Today in AI — August 13, 2026

OpenAI gave ChatGPT a memory of everything you do on your Mac, Microsoft retired its Copilot mascot after less than a year, and Apple warned spyware targets across 110 countries — while the money pipeline kept flowing, from Micron's new venture fund to Reddit's S&P 500 debut.

Industry

• Microsoft's Clippy-like blob Mico is no longer the face of Copilot — the emotive yellow character that launched in Copilot's voice mode last October is being removed "in waves" and moved to Microsoft's Learn Live platform, where it will have "more to react to," according to a Microsoft support page. The retirement, first reported by GeekWire, puts Mico in the company's long line of retired assistants alongside Clippy, Cortana, and Rover — and lands as Microsoft merges its Copilot apps into a "super app" under new leader Jacob Andreou.
• Reddit shares jumped 11% in extended trading after S&P Dow Jones Indices said the company will join the S&P 500 on August 18, replacing AvalonBay Communities and making Reddit only the second pure-play social media company in the index after Meta. The inclusion caps a year in which AI data-licensing deals helped drive eight straight quarters of sales growth above 60% — though investors were rattled in July by "choppy" search referrals that exposed Reddit's reliance on Google for new users.
• Micron Ventures launched a $250 million fund to invest in the next generation of AI companies, per the announcement picked up by Investing News Network and Dealroom. The memory maker's venture arm already backs early-stage deep-tech startups, and the new fund gives Micron a direct stake in the AI startups that are becoming its most important future customers.
• Lululemon's chief AI officer is leaving less than a year into the job — Bloomberg reports the departure of the retailer's first chief AI and technology officer, hired last August to speed up product innovation. It's another short-tenured AI executive exit at a major consumer brand, where AI leadership roles remain a revolving door.
• Goldman Sachs says both the bulls and the bears are wrong about the AI capex explosion — new research argues the two camps are overestimating the economic impact of Big Tech's spending boom, with AI's real footprint smaller than either side assumes, per Business Insider. The note lands as the buildout's earnings season intensifies the debate over whether all that spending is inflation or productivity.

Policy

• Apple pushed a fresh wave of spyware threat notifications to users in 110 countries, with the alerts now arriving as lock-screen push notifications that open directly into guidance on what to do next — an upgrade Citizen Lab's John Scott-Railton calls a "big improvement" over the alerts Apple has sent since 2021. Apple says it has now notified customers in more than 150 countries total, and recommends switching on Lockdown Mode, which the company says has never been defeated in an attack it has seen.
• MIT Technology Review's roundtable traces how the "censorship-industrial complex" — the claim that government, tech, and research networks collude to suppress conservative speech online — moved from right-wing internet spaces into US policy. The framing is becoming a fixture of the policy fights over content moderation and AI safety, and the discussion is a useful map of where the idea comes from and where it's heading.

Tools

• OpenAI launched Computer History, an opt-in macOS feature that turns your computer activity into ChatGPT memories — the desktop app records interaction events (clicks, typing, app switches) across apps and websites you choose, builds a searchable timeline, and lets ChatGPT and Codex pick up where you left off. It replaces the screenshot-based Chronicle research preview with a rebuilt system that OpenAI says uses fewer tokens and adds privacy controls: collection is off by default, per-app selection, pause, and full delete. It rolls out now to Pro, Business, and Enterprise users (admins must enable it for their teams), with the EEA, UK, and Switzerland to follow in the coming weeks.

OpenAI now watches what you do on your Mac so ChatGPT can remember — is that the assistant you've been waiting for, or a privacy line being crossed? Tell us in the comments.

Sources: OpenAI — Computer History · The New Stack · 9to5Mac · The Verge · GeekWire · CNBC · Barron's · Micron Ventures · Investing News Network · Bloomberg · 东方财富 (Eastmoney) · Business Insider · 东方财富 (Eastmoney) · TechCrunch · MIT Technology Review