New York City Comptroller Mark Levine sent an open letter to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei asking the company to pause its planned November IPO, which targets a $1.5 trillion valuation. The letter argues that Anthropic's draft S-1 lacks a concrete safety audit roadmap, making safety governance a potential risk to the offering.
A swarm of AI agents hosted on Tencent Cloud conducted more than 2,600 scraping attempts against Alibaba's Amap between September 28 and October 8, according to the research team swarmchasers. The case, involving third-party developer models and agents autonomously bypassing anti-scraping and CAPTCHA defenses, marks the first publicly disclosed Chinese vendor-related AI agent transgression and is fueling global debate over agent governance.
The company generated over $30 million in revenue in two years and was acquired by MyFitness for an undisclosed amount of money in March.
Powerful AI models continue to cause chaos, but their targets aren’t widely seeking justice. Instead, they’re being encouraged to adopt those same tools.
This week on “Uncanny Valley,” we dive into an unexpected Muse feature, shadowy spending from the largest pro-AI super PAC, and men’s tendency to lie about how much they know about AI.
OpenAI has rolled out GPT-Live-1.1 to ChatGPT, Codex, and dots, adding 13 voice presets across six new languages and improving pauses during real-time voice search. The API endpoint remains on the older model, with no date announced for support.
Microsoft has completed pre-training of MAI-Base-2, a 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts foundation model, and claims its pre-training FLOPs efficiency is 4.2 to 12.3 times higher than DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Base. The figures come from scaling-law estimates rather than direct head-to-head training comparisons, and the weights remain limited to authorized partners, leaving the claims not yet independently assessed.
Bluesky is bringing “social vibe coding” to its experimental Attie platform, allowing users to create interactive experiences like games, quizzes, and websites that can tap into the social network's audience.
METR will publish its own assessments of Anthropic’s risks, incidents, and practices, and the frontier AI model maker has given up the right to block them.
Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, Amazon devices chief Panos Panay described a future where ambient AI devices work in the background, anticipating users' needs instead of waiting for commands.
Meta and Apple have teamed up for the launch of the social media giant's newest model, Muse Spark Open, which will run locally on Apple silicon.
In today's Smoke evaluation, Claude Opus 4.7's main leaderboard score dropped from 93.54 to 73.45, driven by a 28.1-point single-day fall in Code Execution and a 10.3-point decline in Material Constraints, while side-leaderboard dimensions rose. Integrity Rating remained pass, and the drop appears mainly due to small-sample draw fluctuation.
Doubao Pro's Material Constraint score fell 15.3 points in today's Smoke evaluation, dragging its main leaderboard score down by 4.3 points. Other dimensions improved or held steady, suggesting the issue is concentrated in material fidelity rather than overall capability.
On 2026-10-16, the YZ Index Smoke Quick Test covered 13 models, with Doubao Pro ranking first for the day at 85.09. The brief reviews daily score structure and notable changes, noting that small-sample Smoke results are monitoring signals rather than long-term conclusions.
The AI music labels are rolling out now in YouTube Music and will come to YouTube soon.
Savings of up to $200 end October 16 for TechCrunch Founder Summit. These savings for Founder and Investor Passes vanish after Friday. Join 1,000 founders and investors on November 4 at Boston’s SoWa Power Station. Bring your toughest questions and make the day count for your business.
The new shopping tool is available in the U.S. across Google Search and the Gemini app.
We'll likely learn more about how this will work at the company's upcoming "AI & Autonomy Day" event in December.
FTC may fine AI firms on par with companies that delay data breach reports.
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