AI Updates on 2026-02-16

Alibaba releases Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, first open-weight model in series with 397B total parameters (17B active), native multimodal capabilities, and 8.6x-19.0x faster decoding than Qwen3-Max @Alibaba_Qwen
Qwen3.5 uses hybrid linear attention with sparse MoE architecture, supports 201 languages, and achieves competitive performance with Gemini 3 Pro and Claude Opus 4.5 @Alibaba_Qwen
Model trained with large-scale RL environment scaling for real-world agent capabilities, released under Apache 2.0 license with day-0 support from vLLM, SGLang, and Unsloth @Alibaba_Qwen

OpenAI acquires OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger to drive next generation of personal agents, with OpenClaw continuing as open source foundation project @sama
OpenAI Codex weekly users more than tripled since beginning of year as GPT-5.3 shows significant improvements in coding capabilities @sama
Anthropic opens Bengaluru office as second Asia-Pacific location, with India being second-largest market for Claude.ai @AnthropicAI
Blackstone backs Indian AI infrastructure startup Neysa with up to $1.2B financing as India pushes domestic AI capabilities @TechCrunch
Ricursive Intelligence raises $335M at $4B valuation in just 4 months, signaling continued strong investor appetite for AI startups @TechCrunch
MiniMax M2.5 becomes most popular model on OpenRouter, praised for sounding most human-like of any available model @OpenRouterAI

Anthropic and Pentagon reportedly in dispute over Claude usage, highlighting ongoing tensions around military AI applications @TechCrunch
Longtime NPR host David Greene sues Google over NotebookLM voice, raising questions about AI voice cloning and consent @TechCrunch
Google faces criticism for non-opt-in Gemini advertisements in Chrome browser, with users unable to remove persistent promotional elements @GergelyOrosz

Sand AI generates coherent 2-minute anime clips in 15 minutes for under $10, reducing production from 1000 human hours per minute @deedydas
Perplexity Finance adds analyst ratings with consensus views and 52-week price targets synthesized with latest news @AravSrinivas
MIT researchers create magnetic transistor using magnetic semiconductors instead of silicon, enabling smaller and more energy-efficient circuits @MIT

Research shows AI models become more incoherent rather than systematically misaligned as they reason longer, challenging assumptions about extended reasoning @emollick
Study finds reduced latent inhibition (difficulty filtering irrelevant stimuli) predicts higher creative achievement when paired with high IQ @paulg
OpenAI physics research uses AI to solve gluon amplitude problem that had stumped researchers for a year @gdb