#Google

According to a Financial Times report, OpenAI and Google have been providing advanced AI services to Singapore-based subsidiaries of Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, whose parent companies are on the Pentagon's 1260H list of Chinese military companies. These transactions are currently legal under US export controls but have renewed calls for stricter regulations. This report exposes potential loopholes in US export controls on AI technology, as subsidiaries abroad may not be covered. It raises significant compliance questions for major AI providers and could accelerate the push for broader AI export restrictions. OpenAI recently suspended API access to an Alibaba affiliate after detecting model distillation and reported the incident to the US government. In contrast, Anthropic has a stricter policy that prohibits all Chinese entities and their overseas subsidiaries from accessing its frontier AI models.

Google introduced a new 'Save media' setting within Search service history that saves media from features like Google Lens, Search Live, voice search, and Translate speaking exercises, and uses it to improve Google services and AI models. This policy change affects millions of users who use these features, raising privacy concerns about how media is used for AI training. It also highlights the importance of opt-out mechanisms in an era of growing AI data collection. The setting is part of the 'Search service history' in Google Account settings, and users can opt out by turning off 'Save media'. Media includes images, files, audio, and video from Google Lens, Search Live, voice search, and Translate speaking exercises.

Cloudflare announced that starting September 15, 2026, it will default-block mixed-use AI crawlers—those that simultaneously scrape for search indexing and AI training—on ad-supported pages. The company specifically criticized Google for exploiting a loophole where publishers block AI crawlers but allow Google's search bot, which Google then uses to train its AI models. This policy shift forces AI companies to either separate their crawlers by function or pay for content usage, potentially altering the economic balance between web publishers and AI developers. It could set a precedent for other internet infrastructure providers and empower publishers to control how their content is used for AI training. The default block applies to new Cloudflare websites and existing free-tier customers, while paid customers can opt in or out. Cloudflare also partnered with Ceramic.ai and You.com to enable a pay-per-use revenue model, allowing AI companies to compensate publishers based on actual usage.

Google has released Nano Banana 2 Lite, a fast image generation model that produces images in 4 seconds at a cost of $0.034 per 1K images, and Gemini Omni Flash, a multimodal video generation model that creates 10-second videos from text, image, or video inputs, now available to developers. These models significantly reduce the cost and latency of generative media, making high-quality image and video synthesis more accessible for developers and enterprises, and expanding the capabilities of Google's AI ecosystem. Nano Banana 2 Lite is available in Google AI Studio, Gemini API, and Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, and will be integrated into consumer products like Search AI Mode and the Gemini app. Gemini Omni Flash costs $0.10 per second of video output but currently lacks audio reference, scene extension, and full character consistency across scenes.