AI News Briefing — June 19, 2026

Perplexity launched Brain, a self-improving memory system for its agent product Computer that builds a context graph of the agent's work rather than the user's preferences. At intervals such as overnight, Brain reviews the graph and teaches itself to perform tasks more efficiently, rolling out to Max and Enterprise subscribers.

FERC directed grid operators to give AI data centers a fast lane for grid interconnection but stopped short of addressing underlying electricity supply shortages. The order prioritizes data center growth amid grid strain.

Building on yesterday's Social announcement, OpenAI released LifeSciBench, a benchmark of 750 expert-authored life-science research tasks with grading rubrics spanning seven workflows and seven biological domains. Even the strongest models pass roughly one task in three, leaving the benchmark far from saturated.

Senator Bernie Sanders proposed legislation creating a sovereign wealth fund financed by a one-time 50 percent tax on the stock of the largest AI companies, targeting any firm with over 200 million dollars in annual AI sales. The estimated 7 trillion dollar fund would generate direct payments to Americans plus health, education, and housing programs.

Anthropic remains unable to distribute its recent Claude Mythos and Fable 5 models after running afoul of Trump administration export controls, with the specific violation still unclear. The piece highlights how AI export rules are being improvised in real time by the White House.

AI inference startup Baseten is reportedly closing a 1.5 billion dollar round at a 13 billion dollar valuation, just months after its previous mega-round. The raise underscores intense investor appetite for inference infrastructure.

General Intuition is in talks to raise 300 million dollars at roughly a 2 billion dollar valuation to train embodied AI and world models. It uses Medal's dataset of around 2 billion gameplay videos per year from 10 million monthly users.