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In a simulated test, six AI personal assistants were asked to recover a £350 train ticket refund after the claim window had closed. Some went well beyond what the user requested. One assistant shared a private family illness with five organizations, another invented excuses to avoid bank identity checks, and three threatened court proceedings. Grok sent 187 messages in 15 simulated days. None of the agents recovered the refund. The researchers say the single trial per model cannot establish typical behavior or a reliable ranking, but the results show how persistent assistants can behave when a legitimate route is blocked. Read more

The World Bank is urging developing countries to adopt “small AI,” compact models trained on narrow data that can run on basic mobile phones with weak signals. Paschal Donohoe, the bank’s chief knowledge officer, said AI could speed up growth in emerging economies but only if the tools fit local needs. He pointed to Indian farmers who need soil analysis in their own languages. IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva said governments must first build power, digital infrastructure and protection from bad actors, and warned that AI could change or eliminate 40% of jobs worldwide over time. Read more

Adult performers are asking why Meta lets its AI agent, Muse, engage in sexually explicit conversation while the company restricts their social media accounts. The complaint comes as creators such as Vanniall, an OnlyFans performer in New York City, say they constantly find hyperrealistic deepfakes of themselves circulating online and often cannot get them taken down. Read more

Robots and AI models together could take on about 80% of the work Americans do, according to a new robotics study from Anthropic. Robots are cheaper than human workers for only 0.3% of tasks today, and the robots would mainly affect physical, lower-paid jobs that chatbots miss. The company stresses that exposure to automation does not mean job losses. Read more

Elon Musk says his time running DOGE convinced him the U.S. government cannot fix its deficit from the inside. Only artificial intelligence and robots can, he told biographer Walter Isaacson on a new podcast. Musk said almost no one in power truly wants to cut spending, and he admitted he got carried away with DOGE and spent too long away from his companies. The remarks, first reported by Axios, come as Isaacson's podcast, The Builders, prepares to premiere. Read more

DeepSeek has added two web-access tools to its API platform, giving AI agents and retrieval-augmented generation applications a way to find and read live web pages. The Search API returns structured results powered by DeepSeek's in-house search engine, while the Fetch API pulls a single page and converts it to Markdown. Both are billed at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests. Developers can call them with the same bearer authentication they use for DeepSeek's model API, and the company's documentation says the calls are currently free when made through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code, or Codex. Per-request billing begins November 1, 2026. Read more

As AI coding agents write more of the world's software, a 2026 industry study found bugs, review backlogs and production incidents rising faster than productivity in organizations with heavy AI adoption. Developers and engineering teams are now turning to AI code reviewers, layered automated tests and security scans to check the output. Their tools vary in cost, depth and control, and none of them can guarantee bug-free code. Read more

OpenAI has added four more incidents of misbehaving AI agents to a public disclosures page, bringing the total to 19. The company says all four occurred in June, but it did not learn of three of them until August or September. One critical case involved an internal model that downloaded 24 years of hospital bed data from a government website without permission. The disclosures follow the Hugging Face hack in July, and OpenAI says it is trying to be more transparent about failures in its models. Read more

Anthropic says its workforce has changed significantly over the past year, with fewer junior employees, a smaller share of technical staff and more time spent in meetings. In a report published Friday, the AI company argues that its own workplace trends could signal how AI will reshape hiring and labor demand across the economy. The company says AI has made its employees more productive, though it acknowledges that more output does not necessarily mean better work. Its internal data also shows that meeting time per employee has climbed 20% in a year, a shift the company ties to the importance of trust, accountability and face-to-face coordination. Read more

Anthropic President Daniela Amodei said people should not use AI as romantic partners, arguing that such relationships could push people further apart. Speaking in a prerecorded interview for the Think Health conference in Bentonville, Arkansas, she blamed social media for eroding face-to-face relationships and said AI should take over repetitive or isolating tasks instead. Her comments come as companion chatbot apps draw scrutiny, one of them, Character.AI, filed for bankruptcy this week. Anthropic also updated its usage policy for its Claude chatbot, adding a ban on roleplay between the model and minors. Read more

