AI Daily Brief — 2026-07-23

The US Department of Commerce's BIS is formally investigating whether Chinese companies, such as Moonshot, are accessing advanced US AI chips to train their models. This investigation comes as Trump administration officials have publicly criticized Chinese open-source AI companies. The inquiry focuses on the potential use of sophisticated American technology by these firms, highlighting ongoing concerns about technology transfer and national security.

Anthropic has expanded Claude's voice mode to include Opus and Sonnet models, allowing users to seamlessly switch between text and voice during conversations and change models mid-chat. This update enables users to start with a quick chat using Haiku and then transition to Opus for deeper exploration. Additionally, voice mode now supports several new languages, including French, German, Spanish, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese, moving beyond its previous English-only beta availability for these languages.

A research paper titled "Anthropomorphism in Children's Interactions with LLM Chatbots" has been accepted by ACM IDC '26. This study, categorized under Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC), explores how children interact with large language model chatbots, focusing on anthropomorphism. The paper, identified as arXiv:2607.18250v1, was submitted by Renkai Ma on May 9, 2026.

OpenAI is expanding access to ChatGPT Health across the US, enabling users to link their medical records and health data to the chatbot. Ashley Alexander, OpenAI’s VP of health product, stated that their models now demonstrate reasoning capabilities surpassing clinician levels. This wider release follows the recent launch of GPT-5.6 Sol, which OpenAI touts as its "strongest model yet for health," and ChatGPT Health will operate using OpenAI's most current models.

Startup founders are urging the U.S. government not to restrict access to Chinese open-weight AI models. They argue that such a move could stifle innovation and hinder the development of AI technologies globally. The founders believe that maintaining an open exchange of AI research and models is crucial for progress and for the U.S. to remain competitive in the AI landscape.

Etched, an AI chip startup founded in 2022 by three Harvard dropouts, has successfully closed a $300 million Series C funding round, achieving a $10.3 billion valuation. Co-founder and COO Robert Wachen confirmed this to TechCrunch. Etched's systems are designed to run various AI models, including Mixture of Experts models like DeepSeek and Qwen, and non-transformer designs such as Mamba, which utilizes a state-space model architecture.