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.

Source: TechCrunch.

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.

Source: CNBC.

Correction: the cited Gemini Deep Think rollout was in 2025

The original roundup described a June 2026 rollout and attached context-window and benchmark claims. The cited Google announcement is dated August 1, 2025, so it does not support presenting that rollout as news from June 2026. Those unsupported details have been removed in this November 1 correction. Google describes Deep Think as using additional reasoning time and parallel exploration; consult its dated announcement for the historical release.

Reported GPT-4.5 Retirement on June 27

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.

Source: gHacks.

Node.js 26.4.0 Released

Node.js 26.4.0 shipped on June 24, 2026. Its release notes include new filesystem and networking APIs, package maps, and a minimal virtual-filesystem subsystem, alongside fixes. This was more than a dependency-only maintenance release. Review the official release notes for compatibility details.