Issue 1: open decision models, EmbeddingGemma 2, and a learning center

Open models

• Decision models. Three items this week cover models that return an answer or a score instead of generating text: AWS's Strands Decider 2B under Apache 2.0, Liquid AI's open-weight d1 models for text, images, and speech, and support for decision models in the llama.cpp server.
• EmbeddingGemma 2. Google released a 740-million-parameter embedding model for text, code, images, video, and audio under Apache 2.0. It now has its own record, and Transformers 5.19.0 added support for it.
• AstaBrief 8B. Ai2 open-sourced a model that turns a research question and retrieved literature excerpts into a cited report, along with its training data. The model card lists Apache 2.0.

Tool releases

• vLLM 0.31.0: a preload command that keeps weights in GPU memory across engine restarts.
• Diffusers 0.41.0: a Qwen-Image 2.1 pipeline; ONNX support is deprecated in favor of Optimum.
• MLflow 3.17.0: fine-grained permissions for shared resources. SQL-backed servers need a coordinated database upgrade.
• TRL 1.15.0: a fused LM head, on by default in six trainers.
• ONNX Runtime 1.31.0: stable model-package and EPContext data APIs. Supported native builds now default to telemetry, which can be turned off.
• Codex CLI 0.161.0 makes GPT-6.1 Sol the default model, and 0.162.0 adds managed Git worktree tools.

USASI has not tested any of these releases.

Hosted models and policy

• Claude Haiku 5.5: Anthropic announced a hosted model for high-volume tasks such as summaries and classification. The announcement does not describe a release of model weights.
• Anthropic's Usage Policy update takes effect November 12, 2026. It changes the company's own rules for use of its models; it is not a government rule.
• Anthropic's Genesis Mission commitments: Claude, Claude Code, and API credits over three years for research projects in the federal Genesis Mission, as described in Anthropic's own announcement.
• xAI's developer documentation now uses the name SpaceXSI, and the catalog record now reads xAI (SpaceXSI). No change to the company's legal name has been documented.

New in the catalog

Eleven records were added:

• From Google DeepMind: EmbeddingGemma 2; SynthID Text, a reference implementation of its text watermarking method; and SynthID Bio, watermarking methods for AI-generated protein sequences and structures.
• From Meta: Llama Guard 4, a safety classifier; Llama 3.1 8B; and SWE-sweep, a benchmark in which coding agents find and fix unreported bugs.
• From OpenAI: tiktoken and the MCP Extensions SDKs.
• Also: OLMo-core from Ai2, ROCm from AMD, and Sentence Transformers, now maintained by Hugging Face.

New on the site

• Learn is now a learning center: 22 explainers in six topics, five learning paths starting with New to AI, and a glossary of 69 terms.
• Find AI for my needs matches a task and a computer against 17 documented setups and explains each match. USASI has not tested them.
• Reference: a license guide covering 20 licenses, a U.S. AI policy tracker with 30 federal documents, an FAQ, and a model size calculator.
• Jobs now has tracks for roles beyond engineering, data-center and infrastructure careers, customer and operations roles, and internships.
• Hubs: three new hubs on safety and security, developer tools, and speech, vision, and multimodal AI. Nous Research and Hermes Agent were added to the Agents hub.

Corrections

None this week. If you spot an error, reply to this email or use the corrections page.