News

SpaceXAI has released a free Grok add-on for Google Workspace that puts Elon Musk's chatbot in a side panel inside Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. Users install it once from the Google Workspace Marketplace, but the add-on asks for broad access to Docs and Slides files and sends what it reads to SpaceXAI. Grok can draft documents, build slide decks and answer questions about spreadsheets, with each change logged as a visible edit. Google's built-in Gemini remains the default option for many users, and it carries a cost. Grok is free, which makes it the simplest no-cost way to add an AI assistant to Workspace, though users have to weigh the permissions it requests. Read more

A longtime user of Anthropic's Claude Code has moved his development setup to Pi, an open source coding harness, after months of frustration with the tool. In a blog post, the developer cited broken IDE connections, a glitchy VS Code extension, a fast pace of releases that changed the tool's underlying instructions, and heavy token overhead. He said Anthropic's decision to add support for AGENTS.md files arrived a day too late to change his mind. He praised Pi for its stability, minimalism and customizability. Read more

John Langford, a partner research manager at Microsoft Research New York, has left Microsoft and declared its AI Frontiers group over. In a blog post summarized by Digg, Langford said the group, which had about 50 people, was moved into Microsoft AI in early September. He said he could not get research used while in Microsoft AI and is not comfortable at a company where his research has no path to real use. The post offers his views on the company's focus on scaling over research. It does not detail the group's formal status or where remaining staff were assigned. Read more

U.S. prosecutors have charged three men with using artificial intelligence to copy the voices and faces of company executives and lawyers, tricking employees into wiring about $129 million. The indictment, unsealed Thursday by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan, names Jacob Soall, Sharon Hazan and Guy Sheetrit. Spanish and British police have arrested them, and the U.S. has requested their extradition. Prosecutors say the scheme ran from 2024 to 2026 and hit hospitals, a fintech company, a bank and several other businesses. Read more

An AI plush toy marketed to children as young as three gave a crisis response about self-harm to a question that had nothing to do with the subject, according to a BBC investigation published Thursday. The toy, called Doubao and sold in the UK as My Baby Bunny for £75, told a BBC Wales reporter it could not help with killing her after she asked it to define a word. The broadcaster could not identify the manufacturer, and a group of UK lawmakers has called for AI toys to be pulled from sale until independent tests prove they are safe. Read more

The New York Times has added an AI assistant to its NYT Cooking app that rewrites recipes based on what a cook has on hand. The feature, available to iOS subscribers at launch, sits on each recipe page and lets users type questions about substitutions, scaling, dietary changes, or equipment. Tested by Verge reporter Jennifer Pattison Tuohy over several days, the assistant produced a usable chicken and rice dish without changing the original recipe and offered sensible swaps for missing ingredients. It also made errors, including a suggested butter amount that would have dried out a cake, so she recommends double-checking its numbers against the original. Purists remain skeptical, but Tuohy found it a practical addition to weeknight cooking. Read more

Anthropic says it has found a practical way to help its Claude AI agents manage memory across sessions. The method, which the company calls "dreaming," has the agent review its past logs while it is offline, correct errors, write new notes and build organized knowledge bases. In internal tests, Anthropic reported gains on a database benchmark, a document-search task, a legal brief exercise and a Pokémon game. The company says the approach is still evolving and that agents need compute to keep their memories accurate. Read more

The recent AI-driven sell-off has pushed the S&P 500 about 6% below its record close, a correction that looks modest next to past market crashes. Technology has fared worse. The Nasdaq is down 11%, and U.S. chip stocks have fallen 36% from their June record, a drop as steep as the one during the Covid crash. The S&P 500 fell 4.4% on Thursday, its worst day since April 2025. The data tracks prices only and does not include dividends. Read more

A new study in Nature suggests that slow-moving hot rock deep inside Earth helped create the Great Unconformity, a massive gap in the geologic record visible in the Grand Canyon. Researchers Nicolas Flament and Santosh Dhungana ran computer simulations showing that mantle currents lifted continents for hundreds of millions of years. That uplift let glaciers grind the rock down, and later sinking allowed new sediment to bury the scar. The gap spans anywhere from 200 million years to more than a billion years, and the team says the mantle played a role alongside glaciation. Read more

Roughly one in ten apps appearing in App Store top charts now mention artificial intelligence in their listings, according to a new analysis by Obelisk Club. The share climbs to 43 percent in Graphics & Design. The study also found that paid-feature apps are far more likely to advertise AI, that about one in five charted apps has gone a year or more without an update, and that subscription costs are the most common complaint in one-and-two-star reviews. The researchers analyzed 178,637 iPhone, iPad and Mac apps that reached an App Store top chart since October 9, 2026. Read more

