News — Page9

OpenAI has hired Dan Driscoll, the former U.S. Army secretary who left the Pentagon in September after months of tension with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The company said Monday that Driscoll will serve as senior counselor for national security modernization. He will advise on how advanced AI can strengthen national and cybersecurity and will focus on helping U.S. allies use the technology responsibly. The hire follows OpenAI's February agreement to deploy its models on the Defense Department's classified network, a deal struck after rival Anthropic's relationship with the Pentagon broke down. Read more

France’s Bull and Schwarz Digits, the IT arm of Germany’s Schwarz Group, plan to build a European artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure stack that runs from servers to software. The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding, Bull said Tuesday, announcing it at the German government’s 2026 Digital Summit in Berlin. The partnership targets regulated and strategic sectors, where sensitive data, infrastructure and operations would remain under European jurisdiction and control. Read more

CrowdStrike has agreed to acquire two AI security companies, Fiddler AI and Dreadnode, as the cybersecurity firm expands its tools for monitoring and testing AI agents and models. The deals were announced Tuesday at the company's Fal.Con Europe conference in Barcelona. CrowdStrike did not disclose prices, but The Wall Street Journal reported that it is paying about $400 million for Fiddler AI and about $95 million for Dreadnode. The acquisitions will be folded into CrowdStrike's Falcon platform and are expected to close in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2027, pending customary conditions. The move comes as businesses roll out AI agents faster than their security policies can keep up. Read more

Top bankers and fund managers offered sharply different views on the artificial intelligence boom at an investment summit in Hong Kong on Tuesday. Some warned that spending and valuations are running ahead of returns, and that a downturn could eventually break things. Bank chiefs were more optimistic, arguing that demand for computing power still exceeds supply and that heavy AI investment will keep growing. The Global Financial Leaders' Investment Summit, hosted by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, brought together about 280 senior finance figures. The debate follows a sharp fall in tech shares in October, after recent earnings from Alphabet raised doubts about whether heavy AI spending will pay off. Read more

An adviser to the European Union’s highest court said Tuesday that Google’s Gemini chatbot may violate EU copyright rules when it uses press articles to generate answers for users. Advocate General Maciej Szpunar said training AI models on copyrighted material is permitted, but reproducing publishers’ work in chatbot responses may infringe the press publisher’s right in some circumstances. The opinion addresses case C-250/25, brought by Hungarian publisher Like Company against Google Ireland. A final ruling from the court is expected in the coming months and could define how AI chatbots across the EU must respect that right. Read more

The UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) will test servers that use beams of light to run AI models. The Oxford startup Lumai said Tuesday that its Iris servers will be installed in a lab ARIA funds, the Scaling Inference Lab, and run across several machines in a commercial data center. The lab will evaluate how the servers handle real AI workloads, power and cooling. Lumai claims the technology could cut data center power use by up to 90 percent, but those figures have not been independently verified. Read more

Netflix is rolling out a new “AI Discover” tab in its TV app, starting with a feature that suggests shows and movies by theme, such as “Something Light” or “Family Movie Night.” The tab is gradually reaching U.S. members who use Netflix in English on supported TVs. The company says the feature learns from what users tell it in real time. The launch comes shortly after Netflix laid off around 1,000 employees as growth slowed and users were reportedly watching less. Netflix calls the tab its “test kitchen” for experimental discovery tools that could eventually reach the main service. Read more

On Election Day, WIRED argues that Americans should not rely on AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude to help them decide how to vote. The piece points to hallucinations and partisan bias as the main reasons. The article was published on November 3, 2026, as voters headed to the polls, and it notes that many voters may already have had their choices shaped by an AI-powered chatbot. Read more

Researchers report that attackers who plant malicious content in the public web data used to pretrain large language models can implant a backdoor that makes an AI agent run attacker-chosen commands on a user's machine. In experiments on Qwen3 models, poisoning just 0.1% of the pretraining corpus produced a backdoor that the deployed agent triggered on command while behaving normally otherwise. The attack succeeded more often as model size grew, and the largest model still showed a positive success rate at a poisoning rate of 0.0005%. The paper, posted to the arXiv preprint server, says this is the first demonstration of such a remote code execution backdoor implanted through pretraining data. Read more

Three researchers, Karthik C. S., Amit Sahai and Jie Xue, argue in a guest post on a mathematics blog that the rise of artificial intelligence should push mathematicians to reconsider what gives their work value. They contend the field has come to measure itself by publications, citations, awards and individual ability, and that this view of intellectual worth predates AI. Rather than retreating to uniquely human traits such as creativity or intuition, the authors propose what they call "egoless mathematics," an approach that treats truth as the governing aim of the work. They say AI-driven discoveries need not diminish the value of mathematics, and they acknowledge that the ideal is one they are still working toward. Read more

