Stratego was one of the few major competitive board games where humans still had the edge over machines. That may now be over. A research team from Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, Stanford University and MIT has built Ataraxos, a Stratego AI that clearly beat the most successful player in the game's history. According to the team, training cost less than $8,000.
The work is published in Nature. As far as the authors know, Ataraxos is the first AI to reach superhuman level in Stratego.
A one-sided match against the best
In an official 20-game series, Ataraxos played Dutch player Pim Niemeijer. The final score was 15 wins, four draws and one loss for the AI.
Not every step in an AI agent needs a model that writes. Many steps only need a model that picks. That is the idea behind Strands Decider 2B, a new open-source release from Amazon Web Services' Strands Labs team. AWS describes it as a lightweight "decision model" built to make fast choices inside agentic workflows without generating any text.
The model is out now on Hugging Face. The full codebase, training scripts and examples are on GitHub. AWS has tuned it for local use and quick experiments, so developers can run it on their own laptops as well as in public cloud environments.
Deepseek is putting its software weight behind Huawei. The Chinese AI developer has built a set of programming tools for Huawei's Ascend AI chips and is releasing all of it as open source. The goal is simple to state and hard to reach: make domestic Chinese hardware as easy to program as Nvidia's.
The announcement came through Deepseek's official WeChat channel, with further details reported by Reuters and The New York Times.
What Deepseek released
The package includes libraries for running computations on Ascend chips and for moving data between chips. According to Deepseek, Huawei "fully supported" the effort. The two companies also worked together to optimize a supernode, which is a cluster of 128 Ascend 950 chips linked to act as one large system.
An open-weight model from China can now build working cyber exploits almost as well as Anthropic's most tightly guarded system. That is the central claim of a new analysis from Anthropic's Frontier Red Team, which examined GLM-5.3 from Zhipu AI. The company sells its models outside China under the name Z.ai.
The comparison point is Claude Mythos Preview, which Anthropic unveiled five months ago. Anthropic did not release it widely. Instead, it gave access to selected defenders through Project Glasswing so they could get ahead of attackers. According to Anthropic, those defenders have since found more than 10,000 vulnerabilities in critical software. OpenAI follows a similar restricted approach with Daybreak.
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