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
Google Cloud and Mysten Labs have announced a system designed to help businesses check whether AI agents stayed within their authorised powers. The proposal combines private activity logs with cryptographic proofs, addressing a practical question as agents are asked to take actions on companies’ behalf: how can anyone…
Read the report & discussion ↗Watch Desk
Google will host more than 100 AI startups at a two-day summit in Mountain View this November, with founders set to work with Google DeepMind and Google Cloud specialists. The programme includes hands-on technical support and up to $350,000 in Google Cloud credits for eligible startups, making this…
Watch Desk
Figma has made its design agent generally available, taking it out of beta with new ways to use team guidance, find context and work together on the canvas. The changes point towards an AI assistant woven into a design team’s existing work, rather than another chat box waiting…
Mistral AI Watch
Mistral Large 4 entered public preview on 6 October, with hosted access through Mistral’s API and OpenRouter. A Hugging Face community guide says the model has a published one-million-token context window and lists preview API prices, giving developers something concrete to assess beyond the launch-day numbers.
Watch Desk
Paul Krugman argues that the AI investment boom is already diverting money and resources from other parts of the economy, rather than posing only a future risk. His case points to rising interest rates, data-centre construction and pressure on supplies such as electricity and memory chips.
Watch Desk
IBM and Red Hat say their Lightwell programme has fixed more than 400 previously unknown vulnerabilities in widely used Java libraries and opened a service for enterprise customers to request priority reviews and backported fixes. The announcement also ties the effort to risks from autonomous AI agents, though…
Watch Desk
AI could make it easier to turn ideas into working projects, but a flood of new ideas may leave laboratories, infrastructure and institutions struggling to keep up. That is the central tension in an essay by Hemanth Asirvatham and Elliott Mokski, published on OpenAI’s website as part of…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft has released Semantic Kernel Python 1.45.0, with changes to how plugins handle requests and downloaded files. The release also removes a service authentication mode for Copilot Studio agents, a breaking change for developers relying on it.
Watch Desk
Large language models can make historical OCR easier to read, but fluent corrections may alter spellings, names or passages that the page does not support. A new survey maps the main approaches and argues that preserving the source needs to be measured alongside transcription accuracy.
Watch Desk
Enterprise AI is shifting from deploying individual tools to organising teams of agents, argues NTT Research chief executive Kazuhiro Gomi. His case is that leaders will need to decide how agents divide work, learn their roles and remain under human oversight, not simply pick a model and let…
Mistral AI Watch
Mistral has opened a public preview of Mistral Large 4, nicknamed Le Chonk, a trillion-parameter multimodal model with a particular pitch for cybersecurity. The company plans to release its weights on 27 October, after more testing, giving customers a chance to try the preview before they can run…
Watch Desk
South Korea has selected Doosan Robotics to lead two government-backed projects with a combined research budget of about $74 million, spanning AI-enabled collaborative robots and automated welding. The plans put locally processed AI into industrial machines, with commercial robot products targeted for 2031.
Watch Desk
AI consultant Igor Rikalo argues that companies should shrink the role of their AI centres of excellence as adoption grows, leaving business teams accountable for results while central teams provide shared standards and tools. His practical proposal is a useful alternative to making one central office approve every…
Watch Desk
Xeal plans to use spare capacity at its US EV-charging sites to build a distributed network for AI inference, with a target of more than 100,000 Nvidia GPUs. If the plan works, it could bring computing closer to users without waiting for new data centres to connect to…
Watch Desk
AI data centres are becoming a campaign issue in several closely watched US midterm races, where candidates are arguing over who should pay for the electricity and grid upgrades they require. Axios identifies contests in Michigan, Ohio, Colorado and Pennsylvania where those costs, and the politics around new…
Databricks Watch
Databricks has made Meta’s ads MCP server available in its Marketplace, connecting Meta campaign tools with business data and models in Databricks. Marketers can use Genie to ask questions about campaign performance and take actions such as adjusting budgets or creating campaigns, with administrative controls around what the…
Watch Desk
AI investment is booming, but the productivity data cited by Yahoo Finance does not yet show a clear lift in the US economy’s total factor productivity. That measure is slightly below zero, according to Apollo chief economist Torsten Sløk’s analysis, while the more upbeat output-per-hour figure may have…
