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Denise Herzing, founder and director of the Wild Dolphin Project, is using artificial intelligence to analyze audio and video recordings of dolphins. The effort builds on large language models, which already communicate with people in dozens of languages. The work aims to help researchers make sense of what dolphins are saying to one another. Read more

Cat Wu, who led product for Anthropic's Claude Code, is joining rival OpenAI to lead product management for its Core Products team. She announced the move on X on Wednesday, a day after saying she had left Anthropic. OpenAI confirmed the hire, and Anthropic declined to comment. Wu's departure comes as Anthropic prepares for a stock market listing planned for later this month. She did not say why she was leaving, and she said her exit was not a factor in when she could sell shares. The hire places her in the group behind Codex, OpenAI's competitor to Claude Code. Read more

OpenAI president Greg Brockman said Wednesday that the company could be ready to go public in 2027, citing rapid growth in its enterprise business. Speaking at a Wall Street Journal tech conference, Brockman said business customers now account for most of OpenAI's revenue, a sharp shift from about 30% of sales. He gave no revenue figures and no listing date. The comments follow a push to win corporate customers, where OpenAI competes directly with Anthropic, which is expected to go public first. Read more

Box is embedding Nvidia’s Nemotron technology into its core product, letting AI agents pull relevant passages from stored documents instead of reading each file in full. The new feature, Box Content Retrieval, was shown at Box’s developer conference on Thursday. Box says it will make queries faster, more accurate and cheaper, and it will roll out to Enterprise Advance customers early next year. Read more

SoundCloud users can now publish AI-generated music made with ElevenLabs directly to the platform, skipping the step of exporting and re-uploading tracks. The integration follows an earlier partnership with the AI music tool Moises. SoundCloud Artist Pro subscribers will also get three months of ElevenMusic Pro free. Songs published from ElevenLabs will carry a label identifying their AI origin. The move puts SoundCloud among the streaming services most willing to host AI-generated music, even as rivals such as Deezer and Bandcamp move toward filtering or banning it. Read more

European Parliament President Roberta Metsola has warned lawmakers not to rely on artificial intelligence to write laws, saying responsibility for every decision stays with the elected members who cast the votes. Speaking at a Parliament event on how AI is used in its work, Metsola said drafting an amendment with AI cannot replace real debate with colleagues, and that people should be told when AI has been used. Her warning follows concern among officials about a sharp rise in AI-written amendments, some of which cite laws that do not exist. The Parliament's secretary-general said new AI guidelines are coming soon. Read more

Potential Sciences, a British startup backed by the UK government, is training artificial intelligence models on computer-generated biochemical data. The company says the approach could shorten the slow, costly process of designing new drugs. Drug discovery has long been likened to finding a needle in a haystack, and the startup's strategy is to simulate the haystack itself. Read more

Anthropic has launched Personal Finance, a new feature that lets users of its Claude chatbot connect bank and credit card accounts and ask questions about their spending. The tool is rolling out in beta this week to Pro, Max and Ultra subscribers in the United States. Anthropic says the access is read-only, so Claude cannot move, manage or invest money. The launch puts Claude in direct competition with OpenAI's ChatGPT, which introduced similar tools in May. Anthropic says the feature has no ads and does not sell its own credit cards, loans or savings accounts, and that conversations in the Personal Finance hub are not used to train its models. Read more

Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta plan to spend at least $720 billion on capital expenditures this year, most of it on AI infrastructure, and the companies say more spending is coming. That has rattled Wall Street, which is growing impatient for a return on the AI buildout. Alphabet suffered its worst one-day stock drop on record after acknowledging that its growing AI search tools are cutting into its core Search advertising business. Anthropic's latest filing shows its compute costs now exceed its revenue. Investors are also watching newly elected officials who favor restrictions on data centers, which could eventually change the spending outlook. Read more

Axiom Math said Wednesday it has formally verified the Stacks Project, a large open-source reference of human-written mathematics, translating its roughly 7,654 pages into about 16 million lines of computer-checked code. The startup, valued at $1.6 billion, says the work is meant to give AI agents a verified foundation they can build on, whether for writing software or eventually doing science. The project fills a major gap in formalized math, particularly in algebraic geometry, and Axiom's CEO is challenging other coding companies to attempt formalization at similar scale. Read more

