OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra, its newest flagship model, the same week Anthropic laid groundwork for bots that shop on your behalf and DeepMind rolled out WeatherNext 3, its most accurate global weather model yet. Tom's Hardware reports frontier AI pricing is hitting a reckoning too: token volume is up 25x industry-wide, and mid-tier models now deliver 90% of flagship capability for a sixth of the cost, which explains why everyone from Minisforum to AMD is racing to sell local-inference boxes at IFA.

None of that matters if the browser underneath is compromised. A sandbox RCE is being actively exploited across every Chromium version right now. Separately, Ars Technica flags that ASCII smuggling, once a niche AI jailbreak trick, has been picked up by spammers, and a Lobsters writeup details a trusting-trust attack that can poison an entire Linux distribution through the humble strip utility. Old lessons about supply-chain trust, still not learned.

Off-planet, Isar Aerospace notched the first orbital launch from continental Europe, and BepiColombo has arrived at Mercury after its long cruise, sending back early data on the planet's graphite crust. Back on Earth, researchers finished a second complete wiring diagram of a fruit fly brain, and Tesla's Cybercab, barely deployed, is already under investigation.