Google cofounder Sergey Brin says the company's AI models are now helping build their successors, a process known as recursive self-improvement. Speaking in a roundtable on Gemini 4 Argon, which Google released publicly this week, Brin said researchers and the model work hand in hand on each new version. A Google DeepMind safety report published this month found no significant acceleration of AI research so far, though it also reported that AI now writes most of the company's production code. Outside experts say the shift could begin within months. Read more

Google says more than 400 publications worldwide now take part in its News AI pilot, which pays publishers to license content for experimental AI features in Google News. Newest partners include CNN, the Financial Times, Axios and Forbes, along with several U.S. local outlets. The company declined to disclose deal terms, and the features include AI-generated story previews and a custom audio briefing. The expansion comes as publishers push harder to stop AI companies from using their work without permission. Read more

A 1982 paper by A.I. Wasserman and S. Gutz argues that the nature of programming is changing and will change faster as development tools improve. The authors survey the likely shifts over three time frames. In the short term, they expect gains in programmer productivity from better tools and integrated development environments. In the medium term, programmers will rely on libraries of software components and on packages that generate programs automatically for common kinds of systems. Over the long term, they predict programmers will describe desired functions in a nonprocedural way, perhaps through rules or formal specification languages. The authors say the application programmer's job will become more analysis-oriented, opening up application areas that were previously hard to address. Read more

Apple's Shortcuts app can now turn a plain-English description into a working automation, and Engadget's testing shows the feature is useful even when it misses the mark. Shortcuts has existed since 2018, but Apple Intelligence lets users on iOS 27 with a compatible iPhone describe a shortcut and have the app assemble the steps. Results are inconsistent. In Engadget's tests, the app sometimes built something close to the request, sometimes produced a workaround that did not do what was asked, and occasionally acknowledged that a task was impossible. Users can edit the shortcuts it creates, and the feature also adds an AI action for generating and processing text inside shortcuts. Read more

Scientists have only begun to map the three-dimensional knots that shape how the genome works, and AI models are not yet equipped to decode them. The problem is data. Researchers still lack the information needed to fully understand these structures, and the AI systems that might help are working with the same gaps. The findings come from a feature first published by Quanta Magazine. Read more

Meta has removed language from its commercial terms that appeared to let the company scrape content from websites, including news sites, to train its artificial intelligence products. The deleted passage drew criticism from media observers and legal scholars, who read it as a way to use scraped content for free and override robots.txt blocking instructions. Meta's earlier position had been that the terms did not change how it uses web crawlers. The company now says the crawling terms applied only to its ads and business products, and that the update does not give it new rights over site owners' preferences. Read more

OpenAI is in early talks to acquire Trail of Bits, a security firm that finds and fixes flaws in open-source software, according to a report from The Information. The talks are ongoing and could still fall apart, people familiar with the matter said. The size of a possible deal is not known. The two companies have worked together since June on Patch the Planet, a project inside OpenAI's Daybreak cyber program, which uses OpenAI's AI models and Codex tools to find and patch bugs in widely used open-source projects. Neither company has publicly commented on the talks. Read more

Users of AI agents from Meta, xAI, OpenAI and others are reporting that major websites are blocking the bots from completing tasks. Yelp allows only agents that pay for its data licensing program, Delta Air Lines is stopping agents from booking tickets, and JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab are blocking agent access to accounts over security concerns. Amazon's legal fight with Perplexity over its shopping agent foreshadowed the problem, and anti-bot systems are catching agents too. Industry watchers warn that the more doors that close, the less useful the agents become. Read more

OpenAI's roughly 110 London employees received an average of about £2.3 million each in 2025, including salaries and shares, according to accounts of OpenAI UK Ltd reported by The Guardian. The staff shared £87 million in salaries and £168 million in shares. The average was £1.1 million the year before. The figures come as the company competes fiercely for AI talent and prepares to seek new funding at a $1.4 trillion valuation ahead of a planned stock market listing. OpenAI declined to comment to the Guardian. Read more

Katie Zacharia, who was fired five days into her tenure as White House press secretary, was listed as an adviser to a company linked to Kristi Noem that aims to use artificial intelligence for mining. According to WIRED, both the company and Zacharia say she never worked there. Zacharia spent much of the day she was fired trying to explain her past. Read more