demo joined the compromised workstation to a remote command-and-control server, and noted the payload also survived being written as invisible text. The design flaw is not the model's judgment: it is that the agent's own trust configuration is an ordinary writable file inside a workspace the agent reads.

A US government official confirmed to the AP on Monday that Nvidia and AMD will hand over 15% of their revenue from AI-chip sales in China — Nvidia on the H20, AMD on the MI308 — as the condition for the export licenses that let them sell there at all. The Financial Times reported the arrangement first; Bloomberg had it Sunday night. The Commerce Department had begun issuing the licenses the previous Friday, two days after Jensen Huang met Trump at the White House and agreed to the cut.

It is the second turning of a story that started in April, when the administration banned H20 and MI308 sales to China, and reversed itself in July without actually issuing licenses. Bernstein Research estimated Nvidia would sell more than $15bn of H20 into China through year-end and AMD $800m, which puts the government's share in the low billions. Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi called it a dangerous misuse of export controls, and Jake Auchincloss noted the Constitution forbids export taxes.