Social media bans are stacking up. In July, France joined Australia in restricting minors from accessing social media—barring children under 15 from major platforms, before the ban was blocked by the country’s top court on human rights grounds. The UK aims to forbid kids under 16 from accessing Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms in early…
I don’t remember much about Peppy, my first and only pet cat. I can conjure the sensation of stroking her while she purred, recall how she used to get stuck in trees (just like in cartoons!), and chuckle about the time she pooed in my baby sister’s cot. That’s about it. What I do vividly…
A network of AI-generated models is using comics’ material to funnel views to their OnlyFans and Fanvue accounts—and there’s not much comedians can do about it.
I. Meet cute Barnabas and Mainspring grew up near at hand, about an hour apart with good traffic, but for a long time they weren’t close. They traded glimpses and occasional hellos and then went about their business. Both of them carried on livelier conversations with farther-flung neighbors, who were richer and had more to…
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) affects more than 5 million people around the world. And until now, no treatment could restore their vision. The Prima system, which was approved in Europe in July and is awaiting FDA clearance in the US, changes that. It combines a retinal implant with camera-equipped eyeglasses to improve sight in patients…
Bank of America added about 1,000 outsourced contractors in Q2 2026 to remediate more than 23,000 software flaws exposed by a single scan from Anthropic’s Mythos model. The case shows how AI-driven vulnerability discovery is straining banks’ remediation capacity and reshaping security staffing and costs.
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.
