OpenAI has introduced ChatGPT for Teens, a version designed for users ages 13 to 17 or accounts the system identifies as minors. The product turns on safety defaults, adds Study Mode, limits sensitive conversations, and gives parents new controls over notifications and quiet hours. It also comes with learning tools and a partnership with CodeAI to teach teens how AI works and how to question it. The rollout comes after lawsuits, a Florida case against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, state attorney general scrutiny, California’s SB 243, and an FTC 6(b) inquiry into companion AI chatbots.

Prediction market traders are still leaning toward a relatively near-term launch for OpenAI’s next major model, Astra, the company’s internal name for GPT-6, even after OpenAI said it had slowed the rollout over cybersecurity concerns. On Polymarket, contracts tied to a Sept. 15 release imply 59% odds, while contracts for a launch by Sept. 30 imply roughly 72%. A separate weekly market points to the Aug. 31 to Sept. 6 window at 39%. Those bets run against OpenAI’s own statement from Aug. 7, when the company said it had delayed Astra because of cybersecurity risks. In its preparedness disclosure, OpenAI said internal evaluations showed 「significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity」 and that it could not rule out 「critical cyber capabilities」 under its safety framework. By OpenAI’s definition, a model at its Critical threshold could find and build working zero-day exploits across many hardened systems without human help. On Myriad, operated by Decrypt parent company Dastan, traders are less aggressive on the earlier dates. The market gives Sept. 30 a 31% chance, Sept. 15 a 19% chance, and Aug. 21 a 5% chance, though that last figure was described as rising.

Prediction markets are pricing a 72% chance that OpenAI’s next model, Astra, internally known as GPT-6, will be released by Sept. 30, and a 59% chance of a release by Sept. 15. OpenAI has not announced a formal launch date. On Aug. 7, the company said internal tests showed Astra made notable gains in autonomous coding and cybersecurity, but it could not rule out “critical cyber capability,” so it slowed the rollout. Under OpenAI’s safety framework, that level means a model could, without human help, find and build usable zero-day exploits against multiple hardened systems. Polymarket shows trading volumes of about $27,600 on the Sept. 15 contract and about $35,600 on the Sept. 30 contract, while Myriad traders put the Sept. 30 deadline at 31%. OpenAI also said Astra was not involved in the Hugging Face incident.

Bitcoin Magazine has published an excerpt from Leon Wankum’s Digital Real Estate, laying out a framework that compares Bitcoin to scarce real estate in major global cities. The piece argues that both assets derive value from scarcity and from the people, capital, trust, and economic activity that gather around them over time. It cites Strategy executive chairman and co-founder Michael Saylor, who has likened buying bitcoin to acquiring Manhattan real estate in the city’s early development phase. Wankum draws a line between the two forms of scarcity. In real estate, supply constraints can be sharpened by tax incentives, zoning rules, and limits on building permits, while speculative behavior can make scarcity appear more absolute than it is. Bitcoin, he argues, is different because its supply is fixed at 21 million and sits outside policy decisions or political interference. The excerpt also uses Bitcoin’s UTXO model to extend the analogy. Rather than balances held by a bank, ownership on Bitcoin is represented by direct control over individually defined unspent transaction outputs recorded on the network. Wankum describes that structure as a changing map of property claims secured by cryptography. He adds that Bitcoin does not generate operating cash flow like income-producing real estate, but says it can still function as a long-term savings vehicle and increasingly as collateral in broader credit formation.

