Dark still life: a face-down phone, a kitchen timer, a sealed envelope, and a small chip tray on a wood table. Empty chair in shadow. No people, no logos.

Instagram’s opt-in, Malone’s empty chair, and Huawei’s Egypt bid

August 26, 2026 Aaron Harme

Tuesday night plus this morning. Instagram kept the teen pause tool as a toggle, OpenAI confirmed the data-centre chief is gone and split the job toward leasing, and Huawei answered a Cairo tender Washington is trying to match after the fact.

In this Brief

Instagram kept Take a Break opt-in; almost nobody found it
Malone left; OpenAI already split the job toward leasing
Claude and Cowork now share one memory, on by default
Tiangong ran 8.86, then hit the wall
Huawei pitched Egypt 1,408 Ascend chips; Washington is assembling a reply

Instagram kept Take a Break opt-in

Setup: The Next Web reports that George Volichenko, a former Meta data scientist, told an Oakland jury this week Instagram considered switching its “Take a Break” reminder on by default and refused.

The tool prompts a 10-minute pause after a session passes a set length. It required opt-in.

Volichenko worked on Instagram’s mental wellbeing team from April 2022 to February 2023. Roughly two in every 1,000 weekly teenage users took up the excessive-use features.

TNW, citing Madlin Mekelburg at Bloomberg, puts the share who switched the tool on and then took the break under 0.165 percent. A later review put it at 0.2 percent, which he called a drop in the ocean.

Adam Mosseri wrote on Meta’s site in 2021 that once teens set the reminders, more than 90 percent keep them on. Both can be true.

Almost everyone who turned it on kept it. Almost nobody turned it on.

Making it opt-out was refused because the trade-off to core metrics was not desirable. Volichenko said there was a lot of fear an opt-out safety feature would produce large declines, and that multiple levels of leadership would have to explain why they were tanking the numbers.

On cross, Meta lawyer Brian Stekloff said the same math is still hundreds of thousands of teens. Volichenko agreed.

Asked if this had been a sham communication, he said: “No, it was accurate. Our goal was reached. I just did not think it was an ambitious enough goal.”

Meta later put Take a Break and other tools on by default for under-18 teen accounts. Under-16s need parental consent to turn those off.

In 2025 Meta said 97 percent of teenagers aged 13 to 15 keep the default restrictions on. The states are not arguing about what the app does now.

Four states brought the case: California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey. Chief U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said the trial is not about platform content.

“The point of this trial is that Meta allegedly lied and misrepresented that the features are addictive.” Former engineer Arturo Bejar, the states’ first witness, called Take a Break “designed to fail” because most people never change the setting.

Take: The safety tool’s problem was the default. Almost nobody found the toggle. Leadership would not make it opt-out because core metrics would take the hit.

Volichenko would not call the communications a sham. He called the goal too small.

The later teen-account default is undisputed. It is also not the period the states are trying.

The advisory jury is not being asked what the app does now.

Longer cut: Former Meta scientist tells Oakland jury Instagram kept Take a Break opt-in.

Malone left; the job split toward leasing

Setup: The Next Web reports OpenAI has confirmed that Chris Malone, the executive running its data-centre buildout, has left, and that the company has already broken up the job.

Malone joined in March 2025, shortly after OpenAI announced Stargate, the compute programme it runs with Oracle and SoftBank. The flagship site is still going up in Abilene, Texas.

TNW: leadership changes inside the infrastructure team, and a chief technology officer appointed to lead computing capacity. TNW does not name that person.

OpenAI is also reviving projects that would lease entire facilities. Other people are leading that effort in Malone’s place.

OpenAI confirmed the departure and gave no reason.

TNW’s tally: Kevin Weil left in April; Fidji Simo stepped down last month after medical leave; Brad Lightcap announced this month he was leaving after eight years; the head of safety went in July; two weeks ago the company named its second chief revenue officer in under a year, Dali Rajic succeeding Denise Dresser.

Counting Malone, TNW gets to seven senior names gone or replaced since April.

CFO Sarah Friar told staff last week the company will go public in 2027, or sooner. TNW also prints the scale around the job: a $30 billion data centre planned in Georgia; Nvidia has discussed guaranteeing $250 billion of financing for buildings in Ohio; Oracle has said a single AI data centre could expose it to a $7 billion power guarantee; SoftBank has raised a $60 billion bond partly to keep the OpenAI bet funded.

OpenAI advertised for a power trading lead in August.

Take: OpenAI confirmed the exec running the buildout is gone, and it already broke the job up.

A company that revives the lease route while the head of construction leaves is telling you which timetable it now prefers. Those grid and permit relationships sit with people.

Interconnection queues run for years.

TNW’s seven names are TNW’s tally. Friar’s listing line is the frame.

The prospectus will have to describe the compute commitments in writing. The chair is empty.

Claude and Cowork now share one memory

Setup: TechCrunch reports that on Tuesday Anthropic merged the memory system used by Claude chat and Claude Cowork, so what the model learns in one surface is available in the other.

Claude now adds topics to memory as you chat, instead of summarizing when a conversation ends. Users can read, edit, or delete what it has kept.

The feature is on by default on Free, Pro, and Max plans across web, desktop, and mobile. iOS and Android need the latest app.

By default Claude will not store health data, race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, politics, or gender identity. A separate toggle includes those.

Government-issued ID, Social Security numbers, criminal history, immigration status, and acceptable-use violations stay out.

