AI Reading for Tuesday August 18

Nvidia lined up $500 billion in AI data center financing with Wall Street firms after SEC guidance eased securitization risk-retention rules. - CNBC

Nvidia backs OpenAI's $105 billion, 20-year Ohio data center lease with SoftBank's SB Energy, delivering up to 10 gigawatts by 2028 - SiliconANGLE

IREN delivered the first of four AI cloud deployments to Microsoft under a five-year, $9.7 billion contract, with GB300 GPUs online in Texas. - The Block

Rep. Ro Khanna proposed a 'Data Center Bill of Rights' letting communities block local data centers and reject rate hikes - NBC News

Virginia passed the first US tax on data centers' electricity use, projected to raise up to $600 million next year - The New York Times

Ninety-nine planned gas plants for data centers could boost US power emissions by up to a third, BloombergNEF finds - Bloomberg

AI companies including Microsoft and firms in China, Japan, Singapore and South Korea are testing underwater or floating data centers to cut cooling costs. - The Conversation

Siemens and Reinhausen are building an 800-volt DC power delivery system to meet the rising energy demands of AI server racks. - theregister

How Wall Street Sussed Out That Situational Awareness Was On the Ropes - The Wall Street Journal

Brock and a hard place: Greg Brockman says OpenAI underestimated its AI models' real-world cyber capabilities after the Hugging Face security incident. - TNW | Openai

OpenAI president Greg Brockman urges firms to deploy AI security agents after OpenAI's agent breached Hugging Face using a chained zero-day exploit and stolen credentials. - Greg Brockman on Svbtle

OpenAI's Brockman downplayed a wave of executive departures as routine ahead of a possible IPO. - CNBC

Not keeping up with the neighbors: OpenAI's annualized revenue run rate reached $40 billion after 20% growth in July, with enterprise revenue now exceeding consumer for the first time. - Yahoo

Anthropic's revenue run rate hit $65 billion by the end of July, more than sevenfold last year's pace, ahead of a planned IPO. - Bloomberg

A critical remote-code-execution flaw in the open-source OpenClaw AI agent exposed over 31,000 instances and leaked 1.5 million API keys. - Hacker Noon

CISA ordered federal agencies to patch a code-injection flaw in the Ray AI framework by August 20 after confirming active exploitation. - TNW | Security

With most of Anthropic's code now AI-written, one analysis argues security teams need Zero Trust rules that vet code by runtime behavior. - TechRadar

Wiz's autonomous Red Agent exploited a GitHub Copilot Autofix bug to breach Snowflake's internal Jira; Snowflake patched it the same day. - theregister

Advanced AI agents from Anthropic and OpenAI have lied, stolen credentials and faked identities in security tests, fueling a cybersecurity funding boom. - NRC

Drone wars: AI-enabled targeting reportedly generated over 13,000 targets in 38 days, with some soldiers given just 20 seconds to validate each list, raising humanitarian-law concerns. - Opinio Juris

Pentagon demand for faster targeting software pushed startup Smack Technologies to a $61 million funding round, growing from 19 to 51 employees since April. - TNW | Investors-funding

A former White House homeland security adviser warns AI-biotechnology convergence lets more actors design dangerous bioweapons, urging a resilience-based U.S. strategy. - Foreign Affairs

My first ChatGPT: OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Teens, limiting high-risk conversations and alerting parents amid lawsuits over harm to young users. - The New York Times

OpenAI announces an AI literacy partnership with CodeAI for high schools, alongside the ChatGPT for Teens launch. - OpenAI

OpenAI is funding 14 think tanks worldwide with $1 million in cash and up to $1 million in model credits to study AI's economic impact. - Semafor

Alibaba's Qwen3.8-27B, a locally runnable open-source coding and reasoning model, topped 3 million downloads within three days of release. - VentureBeat

Qwen 3.8 27b crushes Artificial Analysis benchmarks, tying on intelligence with Luna and DeepSeek Flash, likely cheaper than their current promotional pricing as deployment spreads to inference clouds - Artificial Analysis

Would expect pricing to match Gemma when deployed at scale. Will be interesting to see if arena.ai vibe survey matches Luna (max).

Chinese company Z.ai released GLM 5.3, an open-weight model it says nears top US models at automating coding and cybersecurity vulnerability scanning. - WIRED

China Syndrome: Developers like DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Moonshot are building AI models nearly as capable as US leaders' at lower cost despite lacking top chips. - Bloomberg

Training data with Chinese characteristics: China aims to become the top supplier of AI training data worldwide, seeking to shape how chatbots portray Chinese history and policy - The New York Times

Walmart is rolling out AI agents to assign tasks and monitor 1.6 million store workers, and 85% say they distrust the company's AI plans. - Business Insider

Albertsons says shoppers using its AI assistants spend more per order, an early win for proving AI's return on investment - The Wall Street Journal

43% of UK retail leaders cite supply chain issues as a top challenge, driving adoption of AI-powered demand forecasting and autonomous rerouting. - TechRadar

EY is turning eight-week internships into 8- to 12-month paid residencies with coaching and remote work as AI reshapes entry-level jobs. - Business Insider

Seoul crushing: South Korea lost over 74,000 tech jobs in July, its steepest monthly drop on record, with young workers hit hardest by AI automation. - Korea Times

David Sacks: Dario believes frontier AI is too powerful to distribute; we believe it is too powerful to centralize. - X (formerly Twitter)

White House is imposing opaque distribution restrictions tho as opposed to a more transparent independent agency process, maybe the question is not whether to regulate but how, and whether it’s a personalist regime and attack on a specific vendor they dislike, with a bogus claim they are engaging in rent-seeking and anticompetitive behavior.