AI Updates on 2026-02-17

Alibaba releases Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, first open-weight model with hybrid linear attention and sparse MoE achieving 8.6x faster inference than Qwen3-Max @Alibaba_Qwen
Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.6 with major upgrades in coding, computer use, and 1M token context window in beta @claudeai
Qwen3.5-397B-A17B supports 201 languages with native multimodal capabilities and Apache 2.0 licensing @Alibaba_Qwen
Claude Sonnet 4.6 shows human-level computer use capability on complex spreadsheets and multi-step web forms @claudeai
Cohere Labs introduces Tiny Aya, 3.35B parameter multilingual model supporting 70+ languages efficient enough to run on phones @Cohere_Labs

India's Emergent reaches $100M ARR in just 8 months, becoming one of fastest companies to hit milestone @mukundjha
Temporal raises $300M Series D at $5B valuation led by a16z as durable execution becomes critical for production AI agents @SamarAtTemporal
Braintrust raises $80M Series B led by ICONIQ Capital to build infrastructure for measuring and improving production AI products @braintrust
Thrive Capital closes $10B fund (Thrive X) with $9B for growth-stage AI investments @JoshuaKushner
Mistral AI acquires Koyeb in first acquisition to support cloud infrastructure ambitions @TechCrunch
India announces plans to attract over $200B in AI infrastructure investment by 2028 @TechCrunch
Adani pledges $100B to build AI data centers as India seeks bigger role in global AI race @TechCrunch

Figma ships integration bringing Claude Code UI work directly into Figma as editable design frames @trq212
Cursor launches plugin marketplace with integrations for Linear, Figma, Stripe, AWS, and Databricks @cursor_ai
Waymo begins full autonomous operations with 6th generation platform at ~$70k per vehicle cost @reed
Sully AI returns over 30 million minutes to physicians using NVIDIA Blackwell infrastructure with 10x cost reduction @NVIDIAAI

SteerVLA framework uses VLM reasoning to handle long-tail autonomous driving scenarios like accidents and construction zones @TianGao_19
UK AI Security Institute publishes research on Boundary Point Jailbreaking method for developing universal jailbreaks against system safeguards @OpenAINewsroom
MIT researchers create technique for 3D printing design models to account for fabrication limitations during design process @MIT
Anthropic research on rubric-based reinforcement learning extends benefits of large-scale RL training to non-verifiable domains @cwolferesearch

Anthropic signs MOU with Government of Rwanda as first AI partnership of its kind in Africa for health and education sectors @AnthropicAI
European Parliament blocks AI on lawmakers' devices citing security risks @TechCrunch
Research shows nearly 40% of college students know someone using AI for emotional support with over half relying on it daily or weekly @nxthompson