AI Round-up: 13 August 2026

xAI introduced Grok 4.6 as a same-price upgrade to Grok 4.5, drawing 20 million measured X views and follow-up creator coverage. Google DeepMind released its SL2T sign-language-to-text model for Pixel 11, while Gemini added connections to 14 more apps and Google's broader Pixel launch put AI at the centre of its phone strategy.

Reuters reported that Anthropic is in talks to acquire Decart AI and that Taiwan was targeted in an AI-driven hacking campaign. Other developments included Cohere's open-source North Micro Vision model, Qwen 3.8 releases for coding and long-horizon agents, Cognition's reported $40 billion fundraising talks, and community discussion about Codex usage, Claude skills and long-running coding agents.