AI News Today — Model Releases, Benchmarks & Industry Moves

Veritas expands its anti-counterfeit chip to jewelry, trophies, and fragrance bottles

Counterfeits of luxury goods are a major problem for fashion houses. Counterfeiters are getting better at replicating brands’ marks and passing off dupes, known as “superfakes,” as genuine items. A startup called Veritas wants to tackle the problem with its own chip that verifies goods. Veritas was founded by Luci Holland, a former Tesla technical […]

ARS

Super Scam Me documentary shows what it takes to catch a romance scammer

Watch an exclusive clip from Super Scam Me where a victim tracks down her scammer.

MIT

The Download: failed social media bans, and extending pets’ lives

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. Kids are outsmarting social media bans. That’s not a problem we need to solve. —Michal Luria, Aliya Bhatia, and Danah Boyd Social media bans are stacking up. In July, France joined…

TC

Replit’s CEO says the future of work is the ‘self-driving company’

Replit CEO Amjad Masad envisions a future of “self-driving companies,” where AI agents handle day-to-day tasks and people focus on higher-level decisions.

MIT

Kids are outsmarting social media bans. That’s not a problem we need to solve.

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…

MIT

Can’t bear to say goodbye to your pet? Biotech’s got you covered.

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…

WD

AI-Generated Hot Girls Are Ripping Off Comedians to Boost Their Horny Content

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.

MIT

Love is infrastructure

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…

MIT

This implant can restore sight for patients with macular degeneration

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 Hires 1,000 Contractors in Q2 to Patch 23,000 Vulnerabilities Found by a Single Mythos Scan

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 Sends Open Letter to Anthropic: Safety Governance Gaps May Affect $1.5 Trillion IPO

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.

Tencent Cloud AI Agents Scraped Amap Over 2,600 Times: First Chinese Vendor Rogue Incident Exposed

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.

TC

When it came to Cal AI’s viral success, a small army of influencers paid off

The company generated over $30 million in revenue in two years and was acquired by MyFitness for an undisclosed amount of money in March.

WD

AI Hacks Leave a Mess That AI Companies Aren’t Paying For

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.

WD

We Got Hot and Heavy With Meta’s Muse—and Baffled by Apple’s HomeView

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 Releases GPT-Live-1.1: 13 New Voices Across Six Languages, API Still Pending

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 MAI-Base-2: 2.8-Trillion-Parameter MoE Model Completes Pre-Training, Claims 4–12x Efficiency Over DeepSeek

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.

TC

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