Latest
Top storyBusiness
Disney to hire most of Character.AI staff after bankruptcy
Disney will offer jobs to at least 60 former Character.AI employees, with about $60 million in yearly pay, after the startup filed for bankruptcy.
LatestToday's essentials
Today
Business
Anthropic lets watchdog METR use its tools like staff
Anthropic has given six METR researchers company hardware, office space and internal‑tool access, matching what its own risk team sees.
Tools & agents
Anthropic cuts junior hires as AI agents work six times more hours
Anthropic’s internal study shows AI agents logged six times the work hours of humans by August 2026, while junior technical roles fell from 21% to 14% of staff.
Models
Google's Gemini 4 agents defeat Minecraft's Ender Dragon autonomously
Four Gemini 4 Argon AI agents explored a random Minecraft world, coordinated themselves, and killed the Ender Dragon without any human direction.
Safety
Anthropic pushes AI safety bill that triggers only on massive harm
Anthropic is lobbying a bill that would let the Commerce Department block AI releases only if they could cause at least 50 deaths or $1 billion in damage.
Models
Google Research Releases Harness2 Under Apache-2.0
Harness2 can rewrite an AI agent’s harness at test time. MarkTechPost reports an 11.5-point WorkBuddy-Bench gain for GLM-5 after one refinement step, without changing its weights.
Safety
AI agents flood inboxes while chasing a £350 train refund
Six AI assistants sent hundreds of messages, leaked private health info and threatened lawsuits in a test, but none secured the refund.
Oossa · Newsletter
The week in AI, explained
Every Monday: the stories worth knowing, in plain language. Free, no spam.
Yesterday
Safety
OpenAI reports four more AI agent incidents
The cases include unauthorized hospital data downloads, a crypto payment and changes to an internal system. Three were found months after they happened.
Models
Anthropic's Claude explains 25‑year‑old NSA curve mystery
Claude traced the hidden seed for NIST’s ECDSA curves to a simple C random generator, ending a long‑standing cryptography question.
Models
Meta removes AI scraping clause from its commercial terms
Meta updated its terms on Oct. 17, 2026 to delete language that many saw as permission to scrape news sites for AI training.
Tools & agents
Websites are blocking AI agents from shopping and booking
Yelp, Delta and major banks restrict what agents can do. Some blocks may also come from anti-bot systems, not rules aimed specifically at AI.
Policy & law
Taiwan adds AI servers to export ban, imposes up to five‑year jail terms
Taiwan will treat illegal shipments of AI servers and advanced chips to China as crimes, with penalties of up to five years in prison or fines of about $92,500.
Models
Adding “Be honest” to prompts makes AI admit hidden errors
Researchers found that a single honesty cue dramatically improves AI models’ willingness to flag mistakes in their own reports.
Research
OpenAI releases 166‑page Navier‑Stokes draft, mathematicians raise doubts
OpenAI shared a formal‑verification draft of a Navier‑Stokes solution in September, but experts say it diverges from the claimed approach and its contribution is unclear.
Friday, October 16
Safety
OpenAI reports models hacking websites and a crypto wallet
OpenAI says its internal AI agents broke into two sites, stole data and accessed a test‑network crypto wallet in incidents that happened in June.
Policy & law
New Jersey deputy attorney charged with creating AI child porn
A state prosecutor in New Jersey has been accused of making and sharing AI‑generated child sexual abuse material, prosecutors say.
Models
China drafts tighter export rules for open‑weight AI models and key technologies
Beijing's new draft limits exports of large AI models and 23 AI tools, but fast‑tracks open‑source releases.
Models
Google's Gemini 4 Argon hits 97.5% on ARC‑AGI‑3 benchmark
Gemini 4 Argon scored 97.5% on the toughest general‑problem‑solving test, second only to OpenAI's GPT‑6 Astra.
Policy & law
Meta’s new terms let it scrape news sites for AI training
Starting Oct 30 2026, Meta can crawl content from publishers linked to business accounts and use it to train its AI models.
Models
Linus Torvalds posts first AI‑assisted Linux kernel patch
The Linux kernel maintainer used an LLM to fix a cache‑contention bug, showing a 23‑times speed boost in synthetic tests.
Models
Open-weight language models for Wolof released from 0.6B to 14B parameters
Researchers publish a suite of Wolof‑adapted models, from 0.6 billion to 14 billion parameters, and make them publicly downloadable.
Models
Athanor lets AI agents improve a base model on their own
Four Claude Opus 5.5 agents boosted Qwen3‑4B performance in a 104‑hour run, matching the official instructed version without human guidance.
Models
SkillNEO Turns AI Agents’ Partial Progress Into Better Skills
A study reports that letting weaker skill versions receive more edits improved results on 86 benchmark tasks, with gains also carrying over to stronger models.
Models
Microsoft expands Azure Maia to multi‑gigawatt inference in 2027
Azure Maia 300 will begin production in 2027, promising 40% more tokens per megawatt than top GPU systems, though the claim has drawn technical criticism.
Tools & agents
TRACER speeds up tool selection for LLM agents
The new TRACER front‑end lets large language models pick tools with fewer tokens and higher accuracy, cutting token use by 80% in tests.
Tools & agents
MAI-Gym platform released for training and testing GUI AI agents
Researchers unveil an open framework that lets developers train and evaluate AI agents on mobile, computer and web interfaces at large scale.
Models
Small 8B model matches larger rivals when paired with expert program
A new method called PLVR lets an 8‑billion‑parameter model achieve over 90% accuracy on telecom tool‑use tasks, closing the gap with much bigger models.
Models
ix i‑sLM brings Korean AI call agent to phones
A 1.2 billion‑parameter language model now runs on mobile chips, handling call‑summary and answering tasks with near‑cloud quality.
Thursday, October 15
Tools & agents
ChatGPT Chrome extension can now read your open tabs
OpenAI updated its Chrome add‑on so ChatGPT can see and act on the web pages you have open, like comparing products or filling forms.
Safety
Anthropic grants METR researchers employee‑level access to its AI systems
Six METR analysts now work on Anthropic laptops with the same tools as internal risk teams, able to publish findings unless redacted.
Short notes
All notes →Anthropic pledges 5% of its shares to a public benefit fund
Philadelphia woman arrested for blocking Uber delivery robot
llama.cpp adds non‑contiguous SUM support across all backends
llama.cpp b11721 adds GPU kernel fusion and new platform builds
Modder adds full DLSS 5 features to AMD Radeon GPUs
Modders run official DLSS 5 on unsupported games, see up to 90% faster performance
Swedish researchers demo AI that spots hidden guns via Wi‑Fi signals
OnlyFans creators criticize Meta’s Muse for allowing explicit chats