Latest in Tech, 26 June 2026

OpenAI and Broadcom Unveil Jalapeño, OpenAI's First Custom Chip

OpenAI announced its first custom hardware on June 24 in partnership with Broadcom: an LLM-optimized inference chip called Jalapeño. The chip went from initial design to manufacturing tape-out in nine months, which the companies say may be the fastest ASIC development cycle ever achieved in high-performance semiconductors. Jalapeño is a reticle-sized ASIC designed specifically for LLM inference workloads, built alongside Celestica, and is targeting initial deployment by the end of 2026. OpenAI's chip roadmap is positioned as a multi-generation platform to reduce reliance on Nvidia for inference compute.

Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of Industrial-Scale Model Distillation

Anthropic told US senators and White House officials on June 24-25 that Alibaba orchestrated the largest known AI distillation campaign against the company. Between April 22 and June 5, 2026, operators linked to Alibaba's Qwen lab ran 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts. The queries specifically targeted software engineering and agentic reasoning capabilities in Anthropic's frontier Mythos model. Anthropic has banned the accounts involved and is pushing Congress to sanction companies caught running similar extraction campaigns.

Gemini 2.5 Pro Deep Think Mode Rolls Out

Google began rolling out Deep Think mode for Gemini 2.5 Pro to Google AI Ultra subscribers on June 22. The model includes a 2-million-token context window, and Deep Think adds an extended reasoning step where the model explores multiple solution paths before producing a response. On public benchmarks, Gemini 2.5 Pro with Deep Think leads on science, math, and general reasoning, while Fable 5 continues to lead on software engineering tasks (SWE-bench) and long-horizon agentic coding.

GPT-4.5 Leaving ChatGPT Tomorrow

OpenAI is retiring GPT-4.5 from ChatGPT on June 27, 2026, following a 30-day notice period. The retirement affects only the ChatGPT interface; GPT-4.5 remains available through the API. OpenAI cited low usage now that GPT-5 fully supersedes it across major benchmarks. The company also confirmed that o3 will follow on August 26, 2026. OpenAI is simultaneously upgrading GPT-5.5 Instant as the recommended replacement for lightweight tasks.

Node.js 26.4.0 Released

Node.js 26.4.0 shipped on June 24, 2026, alongside version 24.18.0 on June 23. Both are maintenance releases updating the underlying library stack: openssl moves to 3.5.7, llhttp to 9.4.2, nghttp2 to 1.69.0, and undici receives a patch update. Neither release adds new language or runtime features; the focus is keeping the dependency chain current and patched against known vulnerabilities.