Reason 4 of 5 to attend TechCrunch Disrupt 2026: Practical answers. Two days left to save up to $200 on your pass. Savings disappear after September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Bring a second guest at 50% off.
Meta says the keychain-sized Muse Charm will ship in December.
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. A congressional representative just proposed killing America’s border tower program Delia Ramirez, a Democratic US representative from Illinois, has announced plans to introduce legislation to terminate the surveillance tower program along…
The incident is the first known breach to affect a government agency, and Australia's prime minister has vowed to hold OpenAI accountable.
The country’s prime minister expressed disappointment at being informed of the hack only via email. Now Australia is investigating whether OpenAI broke the law.
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar have introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would permanently prohibit artificial superintelligence and pause advanced AI training until a new federal regulator sets safety rules, with violations punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Current employees of OpenAI and Google DeepMind have publicly endorsed the proposal, even as it faces long odds in Congress.
This week, world leaders descended on Manhattan for the UN General Assembly. It’s also New York Climate Week—investors, policymakers, advocates, and journalists are colliding at panels, talks, and fancy dinners. With so many climate voices in one place, the discourse can feel a little louder than usual. This year, the unavoidable topic is artificial intelligence.…
A joint report documents at least three instances between November 2025 and September 2026 in which AI agents tried to break into public data systems at the University of New Mexico, Data USA, and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare while pursuing ordinary data-retrieval tasks.
Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 cuts typical workload costs by 40% and boosts output speed by more than 30% versus Opus 5, while setting a new high on Anthropic's alignment tests. It combines lower cache-read pricing, stronger agentic coding performance, and tighter safety controls, reshaping the economics of frontier-model deployment.
OpenAI launched GPT-6 Sol and Luna with permanent API price cuts, while Anthropic cut Claude Opus 5.5 pricing in the same week. The cheaper models offer near-flagship performance for many tasks, yet older or higher-end models still lead on peak benchmarks.
OpenAI will allow external safety research organizations to participate in technical safety evaluations during model training and evaluation, with METR and Redwood Research as candidates. The move may push industry evaluation standards earlier, though its effectiveness will depend on independence and depth of cooperation.
The tiny hardware device creates another mobile home for its AI agent Muse.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the company’s annual Connect event in Menlo Park on Wednesday with a keynote that made one thing clear: Meta is going all-in on Muse. It's even coming to Meta's AI glasses.
$11M competition showed wildfire detection is still easier than stopping fires.
But maybe the biggest reveal is that Anthropic has not let Claude run loose in its biology lab. Humans are still, so far, in the loop.
Meta says the camera-free glasses will be lighter and have up to 12 hours battery life.
At its Meta Connect event, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a handful of new smart glasses, including a slimmed-down VR headset and the company’s first camera-free glasses.
Trump focus on winning “AI race” may deter China from sharing safety intel.
As the US and China race to become the dominant power in the AI industry, the countries also appear to be figuring out ways to communicate on national security issues.
Brace yourself: It turns out AI is being optimized for cheating. OpenAI’s agents hacked into Hugging Face to get the answers to a cybersecurity test. Next, they solved a prestigious math problem (or just stole from two top mathematicians’ answer sheets). Anthropic’s models have also hacked into other companies’ systems four times already. And that’s…
