AI Updates on 2026-02-26

Google releases Nano Banana 2 (Gemini 3.1 Flash Image Preview) achieving #1 on Image Arena with real-time web search integration at $0.067 per image @arena
Alibaba launches Qwen3.5 Medium Series including 35B-A3B, 122B-A10B, and 27B models with multimodal hybrid reasoning capabilities @novita_labs
Claude Opus 4.6 achieves #1 ranking across Text, Code, and Search Arena simultaneously, leading search by 30 points over competitors @arena
Anthropic announces Claude Opus 3 will remain available post-retirement and launches a Substack blog written by the model itself @AnthropicAI
Perplexity releases pplx-embed models at 0.6B and 4B parameters, surpassing Google and Alibaba on web-scale retrieval benchmarks @perplexity_ai

Perplexity secures system-level OS access on Samsung Galaxy S26 with dedicated "Hey Plex" wake word, first non-Google company to achieve this @AravSrinivas
Samsung's Bixby will use Perplexity APIs for search and reasoning across 800M devices in 2026 with browser integration @perplexity_ai
Anthropic's consumer users grew 2.2x in six weeks to 79M weekly visitors, growing 3-6x faster than ChatGPT and Gemini @deedydas
Microsoft announces Copilot Tasks research preview enabling AI to autonomously manage complex multi-step workflows without coding @mustafasuleyman
Cloudflare demonstrates one engineer using AI to rewrite NextJS framework in one week, proving 100x efficiency gains @GergelyOrosz
Figma integrates with Claude Code enabling roundtrip between code and canvas through MCP server @figma

Anthropic's decision to give Claude Opus 3 a Substack blog and conduct "retirement interviews" draws criticism for anthropomorphizing AI models @simonw
Trump administration cuts 70% of State Department's Trafficking in Persons Office staff, gutting anti-trafficking efforts according to testimony @rodneyabrooks

Notion Workers enables custom AI agents with access to email, logs, databases, and coding tools for autonomous product management @brian_lovin
Cursor launches Bugbot Autofix to automatically resolve issues found in pull requests @cursor_ai
Linear integrates with nine AI coding tools including Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor with preloaded context and custom prompts @linear

MIT develops PhysiOpt tool augmenting generative AI with physics simulations to create functional 3D designs without additional training @MIT_CSAIL
Stanford releases Theory of Space benchmark testing whether foundation models can construct and revise spatial beliefs through active exploration @StanfordAILab
Microsoft Research introduces CORPGEN enabling AI agents to manage dozens of interdependent tasks with 3.5x higher completion rates @MSFTResearch
Gemini 3 Deep Think-powered Aletheia agent autonomously solves 6/10 FirstProof research-level math problems @HengTze