ANO—THER. ● NEWS

ByteDance

Illustration for the Concat open-source CapCut replacement story
open sourceproducts

A free CapCut replacement written with Claude passed 10,000 downloads

A developer posting on r/ClaudeAI as JUB0T released Concat, a free and open-source CapCut replacement written in Rust with Slint and GPU shaders. He says he built it in about three weeks on a Claude Max subscription, with help from Claude and a handful of open-source contributors, and that people are switching to it from CapCut. The GitHub repository went up on August 25, 2026, has passed 2,300 stars, and its 25 releases have been downloaded more than 10,000 times. He added a note to the thread clarifying that Concat is completely free, with no paid tier.

Illustration for the AI TikTok character story
cultureproducts

An AI sorority girl ran on TikTok for a week and cost $100

On August 18, 2026 a16z partner Olivia Moore revealed that "Janie", a 19-year-old redhead posting University of Alabama rush videos on TikTok, was an AI character. Creation took one ChatGPT image, then about 30 minutes a day of prompting MiniMax and Grok Imagine to animate the daily posts, at a total cost of around $100. In one week Janie's first video neared 100,000 views, her clips pulled tens of thousands of views each and the account gained 1,300 followers. TikTok's systems flagged 8 of her 20 videos as AI-generated, and per Moore the label had no visible effect on views or comments.

Illustration for the China AI companion law story
policy

China's AI companion law forced Doubao to delete custom agents

China's 'Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services' took effect on July 15, 2026, requiring any AI that simulates human personality to ship anti-addiction systems, usage-time notifications, instant-exit mechanisms and real-time detection of emotional over-dependence. ByteDance's Doubao, one of China's biggest consumer AI apps, took its custom agents offline on July 15, citing product function adjustments, and Alibaba's Qwen did the same. After October 15, Doubao agent data can no longer be viewed or recovered in the app.

Illustration for the China AI companion law story
policy

China's AI companion law took effect and Doubao deleted its agents

China's Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services took effect on July 15, 2026, requiring any AI that simulates human personality to ship anti-addiction systems, mandatory usage-time notifications, instant-exit mechanisms and real-time detection of emotional over-dependence. ByteDance's Doubao, China's most popular chatbot, took its custom AI agents offline on July 15, citing product function adjustments, and Alibaba's Qwen did the same. After October 15, Doubao's related agent data can no longer be viewed or recovered in the app.