ARS
Disney found a way to buy Character.AI without buying its lawsuits
Character.AI faces claims its bots encouraged minors to self-harm and kill their parents.
TC
Nvidia launches new open models to run agents in the enterprise and on PCs
Nvidia is leaning hard into the trend of enterprise companies wanting to run their own open models in their own data centers and also trying to make on-device, private AI agents a thing.
WD
WhatsApp Help Pages Leaked Hidden Instructions for a Meta Chatbot
Around 80 pages on WhatsApp’s website exposed instructions that were designed for its chatbot, including “WHAT NOT TO SAY.” Meta says a bug caused the issue.
TC
People are using AI to make their smart TVs dumb again
Fed up with ads, tracking and sluggish interfaces, some smart TV owners are turning to AI agents to strip away bloatware and take back control of their TVs.
AI Agents Fully Autonomously Breach Over 100 Companies, Hacker Spends Only $5,000
A Chinese-speaking hacker used swarms of AI agents built with DeepSeek and Claude Code to breach more than 100 companies at a total cost of about $5,000, with no human intervention. The case highlights the growing ability of commercial AI agents to conduct complex cyberattacks autonomously.
MIT
The Download: preserving the Arctic permafrost, and playful AI agents
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Inside the quest to combat Arctic fires and save the planet’s frozen carbon —James Temple In July 2021, a wildfire burned through a forest on the University of Alaska, Fairbanks campus,…
World Launches AgentKit Beta, AI Agents Gain World ID Delegation for Financial Interactions
World, Sam Altman's project, released a finance-industry edition at Money20/20, with AgentKit Beta enabling users to delegate World ID cryptographic proofs to AI agents for compliant interactions.
Google Open-Sources Harness²: Agents Rewrite Their Own Scaffolding, Lifting Benchmarks by Up to 11.8 Points Without Touching Model Weights
Google Cloud AI Research has released Harness², an Apache 2.0 framework that automatically optimizes the "scaffolding" around an AI agent — system prompts, tool guides, memory, sub-agents, skills and more — while leaving model weights untouched. On the LAB legal-agent benchmark it delivered an 11.8 percentage point gain, and a weaker model with an optimized scaffold outperformed a stronger one in its default configuration.
Stripe Data: AI-Agent Payments Surge 38-Fold in September, but Bank Blockades and a Liability Vacuum Arrive Together
Stripe data show that AI-agent-driven transactions through Link surged 38-fold month over month in September 2026, with payment volume up 20-fold, even as Charles Schwab and JPMorgan Chase moved to block unauthorized agents from customer accounts. The growth remains small in absolute terms, and unresolved questions over trusted-agent definitions and liability for losses loom over agentic commerce.
Meta Confirms Claude Tool Triggered No Kings Account Ban at Four Times Normal Rate
Meta said a Claude-based automated tool made repeated requests to the No Kings Coalition Instagram account at roughly four times the normal rate, triggering a 90-minute suspension. The company restored public visibility after about an hour but took longer to restore administrative access.
MIT
Inside the quest to combat Arctic fires and save the planet’s frozen carbon
In the middle of an especially warm July in 2021, a wildfire ignited in a thick forest of black spruce and peeling paper birch trees on the northern campus of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.  The blaze, possibly sparked by lightning, burned across the dry carpet of feather mosses and lichen before climbing into the…
MIT
How far can we push computing?
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of science and technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. On the evening of December 29, 1959, at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture called “There’s…
MIT
AI researchers stranded Claude on a virtual desert island. It started to “play.”
What do AI agents do if you don’t tell them to do anything? The answer looks a lot like play. Researchers repeatedly stranded them alone on a virtual desert island for 30 hours in an experiment reminiscent of the movies Cast Away or Home Alone. The agents—copies of Claude Opus 4.7 nicknamed Eko—were able to…
WD
Disney Asked Character.AI to Go Bankrupt for a Get-Out-of-Lawsuits Card
The entertainment giant hopes to get trust and safety tech, among other IP, from a startup whose chatbots dozens of states allege encouraged minors to self-harm and kill their parents.
OpenAI API Hides Unannounced Tri-Color Aurora Models; 503 Response Confirms Backend Activation
Three undocumented Aurora model identifiers—aurora-blue-alpha, aurora-green-alpha, and aurora-red-alpha—briefly appeared in OpenAI’s API backend with the owner field “system” and no shutdown date. A 503 response for the red variant indicates the models were mounted and active in the backend even though OpenAI has not announced them.
Altman Personally Confirms OpenAI Will Build Humanoid Robots: First Demo in 2027, the Brain Is the Real Challenge
Sam Altman has explicitly confirmed that OpenAI will develop humanoid robots in-house, with a first demonstration targeted for 2027. OpenAI's job postings and past robotics efforts suggest that the main obstacle is not the hardware form factor but the perception-planning-action loop that makes a robot's brain work.
Research Lab
Four-Model Translation Showdown: Week 43 Quality Evaluation, gpt-o3 Leads with 8.7
This week, 402 translation tasks were completed by 4 models. A blind multi-model comparison of 3 sampled articles found gpt-o3 to be the overall best, with an average score of 8.7/10.
TC
Anthropic says it’s committing 5% of its shares to a ‘public benefit fund’
Anthropic said that it will commit 5% of its shares to the fund.
DeepSeek Search and Fetch API at $0.75 per Thousand Calls: The Real Cost of the Lowest Price
DeepSeek has opened its Search and Fetch API to developers at a flat rate of $0.75 per thousand successful requests, far below mainstream competitors. This analysis examines the billing rules, rate limits, data storage clauses, and strategic implications behind the low price.
GLM-4.6 Material Constraint Score Plummets 30.2 Points, Code Execution Rises 22 Points
In today's Smoke evaluation, GLM-4.6's material constraint score fell 30.2 points to 50.00, while code execution rose 22 points to 47.00. The main leaderboard score dropped only 1.5 points, suggesting sampling fluctuation rather than real model degradation.