From the archive
Follow the latest AI news and artificial intelligence developments across models, agents, robotics, research and the wider industry. Explore new AI tools, advances in computing, business moves, safety and policy, with clear reporting and useful sources. Read the stories, catch up with News in Brief and join the conversation.
Lead story
Stanford HAI researchers found that paralegals used an AI tool 58% more, and experimented with it 70% more, when managers framed it as a way to make work more meaningful rather than simply faster. Their study suggests that training, time to explore and measures that recognise higher-value work…
Read the report & discussion ↗Watch Desk
Former White House AI adviser Sriram Krishnan is targeting a $500 million venture fund for growth- and later-stage AI companies, The Information reports. If raised, it would put a substantial pool of capital behind companies further along the road from promising pitch to established business.
AWS AI Watch
AWS says Amazon Quick and Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases can now check document permissions against their authoritative source at query time, rather than relying only on access data copied during an earlier sync. The practical gain is that revoked access can be reflected in AI answers within moments,…
Watch Desk
AI’s climate promise runs into an awkward question: can it help develop cleaner technology while its expanding energy demand props up fossil fuels? A new Jacobin essay argues that political and economic incentives matter as much as what AI might make possible.
Watch Desk
Astrocade says its AI game-making platform has reached 10 million monthly users, doubling its audience in four months. The growth suggests there is already a sizeable audience for games and interactive experiences made with generative tools, even if the quality debate has not exactly packed up and gone…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft has made Execution Containers generally available, giving developers and IT teams a way to set boundaries around AI agents and the code they run. The key practical change is that those rules can be enforced across Windows, macOS and Linux, rather than left as a polite request…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft is adding local AI models and sandboxed tool execution to GitHub Copilot on Windows. The change could let coding work move between a model running on a user’s PC and cloud models, while containing some agent-run commands in operating-system-level sandboxes.
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft says its FORGE Lab used AI-assisted research to find 140 Windows vulnerabilities between May and September 2026, including 52 addressed in September’s security release. The company’s account also describes a growing open-source vulnerability programme, where the work of validating and fixing findings may be harder to scale…
Anthropic Watch
Anthropic has launched Claude Haiku 5.5, a small model it says is designed for high-volume, cost-sensitive work such as summaries and classification. Its published API pricing starts at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens, with higher rates for prompts over 100,000 tokens.
OpenAI Watch
OpenAI publicly released a Lean-verified proof of a variant of the 2-to-1 games conjecture, after theoretical computer scientists hurried to publish their own work amid rumours of an AI proof. The episode puts a concrete question about AI’s place in mathematical research on the table: what changes when…
Watch Desk
Mecka AI has raised $60 million in a Series B led by Sequoia Capital, with Nvidia, Microsoft’s M12 and Qualcomm also backing its push to help robots understand and operate in the physical world. The funding highlights a less glamorous, rather important bottleneck in robotics: gathering enough useful…
Watch Desk
An open-source project called openTPU uses AI agents in the design of an AI accelerator and has run several language models on a physical FPGA card. Its reported results offer a concrete, inspectable experiment in AI-designed hardware, though memory access is currently the bottleneck.
Anthropic Watch
Anthropic’s Python SDK 1.12.0 adds support for Claude Haiku 5.5 and typed computer and browser tool calls, alongside new controls and capabilities for developers building with its API. The release also updates how models, workspaces and Managed Agents can be configured, making this a substantial toolkit update rather…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft Research Asia has released Agent Lightning v1.0, an open-source framework for training AI agents with reinforcement learning while keeping the agent harness used in deployment in the loop. Its coding-agent example reports a 14.6 percentage-point improvement on SWE-bench Verified, with about 6,000 training samples.
Watch Desk
AI leaders who fear the consequences of powerful systems may also feel compelled to build them before less cautious rivals do, journalist Kevin Roose argues. His proposed counterweight is a mix of oversight and coordination, not simply hoping the race slows itself down.
Watch Desk
San Francisco has passed a temporary ban on new data centres within city limits, according to Bloomberg. The decision puts a practical question beside the AI boom: how much room should a city make for the infrastructure that powers it?
Watch Desk
Liquid AI has released two open d1 decision models, including one it says can answer a question in under 50 milliseconds on each of four tested NVIDIA devices. The models return structured decisions in a single pass rather than generating text, offering developers a smaller, faster option for…
Watch Desk
Georgia Tech plans to launch an online master’s degree in artificial intelligence in 2027, with six concentrations spanning business, health and human-AI interaction. The programme is designed for working professionals who want to apply AI in their fields, not just study it in isolation.
Nous/Hermes Watch
Nous Research has raised $90 million to develop Hermes Agent as a business product, with private deployment, single sign-on and auditing among the features planned for organisations. The expansion could give companies more control over how staff use the open-source AI agent, while leaving its underlying project open…
SAP Watch
SAP has introduced SAP Pay for institutional stablecoin settlement within SAP Cloud ERP, according to Forkast. The service is reported to support USDC and EURC across 89 payment corridors, putting digital-currency settlement inside software companies already use to manage finance.
