Evening AI briefing: agents, images, chips, and APIs

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As shipping agentic capabilities becomes table stakes among foundation model companies, Anthropic is releasing Claude Sonnet 5, a more powerful and agentic version of the lab’s midsize model.

“It can make plans, use tools like browsers and terminals, and run autonomously at a level that, just a few months ago, required larger and more expensive models,” Anthropic said in a blog post .

That framing mirrors what OpenAI and Google have said about their own recent releases. OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol was launched in preview last week, and it is also the firm’s most agentic model yet, allowing users to split work across subagents for longer autonomous tasks.

A Hacker News post titled 'Claude Code is steganographically marking requests' links to an external analysis of Claude Code behavior.

The claim is that request objects can include hidden markings rather than only visible prompt content.

The post drew 1,155 upvotes and 299 comments in this scrape.

No additional technical details or reproducible test snippets are present in the provided material.

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Google on Tuesday released Nano Banana 2 Lite, the newest version of its in-house AI video and image generator. This version is significantly faster and more affordable than its previous release, the company claims.

The model has much lower latency and can produce images in four seconds, which makes it a good option if you need to workshop images and produce a large number of them in quick succession, Google says. It costs $0.034 per 1,000 images, which makes it quite affordable for people looking to draft and perfect their content at scale.

The release follows last summer’s launch of the original Nano Banana, powered by Gemini 3.1 Flash, and the February release of Nano Banana 2 . The latter introduced new powers for the generator, including the ability to create more realistic images. The company also offers Nano Banana Pro, which is described as a more powerful (and more expensive) model for advanced use cases.

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Nvidia AI chip competitor Etched issued a progress report on Tuesday, after TSMC successfully manufactured its chip earlier this year. The startup says it has already booked $1 billion in contract orders for its product: full systems powered by those chips.

Etched, founded in 2022, also revealed that it has now raised a total of $800 million to date. The most recent tranche was an unannounced $500 million round closed in December at a $5 billion post-money valuation, the company said.

The startup has attracted a notable group of investors, too, including VentureTech Alliance, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Two Sigma, Ribbit Capital, and Stripes, who led the $500 million round. It has also secured angel investment from AI heavyweights including Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Arthur Mensch, and Scott Wu.

The GIF-picking interfaces in some of your favorite online platforms might look different going forward, as Google prepares to shut down the Tenor API today. While the Tenor website, along with its searchable GIF library, will remain live, platforms like X, Discord, Bluesky, and WhatsApp that previously integrated the API are now having to migrate to alternative GIF picker services.

Google acquired the Tenor GIF platform in 2018. Both its website and API allow users to search for GIFs using keywords, similar to competing services like Giphy and Klipy. Google will continue using Tenor across its own services, including Google Messages and Gboard. It stopped accepting requests for new API sign-ups and integrations on January 13th, according to its Tenor FAQ page .

After June 30th, Google says any Tenor API agreements and current integrations will be “fully decommissioned,” and that any attempt to make an API request after the transition deadline will fail and result in an error message. The API is being shuttered “as part of an ongoing effort to focus resources on enhancing our core products,” according to Google .

Several apps impacted by the API shutdown have already started moving to other services. X Product head Nikita Bier said on June 21st that the platform was “forced to migrate” because of it, though didn’t specify what GIF picker it would be using going forward. Discord started testing Giphy and Klipy as Tenor alternatives in January, and WhatsApp was working on replacing Tenor with Klipy in May.

The most noticeable change for the users of these platforms is that you might lose access to your favorite Tenor GIFs, as the libraries of GIF pickers vary depending on the service.