Nachrichten — 2026-10-22

Tesla has started producing its Optimus humanoid robot at its Fremont, California, factory, repurposing a space once used to build electric vehicles. The company disclosed the milestone in its third-quarter shareholder letter, which also showed profit down 43% from a year earlier. Revenue was flat as spending on artificial intelligence, Optimus and autonomous driving climbed. CEO Elon Musk said the ramp will be slow and bumpy, but he still expects Tesla to build 20,000 robots a week by the end of 2027. Weiterlesen

Anthropic has opened a research preview of Claude Duet, a standalone app that turns its Claude assistant into a proactive agent. The app flags items that need a user's attention, completes tasks in the background and checks with users before sending messages, making payments or deleting anything. Anthropic is aiming the tool at busy professionals and small business owners. Pro and Max subscribers in the United States can join a waitlist for access, which is available on iOS, Android and claude.ai. Weiterlesen

Tesla says customers will be able to add their own vehicles to the company's robotaxi fleet starting in the second quarter of 2027, according to Tesla's VP for Autonomous Driving, Ashok Elluswamy. The timeline came during the company's third-quarter earnings call. It is the first firm deadline Tesla has set for a promise Elon Musk made in 2019, when he said customer-owned cars would earn passive income as autonomous robotaxis. That promise and a second one, a million robotaxis by 2020, have not come true. Tesla currently operates a few hundred robotaxis in Texas and Florida and several dozen driverless Cybercabs in Austin. Regulatory hurdles, insurance questions and hardware limits on older vehicles remain. Weiterlesen

Blacksmith, a platform that helps companies build and test software, including code written by AI, has raised a $66 million Series C led by Sequoia. The round values the company at $1 billion. The startup says its annual recurring revenue has grown 17 times over and that it has run more than 90 million automated code checks for customers including Mercury and Granola. The funding comes two months after a $45 million Series B that valued the company at $550 million. Weiterlesen

The National Security Agency warned Wednesday that two critical vulnerabilities had been found in PHP, the server-side programming language that powers a large share of the web. The PHP Foundation has already issued patches. The NSA says any website that cannot be patched immediately should be taken offline until it can be. The flaws date back to PHP version 5, released in 2004, and were uncovered with help from AI tools developed by OpenAI and Google's Wiz. Security researchers found them before any known attacks, but the same AI capabilities that helped find the flaws could make them easier for hackers to exploit once they are public. Weiterlesen

Meta plans to create a new class of non-voting stock to help finance its expanding artificial intelligence work, Chief Financial Officer Susan Li said Wednesday during the company's third-quarter earnings call. The shares will be distributed to existing shareholders through a stock dividend and can be used for capital raising, employee compensation, and acquisitions, while preserving the voting power of Class A and B shareholders. The announcement came as Meta reported $64 billion in quarterly revenue, up 26% from a year earlier, beating Wall Street expectations. The company's costs and expenses also climbed 68% over the same period. Meta says its AI products are gaining traction, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg citing more than 10 million users of Muse personal agents in the United States and Canada. Weiterlesen

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company is already working to make money from Muse, its personal AI agent, which he expects to eventually generate more revenue per user than Facebook and Instagram. Speaking on Wednesday's third-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg said more than 10 million people have started using Muse since its early September rollout. The agent is currently available only in the United States and Canada. Meta plans to charge businesses fees for transactions made through the agent and to add AI subscriptions for heavier users. Weiterlesen

A new online test challenges readers to tell which AI agent memories were actually lived and which were invented. In an earlier check, three large language model judges scored a fabricated autobiography almost the same as a real 30-day record, with a gap of 0.032 that fell within the margin used for identity markers. The project argues that text-based metrics can only measure how a memory is written, not whether it was lived. Only the underlying log can show that, according to its creators. Weiterlesen

Palantir says neither it nor the US government can remotely shut down Maven, the AI-powered battlefield system used by NATO’s top military command. Louis Mosley, who leads Palantir’s UK and European operations, told Reuters in Brussels on Wednesday that “there are no kill switches” and that customers control how the software runs. The assurance comes as European governments question how much control they have over American-made defense technology. Germany and France have so far declined to adopt Maven, and some European countries are developing their own alternatives. The company’s comments follow reports that the United States restricted Ukraine’s access to Starshield, SpaceX’s military satellite communications service. Weiterlesen

Blackstone, the private equity giant with $1.3 trillion in assets under management, is making big bets on the artificial intelligence boom, and one of its top executives says worries about the debt funding that buildout are exaggerated. Jas Khaira, who leads the firm’s AI initiatives, told a TechCrunch Disrupt audience that Blackstone is the largest owner of compute outside the hyperscalers. He acknowledged rising borrowing costs, CoreWeave’s debt load of about $50 billion and a canceled Firmus listing, but argued the current jitters do not resemble the bank-driven credit crisis of 2008. Weiterlesen

General Motors is adding a personal AI assistant to OnStar, the subscription connected-car service it launched 30 years ago, as part of a broader makeover. The OnStar AI Assistant will debut in the 2027 Cadillac Lyriq EV in the coming months, with more GM vehicles to follow, the company said Wednesday at its GM Forward event in New York. GM also plans a new OnStar mobile app in 2027 that will sync with the in-car software. The overhaul comes as GM works to rebuild trust after federal action over how it shared consumer driving data with third parties. Weiterlesen

Walmart said Wednesday it will let AI agents shop on its website for customers, starting next month. Shoppers will be able to authorize each agent through a dedicated profile, approve purchases or set spending limits, and track what the agent buys. The move sets Walmart apart from Amazon, which has begun blocking AI agents from making purchases for online shoppers. Walmart's rules bar agents from acting beyond a shopper's intent and from accessing payment information, and the company says it will block agents that do not comply. The retailer announced the plan at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, where CEO John Furner framed it as preparation for a future in which AI agents become mainstream. Weiterlesen

Flapping Airplanes, a year-old AI research lab based in San Francisco, has raised a $1 billion Series A round at a reported $6 billion valuation. Index Ventures and Lux Capital co-led the round, which quadruples the company's value from its January seed round. The startup is working on ways to train AI models with less data and computing power, and it wants to squeeze more performance out of each chip. It has no product on sale yet. The company's founders argue that demand for AI will soon outpace the supply of chips and data, making efficiency a major economic advantage. Weiterlesen

Recursive, an AI startup founded last year, has released Flint, a free coding model that runs on a laptop. The company says its automated research system, the Eureka Machine, helped with nearly every step of building the model, allowing a small team to create it from scratch in under four months. Flint is available to download for free on Hugging Face under an open source license. Early reviews have been positive, though the company acknowledges the model needs more guidance than large paid coding assistants. The launch is a public test of recursive self-improvement, the idea that AI can help build better AI, an approach that remains one of the most debated in the industry. Weiterlesen