> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://arka-agent-mintlify-f21cea86.mintlify.site/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Week of August 24, 2026

> Weekly Arka changelog: model-policy control, browser-app launcher, tougher chat and search, and Docker CLI detection fixes.

A quieter week focused on reliability. Highlights below.

## New features

* **[Model policy control](/guides/free-models).** Set `ARKA_MODEL_POLICY` to `local-first`, `hosted-first`, `local-only`, or `hosted-only` to reorder LLM fallback chains without editing config.
* **[Launch browser apps by name](/guides/open-url).** `arka open brave`, `open chrome`, `open firefox`, `open safari`, `open edge`, `open arc`, `open vivaldi`, and `open opera` now open the desktop app instead of the matching `.com` site.

## Improvements

* **Faster `arka --help`.** The CLI defers loading heavy dependencies (OpenAI SDK, faster-whisper, and others) until the matching subcommand runs, so top-level help returns immediately.
* **Simple arithmetic in chat.** Questions like `what is 12 * 7 + 3` are recognized as math and routed to the math path directly.
* **Configurable web search timeouts.** DuckDuckGo lookups honor `DDGS_TIMEOUT` (default 20s) and `DDGS_RETRIES` (default 2) so slow networks no longer stall chat.
* **Chat survives web failures.** If web-context gathering fails, chat prints the error and continues instead of aborting the turn.
* **Gemini quota handling.** When Gemini returns a rate or quota error, Arka marks all Gemini models exhausted for the run instead of rotating API keys and retrying.

## Bug fixes

* **[Docker status finds the CLI everywhere](/guides/docker-status).** `arka docker status` now locates the `docker` binary at `/usr/local/bin/docker` and `/usr/bin/docker` when it isn't on `PATH`, and skips host/container parity checks when the CLI is unavailable inside a container.


## Related topics

- [Week of August 31, 2026](/changelog/2026-08-31.md)
- [Week of August 17, 2026](/changelog/2026-08-17.md)
- [Week of September 7, 2026](/changelog/2026-09-07.md)
- [Week of September 14, 2026](/changelog/2026-09-14.md)
- [Week of September 21, 2026](/changelog/2026-09-21.md)


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