DAILY SITUATION RECAP: - ZAI releases GLM-5.3. GLM-5.3 is the exact same base model as GLM-5.2, released June 13, but with post-training improvements. It performs similarly to Kimi K3 on most benchmarks, but is substantially improved on TerminalBench and on cyber capabilities. ZAI found that the model performs substantially better than GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3 on cybersecurity benchmarks (though still behind Mythos and Sol), and was able to chain together multiple exploits. In response, the company built the ZAI Security Disclosure Ledger as a public record of vulnerabilities that are found and fixed, and will release the weights in two weeks after safety evaluations and hardening are complete. - Thrive releases its first-ever investor letterand invests $215M in Amazon. Thrive Capital, founded by Joshua Kushner in 2009, has over $65 billion under management and stakes in OpenAI, SpaceX, Stripe, Databricks, Anduril, and more. In his first letter, Kushner laid out the firm’s opportunity set: emerging tech, infrastructure and applications, traditional industries to be transformed by tech, and scarce assets that will become more valuable with tech. Since 2009, Thrive has compounded at 41% gross and 33% net IRR. - Anthropic publishes its August 2026 Risk Report focusing on three threat models: misalignment in high-stakes settings, risks from automated R&D, and chemical and biological weapons production. They find that risk is still low, though no longer very low, and could increase if models learn how to scheme more coherently. Anthropic evaluated an unreleased “Model 2” that is slightly more capable than Claude Mythos 5, that they have no plans to release. - France’s highest court blocks ban on social media for under-15s. The French Constitutional Council ruled that the ban was too broad and age verification would violate the privacy of adults. The French Senate and Assembly passed the bill last month with overwhelming margins (243-2 and 279-81, respectively). - Jane Street posted a $15B loss in July due to declines in the value of Situational Awareness LP’s holdings. Jane Street was a major backer of SALP, an unusual move for a firm which usually trades only its own capital. - Nvidia disclosed a $21B stake in SpaceX and a $30B stake in Intel. Also, Google disclosed a $94B stake in SpaceX, up ~100x from its $900M investment in 2015. - Apple is working with Alibaba to train its own model in China. It will be used as part of Apple Intelligence for Apple devices sold in the country. - Alibaba releases the weights of Qwen3.8-27B, the smaller version of its recent model. Weights of the full 2.4T version are also available on Hugging Face. Written by @theojaffee. Read more at our link in bio.