News — 2026-11-07

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