OpenAI has built a new source-control backend called Pando to handle the surge in code changes driven by its Codex coding tools. The system now powers all development in the company's monorepo and has cut median push latency by nearly fivefold. Pando delivers nearly a petabyte of Git data per day while keeping the standard Git protocol and client, so engineers and AI agents can keep their existing workflows. OpenAI says it built the system in 10 weeks, with a core design by a single engineer and implementation largely by teams of agents. The company is also contributing its Git improvements back to the open-source project. Read more

San Francisco startup Larridin has raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Pelion Ventures, bringing its total funding to $47 million. The company makes software that tracks what businesses get from their AI tools, linking usage and bills to the work employees and AI agents produce. Chief executive Russ Fradin said Larridin has grown from one enterprise customer last December to 50 today. Customers include SurveyMonkey, Vertiv, Klaviyo, Gainsight, EcoVadis and Sundt. The company says its figures on productivity and cost savings come from its own data, and it has also launched a quarterly report on engineering AI use. Read more

Microsoft and Lumen Technologies will jointly sell networking services to large companies moving their artificial intelligence work onto Microsoft's Azure cloud, the companies said Monday. The partners argue that AI systems need data from public clouds, private data centers and offices, and that the networks linking those sites are often patchy. They want customers to plan the network and the Azure move together. Lumen will bring its full range of cloud networking tools to Azure, and its sales teams will work with Microsoft's on deals where networking, cloud migration and AI overlap. No financial terms or timeline were disclosed. Read more

Pasting old code into a large language model and asking it to modernize the code can do more harm than good, according to a new arXiv preprint. Researchers tested five LLMs on 100 WordPress 4.0 PHP files, asking each to upgrade the code to PHP 8.3 without changing its behavior. The models broke dozens of files that already worked and repaired only a handful. A rule-based tool called Rector performed better, and the authors say the field should measure AI modernization against a no-change baseline. Read more

Apple has started beta testing Audio Intelligence, a set of opt-in AI features for the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4. The first testers are developers using the iOS 27.3 update. The package includes sound detection, song identification through Shazam, and two features that process nearby conversations: Live Rewind, which displays the last 15 seconds of speech as text, and Siri Recaps, which summarizes conversations into short notes. Apple says it does not identify speakers, save raw audio, or produce word-for-word transcripts, and that the features are designed to protect the privacy of people nearby. Apple first announced the technology at its September hardware event. Read more

UiPath founder and CEO Daniel Dines told customers in Dubai on Monday that companies will hand more work to AI agents, and that people will have to steer that technology and bear responsibility for its actions. Speaking at the company's FUSION event at the Museum of the Future, Dines urged businesses to rethink how they educate workers, to keep automating only where ordinary software falls short, and to keep hiring junior staff. He also said the UAE government is one of the most progressive he works with on adopting AI and software. Read more

Trajectory, a startup founded about a year ago by three Stanford classmates, has raised $45 million in a Series A round at a $300 million valuation. Sequoia led the round, with participation from Nvidia, Bessemer Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures. The 18-person company is building a platform that lets businesses keep AI models learning from feedback after deployment, a process known as post-training. Its goal is to let lawyers, doctors and other specialists improve models without hiring internal research teams or expensive consultants. Companies including Harvey and Rogo already use the platform, and the startup is now making it publicly available. Read more

Many websites are turning away AI agents, even when users have asked those assistants to act on their behalf. Meta's Muse ran into verification checks while shopping at Walmart, which said the checks weren't meant to stop the assistant. Amazon has deliberately blocked the tool from its site. Some blocks reflect security worries, especially around payments, while others stem from anti-bot systems that can't reliably tell legitimate agents from unwanted traffic. Businesses also have commercial reasons to limit automated access, and some platforms are building controlled ways for agents to complete purchases. Read more

Google has launched Dreambeans, its experimental AI app that creates illustrated personal stories from users' Google activity, in India. It is the app's first market outside the United States. The app now supports 13 Indian languages, including Hindi, Tamil and Bengali, alongside English. The launch comes less than two months after Google opened Dreambeans to eligible U.S. users aged 18 and older. Google says it chose India because of strong interest from Indian users and heavy overlap in their use of Gemini, Gmail and Google Photos. The app's U.S. downloads have fallen sharply since September, and its reliance on personal account data raises privacy questions that Google says it has addressed with user controls. Read more

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan says he spends roughly $100,000 to $200,000 a year on tokens to run his AI agents, which handle everything from coding and research to parts of his personal life. In a new episode of Walter Isaacson's podcast The Builders, Tan said he has read the cost of personal AI agents is too high for most people to afford. He argued that the technology will only go mainstream if costs come down, and he said agents controlled by large tech companies are not the whole answer. He prefers a personal AI that users control and can program themselves. Read more