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Lockdown Mode and Elevated Risk Labels by ChatGPT, Qwen3.5-397B is here and more...
And everything else you need to catch up on that happened this week yet!
What's Up in AI
February 17, 2026
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Welcome Back, AI Geeks!
It’s time to stay updated with What’s Up in AI.
Today’s AI news reads like two parallel storylines: one where systems get safer and more restricted, and another where they get bigger, cheaper and more powerful.
In today’s issue:
🔒️ Lockdown Mode and Elevated Risk Labels by ChatGPT
🧠 Qwen3.5-397B is here
⚡ 5-4-3-2-1 hits you just can't miss
📰 What Else Happened in AI
😂 Your AI-Powered Laugh
Read time: 6 mins
The Future of Tech. One Daily News Briefing.
AI is moving faster than any other technology cycle in history. New models. New tools. New claims. New noise.
Most people feel like they’re behind. But the people that don’t, aren’t smarter. They’re just better informed.
Forward Future is a daily news briefing for people who want clarity, not hype. In one concise newsletter each day, you’ll get the most important AI and tech developments, learn why they matter, and what they signal about what’s coming next.
We cover real product launches, model updates, policy shifts, and industry moves shaping how AI actually gets built, adopted, and regulated. Written for operators, builders, leaders, and anyone who wants to sound sharp when AI comes up in the meeting.
It takes about five minutes to read, but the edge lasts all day.
#1 LATEST IN AI TODAY📎
What Happened (Feb 2026):
OpenAI rolled out a new Lockdown Mode in ChatGPT, along with Elevated Risk labels, to protect security-sensitive users from threats like prompt injection.
What You Need to Know:
Lockdown Mode is optional and disables certain tools and capabilities that could be exploited.
Web browsing is restricted to cached content only, preventing live external requests.
Workspace admins can enable the mode and whitelist specific apps or actions, while new Elevated Risk labels flag potentially sensitive features across ChatGPT, Atlas, and Codex.
Why It Matters:
As AI becomes enterprise infrastructure, security features like this aren’t optional — they’re foundational to trust and adoption.
#2 LATEST IN AI TODAY📎
What Happened (Feb 2026):
Alibaba’s Qwen team released Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, an open-weight vision-language model built with a hybrid sparse architecture designed to rival frontier proprietary models like GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro.
What You Need to Know:
The model uses a sparse MoE (Mixture of Experts) design, activating only 17B of 397B parameters per query, delivering strong performance with lower latency.
It reportedly matches frontier models across benchmarks and outperforms them in agentic search, document recognition, and instruction following.
Alibaba claims the model is 60% cheaper to run and at least 8× better at large-scale workloads compared to Qwen3-Max.
Why It Matters:
Open-weight models are closing the gap with proprietary giants — and when they’re cheaper and optimized for agents, the competitive landscape shifts fast.
BRAIN BOOST 🧠
What will matter most as AI becomes enterprise infrastructure? |
QUICK HITS 💥
It’s time for some quick hits that you’ll love. Let’s go in…..5-4-3-2-1 👇️
5- TOP AI TOOLS OF THE DAY
✍️ Veeso turns raw copy into clean, polished visuals instantly so you can present ideas beautifully without design skills. Try now!
📹️ TemVideo transforms images and footage into viral-ready UGC video ads that grab attention fast. Try now!
💻️ Storyship creates sleek product demo videos from simple screen recordings so you can showcase your product like a pro. Try now!
📽️ Vemeo generates cinematic, high-definition videos from text prompts with realistic motion and stunning depth. Try now!
🤖 Seed 2.0 delivers ByteDance’s open-source models built for powerful, general-purpose AI agents and advanced automation. Try now!
4-AI JOB OPPORTUNITIES
Tesla – AI Engineer, Autopilot Systems (Palo Alto, CA)
Salesforce – Research Scientist (San Francisco, CA)
Intel – AI Software Engineer (Hillsboro, OR)
Adobe – Applied Research Scientist – Generative AI (San Jose, CA)
Want us to search for tech related jobs in your country/city ? Post a request 🔍
3-THINGS IN TREND
These 10 prompting techniques promise to take your AI output quality to the next level.
This 35-minute tutorial will teach you everything you need to know about integrating the viral AI agent OpenClaw into your workflow.
Here’s a detailed, step-by-step breakdown on how to build apps that don’t look vibe-coded.
2-USEFUL LINKS
Mexican police plan to deploy quadruped “K9-X” robots during the 2026 World Cup to patrol high-risk areas. The machines can enter dangerous environments, stream live video, and deliver voice commands to suspects—part of a wider security rollout that also includes drones and counter-drone systems for crowd control.
WHAT ELSE HAPPENED IN AI 📰
📲 Manus Brings Personal AI Agents to Telegram
Manus launched personal AI agents directly inside Telegram, giving users full task execution capabilities without any technical setup.
📱 AI After You’re Gone
Meta patented a system that simulates a user’s replies using AI trained on their past interactions. It can post while they are inactive or even deceased.
🇮🇳 India Hosts AI Power Summit
India opened its AI Impact Summit with leaders from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Attendees included Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, and Dario Amodei.
🚁 Pentagon Drone AI Race
SpaceX will reportedly compete in a $100M Pentagon contest to build voice controlled autonomous drone swarms. xAI is also expected to participate.
🗣️ ElevenLabs Targets Governments
ElevenLabs launched ElevenLabs for Government. The program helps public agencies deploy secure multilingual voice and chat AI.
Funding 💰️
India’s Adani Group to Invest $100 Billion on AI Infrastructure
GET AN AI-POWERED LAUGH 😁
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And that’s a wrap!
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Team What’s Up in AI