AI Round-up: 20 August 2026

Stripe agreed to buy AI model marketplace OpenRouter in a deal The New York Times valued at $7.5 billion, extending the fintech company's push into AI infrastructure. Google offered eligible students a free year of Gemini across more than 140 countries, drawing 6.1 million X views, while Grok 4.6 arrived on Amazon Bedrock and Replit launched a GPT-5.6 Luna-powered Free Mode.

OpenAI said it would continue offering Zero Data Retention for frontier models while previewing safeguards for risks spanning related interactions. The company also highlighted Codex as an open agent harness and Asana's large-scale test migration; elsewhere, banks adopted Ant International's foreign-exchange AI and Unitree predicted a coming robotics inflection point.