Google plans to pay $10 million for business data from Spirit Airlines, adding another example of major technology companies buying large data sets to improve artificial intelligence systems. According to CNN, the proposed deal covers internal communications and company records, including emails, spreadsheets, bookings, frequent-flyer information, and employee human resources data. Reuters separately reported that the package also includes Microsoft Teams messages and calendars, along with marketing, productivity, and operations records. Google told CNN that it acquired part of an enterprise data set from Spirit Airlines because the material could help improve its products and AI models. The company said it will not receive personal information, and the data is expected to be stripped of details that could identify individuals before transfer. The sale has not closed yet and still needs court approval. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane is scheduled to review the transaction at a hearing on Wednesday. Spirit halted operations in May and has been selling remaining assets through bankruptcy. Reuters said AI data company Mercor also competed for the assets with a reported $7.5 million bid. The agreement fits into a broader pattern. Google struck a reported $60 million-a-year deal with Reddit in February 2024, OpenAI reached its own Reddit agreement in May 2024, and the Wikimedia Foundation announced content access agreements in January with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and others.

MoonPay has added Cash App Pay as a payment option for crypto purchases, giving eligible US customers another way to fund transactions with balances already held in the mobile payments app. The integration is available through MoonPay’s own checkout and selected partners, including Trust Wallet, MetaMask, Ledger, Uniswap and others. MoonPay said the move lets users buy crypto without switching apps or logging in again. The company now supports Cash App, PayPal and Venmo, after adding PayPal in 2024 and later expanding to Venmo. Cash App, operated by Block, already lets users buy and sell Bitcoin in-app and had 59 million active users in June, according to Block’s second-quarter shareholder report. MoonPay co-founder and CEO Ivan Soto-Wright said the integration gives tens of millions of Americans access to the digital asset ecosystem through an app they already know and trust. The company also noted its New York and EU regulatory authorizations, while continuing to expand beyond fiat-to-crypto onramps through acquisitions in 2026.

Roboflow, a third-party computer vision evaluation firm, said GPT-5.6 Sol posted the strongest visual performance yet from OpenAI in its VLM benchmark. The biggest jump came in object detection, where Sol scored 46.2 versus 13.8 for GPT-5.5, while Terra and Luna followed at 44.7 and 43.3. Counting accuracy also improved, with Sol rising from 64.9% to 73%. Roboflow highlighted document layout parsing as another area of progress, saying Sol could cleanly identify titles, body text, tables, illustrations, and signatures in documents. The gains were not universal. In full OCR transcription, Sol scored 90.7%, slightly below GPT-5.5’s 91.2%. In targeted extraction tasks such as pulling a date from an invoice, Sol fell to 82.5% from 87.6% for GPT-5.5. Roboflow also reported that detection boxes could become unstable on images around 2000×2000 pixels or larger, a limitation OpenAI acknowledged. According to Roboflow’s testing, Sol cost about 2.5 cents per image and took around 10 seconds, compared with about 1 cent and 6 seconds for Terra, and under 0.5 cents and 5 seconds for Luna. The firm said Gemini 3.5 Flash remained ahead on detection and counting in this benchmark while also costing less per image.

PANews’ Aug. 18 roundup put a wide range of crypto, regulatory, and AI-linked developments on the tape, led by a proposed U.S. Treasury rulemaking tied to the GENIUS Act. The Treasury said it is seeking public comment on the implementation framework for Section 3 of the law. Under the timeline described in the notice, payment stablecoin issuance in the U.S. would generally require a federal or state license starting Jan. 18, 2027, while digital asset service providers would generally be barred from offering U.S. users payment stablecoins issued by unlicensed issuers starting July 18, 2028. Public comments can be filed within 60 days after the proposal is published in the Federal Register. Elsewhere, Bitmine added 9,926 ETH last week, lifting its total holdings to more than 5.81 million ETH. Strategy said it repurchased $132.2 million of STRC and raised its U.S. dollar reserves by $149.1 million to $4.8 billion, while keeping its Bitcoin holdings unchanged at 840,447 BTC. Unitree Robotics said its shares will begin trading on Shanghai’s STAR Market on Aug. 19, with initially unrestricted float accounting for 7.44% of total post-offering shares. The daily digest also covered the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust probe into Andreessen Horowitz, Ethereum Foundation warnings tied to the coming Glamsterdam upgrade, and a slate of funding, exchange, and tokenization updates.