Foundation models and the labs that build them — USASI news

xAI's developer documentation now uses the name SpaceXSI

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

As of October 11, 2026, xAI's developer documentation at docs.x.ai is titled "SpaceXSI Docs", describes itself as the official SpaceXSI API documentation, and opens with "Get started with SpaceX Super Intelligence". The page's structured data still names the organization xAI and lists "SpaceXAI Docs" among the site's alternate names, and the company's Greenhouse job board still carried the name SpaceXAI the same day. xAI has been a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX since February 2026. USASI has not found an official announcement of the new name, and no change to the company's legal name has been documented; the catalog record now reads "xAI (SpaceXSI)".

White House science summit lists industry partners in the Genesis Mission Consortium

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

On October 8, 2026 the White House published a fact sheet on science initiatives announced at its "Science: A New Golden Age" summit. It says eleven industry partners committed SI-for-science tools and compute credits to the Genesis Mission Consortium, and names NVIDIA, AMD, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, AMP, Emerald AI, AWS, Armada, Crusoe, and Micron. The same fact sheet says NIH, DOE, and Biohub launched a virtual biology initiative to build data and models for virtual cells. The fact sheet describes announcements and commitments rather than an executive order.

Anthropic announces commitments to the federal Genesis Mission

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

On October 8, 2026 Anthropic announced commitments to the Genesis Mission, which it describes as a federal initiative to accelerate scientific and technological discovery through AI. The post says that over the next three years Anthropic will provide Claude, Claude Code, and API credits to Genesis Mission research projects, partner with agencies and national laboratories on science priorities including fusion energy and quantum computing, and provide training, onboarding, and technical support to scientists on those projects. It names NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation among participating agencies. These are commitments Anthropic describes in its own announcement; this item does not describe any government action.

Anthropic updates its Usage Policy, effective November 12, 2026

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

On October 8, 2026 Anthropic published a summary of updates to its Usage Policy, which it says take effect on November 12. The post says rules on deceptive activity that were previously spread across several sections are consolidated into a new section titled "Do Not Engage in Deceptive Campaigns or Artificial Activity", and that the elections section is renamed "Do Not Undermine Democratic Processes". It says the weapons prohibitions now explicitly include the software and components that make weapons work and actions such as arming drones and other autonomous vehicles, and it adds requirements for models connected to hardware that takes autonomous physical actions, including that a qualified operator can observe and stop the equipment. This item describes Anthropic's own policy for use of its models; it is not a government rule.

OpenAI releases Codex CLI 0.162.0 with managed Git worktree tools

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

On October 8, 2026 OpenAI published version 0.162.0 of its open-source Codex CLI on GitHub. The release notes add tools for creating and listing managed Git worktrees from trusted local projects when the worktrees feature is enabled, and add task pinning in the agent Command Center with the `p` key. They also say live web access and remote compaction can be configured for custom Responses-compatible model providers, and that a signed PowerShell installer is now published with Windows releases. USASI has not tested these changes.

Anthropic releases Claude Haiku 5.5

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

On October 7, 2026 Anthropic announced Claude Haiku 5.5, a model it describes as designed for high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks such as summaries, classification requests, and database queries. The announcement gives the API model ID claude-haiku-5-5 and says the model is available on the Claude Platform, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, and it points to a Haiku 5.5 System Card for evaluation and safety details. The same post announces SDK updates that add beta support for computer use and browser use in Python and TypeScript. The announcement describes a hosted model; it does not describe a release of model weights.

OpenAI releases Codex CLI 0.161.0 with GPT-6.1 Sol as the default model

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

On October 7, 2026 OpenAI published version 0.161.0 of its open-source Codex CLI on GitHub. The release notes say GPT-6.1 Sol is now the default model in the bundled and Amazon Bedrock catalogs, and that Amazon Bedrock supports multi-agent V2 and Ultra reasoning on compatible models. The notes also add a `/mcp login ` command for signing in to MCP servers from an active terminal session, and make Daybreak opt-in through `--enable cli_daybreak`. USASI has not tested these changes.

Google releases EmbeddingGemma 2, an open-weight multimodal embedding model under Apache 2.0

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

On October 6, 2026 Google announced EmbeddingGemma 2, a multimodal embedding model built on the Gemma 4 architecture. The announcement says the model maps text, code, images, video, and audio into a shared embedding space, contains 740 million parameters, and produces 768-dimensional vectors that can be truncated to 512, 256, or 128 dimensions using Matryoshka Representation Learning. Google says the weights are released under the Apache 2.0 license and are available on Hugging Face and Kaggle, with on-device variants in the LiteRT Community on Hugging Face. USASI has a release record for the earlier EmbeddingGemma 300M; a record for this release has not yet been added.

Ai2 open-sources AstaBrief 8B, a model for writing cited scientific reports

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

On October 2, 2026 Ai2 announced that it is open-sourcing AstaBrief 8B, a model that turns a research question and retrieved literature excerpts into a cited report, along with its training data. Ai2 says the model was built from Qwen3-8B using supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization, and that it is available as Fast mode in the "Generate a report" feature of Asta, its platform for scientific work. The Hugging Face model card lists the Apache 2.0 license. Ai2 notes that most of the training and evaluation was completed in 2025 and that it has not rerun the full evaluation against today's frontier models.

Ai2 releases OLMo-core 3, its open training library, with mixture-of-experts support

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Ai2 released version 3 of OLMo-core, the PyTorch training library behind its Olmo models, on October 1, 2026. The release redesigns the library's mixture-of-experts training system, adding expert and pipeline parallelism, a distributed optimizer, grouped matrix multiplication for experts, and support for the MXFP8 number format; Ai2 says it is designed to scale mixture-of-experts training into the trillion-parameter range. The code is licensed under Apache 2.0, and the repository includes Ai2's official training scripts for Olmo 3.

OpenAI adds GPT-6.1 Sol to its API

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

OpenAI's API changelog lists GPT-6.1 Sol (model ID gpt-6.1-sol) as released on September 29, 2026, describing it as a model for complex coding and professional work at a lower cost than GPT-6 Astra. The changelog says it is available through the Responses and Chat Completions endpoints. Separate changelog entries on the same date add computer use to the Agents API and an Ultrafast mode for GPT-6 Astra in the Responses API. GPT-6.1 Sol is a hosted model; OpenAI has not published its weights.

Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 5.5

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Anthropic announced Claude Sonnet 5.5 on September 28, 2026, describing it as a faster, lower-cost complement to Claude Opus 5.5. Anthropic says it is available in the Claude apps and on its platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Anthropic's model documentation lists the API identifier claude-sonnet-5-5 with a 1M-token context window. It is a hosted model; Anthropic has not published its weights.

Meta releases Muse Glimmer as an open-weight model under Apache 2.0

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In August 2026 Meta Superintelligence Labs published Muse Glimmer, a model of about 30 billion parameters that takes text and images as input and was distilled from Muse Spark. Its weights can be downloaded from Hugging Face without an access request under the Apache 2.0 license, and the repository also includes a separate Muse Glimmer Usage Policy that lists prohibited uses. Muse Glimmer has its own release record under the Muse family.