On Wednesday 5 August, Sundar Pichai's blog post moved Demis Hassabis to Chair of GDM and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, made Koray Kavukcuoglu **SVP of Google DeepMind reporting to Pichai — not CEO, whatever several outlets wrote** — and confirmed Jeff Dean's departure after 27 years to launch Discovery Loop with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le. Google DeepMind now has no chief executive, and the semi-independent layer between DeepMind and Google is gone. Plus CoreBreak, the Black Hat research showing an agent runtime can be made to fire its own tools with no model turn at all, Alphabet's up-to-$25bn bond raise, Canva cutting its growth forecast on AI serving costs, Google Maps becoming a transacting agent, and an AI that designed 16 working bacteriophages. ## In this episode - **CoreBreak** — Hedi Ingber and Aviyam Ivgi at Black Hat USA. Data *shaped like* a model-generated tool call reaches the dispatch path and the runtime executes it, with no model turn. **This is not prompt injection.** AWS, Google and Vercel all shipped fixes — **and the exposure is still not closed**: the open-source **Strands** library AgentCore is built on retains the vulnerable shortcut, a PR raising it was **closed unmerged on 19 June 2026**, and AWS issued documentation rather than a code patch on shared-responsibility grounds - **CoreBreak is NOT episode 5's Check Point research.** Different researchers, different bugs, same conference. Google **did** issue CVE-2026-18236 (CVSS 9.3) for the CoreBreak ADK flaw and **did not** issue one for Check Point's separate ADK finding, which got a partial fix. Caveat per The Hacker News: the public CVE record covers the continuation-forgery path only, and ADK 2.5.0 also fixed a second bypass with no CVE assigned - **Alphabet returns to the bond market** — up to **$25bn**, in as many as **10 parts**, maturities 2–40 years, ~$115bn peak demand. Context: Q2 capex of $44.9bn and negative free cash flow of about $5.9bn - **Canva cuts its growth forecast** — to around **20%, down from a 30% target**. That is a cut to the **growth rate, not to revenue**. Quarterly revenue reported at about **US$922m**. Perkins: the average cost of serving an AI task was too high. Recovery: **90% off the cost of one AI task**, a video model **17×** and an image model **30×** cheaper than **an unnamed frontier model** - **Google Maps becomes a transacting agent** — Ask Maps orders food (Square and Toast, US only), compares hotels, buys tickets. **Personal Intelligence**, which reads Gmail and Calendar, is **off by default**. Plus Gemini Spark driving your real desktop Chrome - **An AI designed 16 working viruses** — Stanford and the Arc Institute went from just over 300 generated bacteriophage designs to 16 that infected *E. coli* strain C, with Johns Hopkins' Thomas Inglesby and Moritz Hanke asking for an ID check at the DNA synthesis provider that **no US law currently requires**. Context most coverage omitted: **Thursday is the peer-reviewed publication in *Science*; the work has been public as a preprint since September 2025.** The capability didn't appear this week — it finished review this week - **Follow-up with a clock:** CISA's 7 August federal deadline on **CVE-2026-9198** passed with **still no published exploitation detail and no threat-actor attribution**. What is new is the exploitation chain, described by security vendors rather than CISA. (Added to the KEV catalog **Tuesday 4 August**, per CISA's own alert page) - **Deep dive:** the restructure, Discovery Loop (**no disclosed raise or valuation — the round was still open**), Alphabet shares falling about 4% on Wednesday, the six-month coding gap Semafor's sources describe, and five named counter-arguments that do not agree with each other ## Sources **Deep dive: the Google DeepMind restructure and Discovery Loop** - [Google blog — Sundar Pichai, "The next chapter of our AI momentum" (PRIMARY)](https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/next-chapter-ai-momentum/) - [TechCrunch — Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup](https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/05/jeff-dean-and-other-top-ai-researchers-are-leaving-google-to-launch-their-own-startup/) - [CNBC — Google chief scientist Jeff Dean leaving company after 27 years](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/05/google-chief-scientist-jeff-dean-leaving-company-after-27-years.html) - [Semafor — Demis Hassabis was shifting away from DeepMind CEO duties for a year (anonymous sourcing: two people familiar with his thinking)](https://www.semafor.com/article/08/05/2026/demis-hassabis-was-shifting-away-from-deepmind-ceo-duties-for-a-year) - [Axios — Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis and the AI leadership shuffle](https://www.axios.com/2026/08/05/google-deepmind-demis-hassabis-ai) - [Radical Ventures — Our investment in Discovery Loop](https://radical.vc/our-investment-in-discovery-loop/) - [Bloomberg — Google ...
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24 Aug 202627 min