Meta and Google Both Ship New Models, OpenAI's Astra Raises Safety Monitoring Concerns

Today we're covering the biggest AI stories of September 3rd, 2026. Meta and Google both shipped new models within hours of each other, with Meta's Muse Spark 1.3 hitting a 62 on Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index, trailing only Claude Fable 5.1 and Opus 5 while costing far less, and Mark Zuckerberg already teasing a larger model codenamed Watermelon, while Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash landed at 59 with real gains in coding and reasoning, though DeepMind's own Koray Kavukcuoglu admitted Gemini still sits a little below the frontier. A new report claims OpenAI's upcoming Astra model uses a technique called recurrent depth, running the same text through repeated analysis loops to boost intelligence without making the model bigger, but producing reasoning that comes out as pure math instead of readable text, a real problem for safety monitoring, with OpenAI reportedly dialing the loops back so Astra still shows its work and promising extra monitoring at launch, even as its own chief scientist admits current monitoring is already fragile for reasons that have nothing to do with Astra. Plus, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Axios the government now trusts Anthropic and considers the relationship repaired, and today's community workflow comes from John, who spent months building a custom GPT with the personalities of Einstein, Lorentz, Planck, and Compton to challenge his own physics equations and ended up with a paper unifying formulas from the atomic scale to the black hole scale.