The Register says shared memory is live, with no option to separate it between services. Claude Code stays apart for now.

Anthropic had nothing to share about Code’s memory. An Anthropic spokesperson told the paper the only way to keep chat and Cowork memories separate is to use different accounts.

The other exits are pause memory, incognito chats, or prune topics by hand. Cowork itself is not available on Free accounts.

The Next Web notes the consumer default and a different rule for Team and Enterprise: admins control whether memory is available, and it stays off for individual users until they turn it on. The sensitive-topics switch does not work retroactively.

Take: The two products now share one memory, it writes while you are still talking, and consumers do not get a split toggle. Claude Code stays out.

Pause, incognito, or a second account are the exits.

Claude Code stays out. Anthropic had nothing to share about its memory.

Tiangong ran 8.86, then hit the wall

Setup: Ars Technica reports that the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, August 22 to 26, produced viral clips of sprinting robots beating Usain Bolt’s human 100-meter record, then crashing into barriers because they cannot readily stop. A few fallen machines break at the waist in sparks or catch fire.

Dipam Patel, a Purdue PhD candidate and U.S. Army DevCom research assistant, told Ars the jump from lagging human marks last year to beating them in the 100-meter and standing high jump shows real progress in whole-body control for a single task.

The same robots sprinted in a straight line and could not slow down by continuing around the track. “If you cross the finish line, that’s the goal. It doesn’t matter if you stop and it doesn’t matter if you fall into different pieces.”

Some companies fielded different robots for different events.

Ars says laundry and other practical events appeared to lag typical human working speeds. Many competitors were still teleoperated.

The games allow that in some events and penalize the score against autonomy. Investors poured more than $6 billion into humanoid robot companies in 2025 alone, Ars writes.

Global Times put Tuesday’s large-size 100-meter semifinal at 8.86 seconds for Tiangong, beating its 9.39-second mark from the opening ceremony.

The robot, developed by Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, then crashed into a blue wall, fell, and emitted sparks. Bolt’s record is 9.58 seconds from 2009.

The center told Global Times the competing model is Tiangong Ultra, designed specifically for track and field.

Take: The 100-meter times are real and the finish is the tell. These machines were built to win one task. They do not know how to stop.

Tiangong Ultra is a track specialist. The 8.86 is a Tuesday semifinal, then a wall and sparks.

The record is the crash.

Huawei pitched Egypt 1,408 Ascend chips

Setup: Bloomberg reports, in a reprint at The Edge Malaysia, that Huawei pitched the Egyptian government on AI data centres for military, surveillance, and other public-sector use, and that officials in Washington are working to assemble a counteroffer.

People familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by Bloomberg say Huawei answered a Cairo tender with 1,408 top-end Ascend 950-series chips for an AI training cloud, plus 600 more of those chips or the earlier 910B for two inference clusters.

The documents show a 12-month build. If it lands, it would be the first known export of Huawei Ascend accelerators after more than a year of attempts.

Huawei declined to comment. Egypt’s foreign ministry did not respond.

When the Trump administration learned of the pitch, the State Department reached out to Nvidia, AMD, and Microsoft about a U.S. consortium. Microsoft declined to comment. Nvidia and AMD did not respond.

A State Department spokesperson said Egypt is one of dozens of countries in talks about U.S. technology leadership on AI, and that the United States “stands ready to partner with countries on AI development and deployment in ways that respect sovereignty and expand capabilities.”

The proposal involves a partnership with iFlytek, blacklisted by the United States since 2019 along with Huawei. Offerings include vehicle and individual recognition on a national population database and “situation awareness” packaged as a “one screen panoramic view of the city.”

A slide in a 102-page presentation showed China’s Ministry of Public Security insignia on “basic video applications.” iFlytek did not comment.

AI chip shipments to Egypt have required Washington’s permission since 2023. The Edge reprint notes 2,008 chips is a fairly small amount: under typical parameters, that quantity of Huawei 950DT accelerators would provide roughly the same capability as a few hundred of the top commercially available Nvidia chips.

Last year Huawei wooed the Gulf and Southeast Asia with second-best chips because 910C production was too low. It is now offering Egypt its top processors, more powerful than the 910C.

Malaysia last year announced a national AI system on Huawei chips at similar scale, then distanced itself amid White House concerns.

Take: Cairo put one government AI tender on the table. Huawei answered with top-end chips. Washington is trying to assemble Nvidia, AMD, and Microsoft after the fact.

Two thousand and eight chips is still a small pile next to a Western training cluster. The offer sits next to a blacklisted partner and a public-security slide.

Nothing is awarded.

Nothing is awarded. The consortium has not signed.

Longer cut: Huawei pitches Egypt 1,408 Ascend chips as Washington courts Nvidia, AMD, and Microsoft.

Also noted

Moonshot AI is in early talks with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google about hosting Kimi K3, seeking up to 30 percent of the revenue those clouds would generate, The Next Web writes, citing Reuters. K3 is 2.8 trillion parameters, open in licence, impractical for most buyers to host. Nothing is agreed. All four companies declined to comment beyond confirming nothing further.
The EPA has proposed making public disclosure of air pollution from minor sources voluntary rather than mandatory, a change that would cover diesel generators clustered around data centres, The Next Web reports. Northern Virginia holds roughly 10,500 of those generators with combined capacity approaching 27 gigawatts. The comment period closed 21 August.
OpenAI published Jalapeño inference benches against Nvidia’s GB200 and GB300. Longer cut.