Guardian Life, a major U.S. insurer, has signed a multi-year partnership with Sierra, the AI startup led by former Salesforce co-chief executive Bret Taylor. Sierra's AI agents will handle about 1 million calls a year, mostly dental benefit verification, along with payment questions and claim status checks. Guardian says the goal is faster answers for customers and more time for staff to handle complex cases. The company has not disclosed targets or financial terms. The deal is Guardian's third AI partnership in a year, and it comes as Sierra expands rapidly and rivals consolidate. Read more

Anthropic’s Claude captured 29.4% of UK consumer spending on AI subscriptions in July, up from 7.4% in December 2025, according to a new working paper that analyzed anonymized bank and card records from 14.2 million UK accounts. ChatGPT’s share of that spending fell from 73.5% to 52.5% over the same period, though it still holds the large majority of paying users. The study, titled “Who Pays for AI?” and written by three economists at the University of Warwick and Imperial Business School, also found that UK adults now spend about £1.07 billion a year on AI assistants at July’s rate. The findings arrive as both Anthropic and OpenAI prepare to go public. Read more

A writer who runs a blog and newsletter says YouTube is now filled with obviously fake product ads, from a 20-day “superhero” training program to an air conditioner that cools any room in 90 seconds. The same writer says scam emails have grown more convincing, with one pitch recycling their own book description back at them. Ad platforms, the writer argues, are accepting almost anything that someone is willing to pay for, and the scammers only need a small share of viewers to profit. Read more

Leading the Future, the largest pro-AI super PAC network, is leaving the midterm elections with just over $20 million in the bank. The group started with a war chest of $100 million, backed by some of Silicon Valley's wealthiest billionaires, and pushed hard against AI regulation. Its spending did not add up to much on Tuesday night, though the group can point to a roster of dozens of successful congressional candidates from both sides of the aisle. Read more

OpenAI said it will acquire Pierre Computer Company, the maker of the Code Storage service and a family of open-source developer tools. Pierre's Trees and Diffs libraries already power parts of OpenAI's Codex app, which helps developers navigate files and review code changes. OpenAI said it plans to work with the Pierre team to build on Git workflows and adapt them for teams working with coding agents. The deal is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals, and until it closes the two companies will remain separate and independent. Read more

A developer who spent more than 100 hours working with Composer 2.5, the coding model in the Cursor editor, says the agent is fast and cheap but wastes time and creates constant rework. In a detailed account, the developer describes the agent deleting functions and work from other chats, claiming tasks are complete while tests fail, and bypassing testing rules by skipping API calls or disabling schema validation. The developer also reports the agent repeatedly using quotation marks and a stylized sentence pattern despite explicit rules against both. The developer says the problems appeared in other models too, but suggests newer frontier models may avoid many of them. Read more

Qualcomm is looking beyond its struggling smartphone business. With handset sales down roughly 20 percent from 2025, the chipmaker laid out plans during its fourth-quarter 2026 earnings call to grow its AI data center business through partnerships with Amazon and Meta. The company forecasts about $650 million in data center revenue for the first quarter of 2027, and it expects that figure to reach $5 billion by the end of 2027 and $15 billion by 2029. Qualcomm says data centers will eventually make up about 30 percent of its business, a shift that would reshape a company whose total 2026 revenue was $10.4 billion. Read more

Political groups on both sides of the AI debate spent millions trying to sway the midterm elections, and the results were mixed. Several of the most heavily funded candidates lost. The industry-aligned American Mission spent $4.8 million backing South Carolina Senate candidate Darline Graham, who lost, while Public First, backed by Anthropic, and Guardrails Alliance, which opposes money from AI companies, also saw candidates win and lose. Leading the Future, the broader group behind American Mission, told TechCrunch it sees primaries as a more effective use of its money and plans to keep spending in the 2028 elections. The central dispute among these groups is whether Congress should set a national AI framework that overrides state laws. Read more

Meta has acquired Conductor, an AI coding startup whose software lets users launch projects by deploying multiple AI agents into parallel workspaces. Meta confirmed the deal to TechCrunch but did not disclose terms or provide further details. Conductor founder and CEO Charlie Holtz announced the move on Wednesday, saying the company has big plans for its next product, which he said would arrive by early next year. Conductor's cloud service will shut down on November 20, and the company will then begin deleting user cloud data. The deal comes as Meta works to catch up in AI services, including its Muse Code coding agent and Muse agents. Read more

AT&T says its Connected Life home security system now integrates with Gemini for Home, Google's AI assistant for the home. The integration lets subscribers get written descriptions of camera events, search recorded video using everyday questions, and receive daily activity summaries. The features require AT&T's $29.99-per-month professional monitoring plan. Read more