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Week 36 · 2026

August 31 – September 6

3 events

Importance: important GitHub Tools and apps update ✓ official

GitHub recommends Claude Opus 5.5 following the retirement of Claude Opus 4.7

The recommended replacement for Claude Opus 4.7 in GitHub Copilot is Claude Opus 5.5; the original announcement listed Claude Opus 5. The retirement of four models takes effect on 2 October 2026 across all environments of the service.

New: The recommended replacement for Claude Opus 4.7 is Claude Opus 5.5, not Claude Opus 5.

Importance: monitoring Regulation and law 1 source

Germany is establishing the federal AI safety institute DE-AISI

In June 2026, the German government decided to establish the federal institute DE-AISI to analyse the safety of advanced AI models. Four cities are competing to host it, while Bitkom and DFKI are disputing the scope of its mandate; UK, USA and nine other countries or the EU already have similar institutes.

Importance: monitoring Google Other update ✓ 2

Google DeepMind: Gemini 4 model is in the fine-tuning phase, release planned earlier than end of year

Google DeepMind head Koray Kavukcuoglu said that the Gemini 4 model is in the fine-tuning phase and the company plans to release it much earlier than by the end of the year. He previously said that leadership in frontier AI is the company's sole priority; the Gemini 3.5 Pro model, despite being announced, was never released.

New: Gemini 3.5 Pro was never released, even though it was announced in May 2026; the project missed 3 deadlines; Demis Hassabis stepped down from leading Google DeepMind in August 2026; Kavukcuoglu replaced him; Kavukcuoglu explicitly rejects AGI as a priority, calling it 'not the right conversation'; Google DeepMind operates under competitive pressure as a 'Gemini factory' (a model-production facility); Gemini 4 is in the 'early phase of post-training', with release planned 'much earlier' than by the end of the year