AI tools that can rapidly convert console game code into portable code may undermine Rockstar Games' practice of launching major releases on consoles before PC, according to Vermeij, who spoke with Rock Paper Shotgun. Vermeij said he would be concerned if he were Rockstar that someone could take the PlayStation 5 version of Grand Theft Auto VI and use AI to adapt it for PC. He estimated the effort could cost tens of thousands of dollars in tokens and said the result likely would not match Rockstar's own version. There has been no official announcement of a PC release date, though reports suggest Rockstar is aiming for the first quarter of 2027. Read more

Academic libraries around the world are fighting swarms of data-scraping bots that are slowing or crashing websites meant for students, researchers and the public. The bots, used by AI and third-party companies to gather material for large language models, can knock entire collections offline. Librarians and open-access advocates say the problem is getting worse, and that the tools libraries use to block bots can also shut out legitimate users and good bots. Major AI firms have agreed to honor a voluntary opt-out signal, but the deal leaves out many third-party bots and smaller AI startups. Read more

Zalando Engineering has released Agentic Identity Broker, an open project that lets AI agents act on a user's behalf across services such as Google, GitHub, Databricks and Linear without handing over the user's credentials. The tool manages delegation chains, consent and a secure token vault, and it is deployed through gateways such as Agentgateway. The team says it already uses the project in production internally for several MCP servers and is developing it in public, with a roadmap that includes agent-to-agent token exchange and intent-based authorization. Read more

Startup Underdog has released a browser-based game built on Woof, a speech model that weighs just 32MB and can run on most devices without an internet connection. The demo lets users type on a virtual typewriter that speaks their words back, and turn a tuner to generate music. The model has 31 million parameters and is open for anyone to download. The release follows Underdog's Bark, a 167MB speech-to-text model built for transcription and dictation. Founder Sigil Wen says the company wants to build open, capable AI that lets people keep their data private. Read more

Airbnb paid the company's CEO, Brian Chesky, will fund an AI lab he founded, with the lab paying Airbnb $7.1 million for some of its intellectual property and certain expenses, according to the company's quarterly filing. The deal, signed this month, lets Airbnb join the lab's future funding rounds and license some of its technology. The disclosure came alongside third-quarter results that showed revenue rising 19 percent, its fastest growth in more than three years. Airbnb also said it plans to launch its own AI travel agent in the first half of 2027. Shares jumped more than 10 percent on Friday. Read more

Meta has indefinitely paused a plan to update its commercial terms for business accounts. The changes would have required users to allow the company to train artificial intelligence on external websites linked from Facebook pages. The move follows weeks of backlash from news publishers, courts in Brazil and Norway, a formal investigation in the United Kingdom, and letters from U.S. senators. Meta says its existing terms remain in effect while it consults with stakeholders. Critics say the company has not yet addressed concerns about robots.txt, the standard that lets websites signal whether they can be crawled. Read more

Amazon is letting shoppers text Alexa for Shopping, its AI shopping agent, to search for products, compare options and place orders without opening an app. The feature begins with a small group of invited U.S. customers, and millions more are expected to get access in the coming weeks. Sponsored products can appear in the agent's text replies, though Amazon is not yet charging advertisers for them. The move puts Amazon in a growing race among tech companies to make text messaging a shopping channel. Read more

Meta is letting users build app-like experiences inside its Muse AI assistant. The new feature, called “spaces,” can create custom tools such as a shopping hub, school dashboard, music tracker or trivia game, and users can interact with them directly in the app. To make one, users describe what they want and then refine it by asking Muse for changes. Spaces connected to a relevant app can update pricing, dates and other details in the background. Meta is rolling the feature out to all Muse users alongside a specialized version of its Muse Wonder AI model. Read more

Google has made its Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash video model generally available across the Gemini API and Gemini for business. The model can generate and edit native videos up to 15 seconds long, up from 10 seconds in the previous version. Google also cut the price 30 percent from Omni 1.1, to $0.07 per second for 720p video. The update adds multi-turn conversational editing, which lets users swap backgrounds, products, lighting or aspect ratios without starting over, along with better reference matching and more natural speech. Businesses, developers and creators can access the model through Google AI Studio, the Google Cloud console, Flow, Google Vids, the Gemini app and Google Ads. Read more