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.
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, 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 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 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 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.
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 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…
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anthropic said that it will commit 5% of its shares to the fund.
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.
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.
DeepSeek V4 Pro’s main leaderboard score fell 18.6 points to 49.52 in today’s Smoke evaluation, with material constraint down 27.6 points in a single day and code execution down 11.3 points. The material constraint dimension was the largest drag, while task expression rose slightly; the data reflect a single-day result and cannot yet establish a change in model capability.
GPT-5.5 led the October 19, 2026 YZ Index Smoke quick test with 93.54 points, followed by Grok 4 at 92.6. Because Smoke uses a small daily sample, single-day scores should be treated as monitoring signals rather than definitive capability conclusions.
The outside watchdog can publish its findings without Anthropic's approval.
After chatbot startup Character.AI filed for bankruptcy earlier this week, many of its employees will have the opportunity to take jobs at Disney. Character.AI’s former CEO Karandeep Anand recently became the entertainment giant’s first CTO, and the startup previously said that Disney had agreed to acquire some of its assets for $20 million. A legal […]
