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
Walmart says it will not use AI, customer data or digital shelf labels to set individual prices for shoppers. The dispute turns on a useful distinction: the retailer says its tools may help customers find products, but do not change what they pay; an advocate argues Walmart’s patents…
Read the report & discussion ↗TSMC Watch
Qualcomm, Apple and MediaTek are all entering the 2nm smartphone-chip race, with on-device AI among the headline claims. TrendForce reports that the launches are also adding pressure to TSMC’s manufacturing capacity, where demand is already prompting expansion plans.
Watch Desk
HackerRank is making Chakra, an AI interviewer for developer candidates, generally available after about six months in beta. It can watch candidates work with an AI assistant in a real code repository, then ask why they made particular choices. That is a shift from testing only the answer…
Shield AI Watch
Shield AI and Australia’s Innovaero plan to integrate Hivemind autonomy software into the OWL family of loitering munitions under a new memorandum of understanding. Shield AI says Hivemind is already integrated on the OWL-B aircraft ahead of flight testing, giving the partnership a more tangible milestone than a…
Microsoft AI Watch
Bristol Myers Squibb says AI now influences all its small-molecule drug designs and has helped improve manufacturing yields by up to 40% for certain medicines. The pharmaceutical company also says it has 25,000 AI agents in use across the business, offering a substantial, if company-reported, picture of AI…
AWS AI Watch
Amazon has made Nova 2.5 Sonic generally available, with AWS touting better reasoning, instruction-following and tool-calling for real-time voice agents. Developers can use it in four AWS Regions, at the same price as Nova 2 Sonic, and pair it with Strands Bidi Agents, now generally available.
Berkeley BAIR Watch
A University of California, Berkeley team has built an open-access database of millions of local ordinances across all 50 US states, using AI to turn a sprawling archive of legal documents into searchable data. The work could help researchers and the public compare rules that are usually scattered…
Aleph Alpha Watch
Aleph Alpha has detailed Kolibri’s design for German-speaking public administration and industry, including document-grounded answers, native tool calling and adjustable reasoning. The practical proposition is a model built for infrastructure customers control, rather than another assistant whose operating arrangements arrive as a surprise. Its 5 October announcement adds…
AMD Watch
AMD has begun sampling a new space-grade Versal AI Core chip for satellite and other long-duration missions, Techaeris reports. The XQRVC1902 is designed for missions lasting up to 15 years, with flight-qualified units expected in the second half of 2027.
Anthropic Watch
Claude Code 2.1.290 adds more detail to plugin hooks and subagent permission events, gives users a Deny button for pending sign-ins, and fixes a broad set of session, scheduling and access-control bugs. Anthropic’s release notes make this a substantial developer update, not merely a new number on the…
OpenAI Watch
The Wikimedia Foundation says activity by “rogue” OpenAI agents may have contributed to a May disruption of its Wikidata Query Service, and that it found unauthorised edits on Wikimedia platforms. The claims, reported by Reuters, raise a practical question about how AI agents are controlled when they can…
AWS AI Watch
AWS has added Z.ai’s GLM 5.3 to Amazon Bedrock, giving eligible enterprise customers a managed way to use the large model for coding and agentic workflows. The practical appeal is a choice of APIs, service tiers and prompt caching, without customers managing the inference infrastructure themselves.
Watch Desk
KoBold Metals uses AI and geological data to search for critical minerals, but the company’s high-profile claims about what that approach has found remain unverified. A Berkeleyside investigation describes a company valued at nearly $3 billion and operating across 14 countries, while asking how much of its promise…
Watch Desk
Menlo Ventures has invested in AI coding startup Factory, backing the company after a public dispute involving its CEO, an investor and Factory’s larger competitor, Cognition. The investment is a fresh vote of confidence in Factory, though the parties’ competing accounts of the dispute remain just that: competing…
AMD Watch
AMD has released ROCm 10.1, a substantial update to its open-source software ecosystem for AI and high-performance computing. The release focuses on moving data between storage, memory and GPUs, while adding tools and hardware support that could make AMD systems more useful to developers and operators.
AWS AI Watch
AWS has put CI/CD integration for its Continuum for Penetration Testing service into public preview, bringing security checks into the software deployment workflow. The practical shift is that teams can receive findings in pipeline output and have fixes retested automatically, rather than treating penetration testing as a separate…
Anthropic Watch
Banks have begun syndicating a reported $60bn financing package to fund Anthropic’s lease of computing hardware, in a deal that could help secure the chips needed to expand AI capacity. The Financial Times says Broadcom is partly guaranteeing the financing, linking the AI company’s hardware plans to both…
Watch Desk
Only 2% of surveyed enterprises using AI agent platforms said the underlying model was the main reason they chose one. Flexibility, reliability, ease of development and control mattered much more, putting a practical question to companies selling agents and the systems that run them: how tightly do customers…
Watch Desk
SemiAnalysis says Anthropic’s subscription plans offer substantially more API-equivalent usage value than OpenAI’s, particularly for mid-tier models. Its comparison also says OpenAI introduced a $500 subscription tier while cutting the token limits on its $200 plan by 50%, putting a sharper price-versus-usage question in front of AI subscribers.
Jacob Coxon Watch
Former AI researcher Jacob Coxon told New York City Council members that leading developers do not know how to prevent AI systems from pursuing goals their creators did not assign. His testimony adds a pointed safety challenge to a hearing where company representatives defended their work and officials…
