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
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…
Read the report & discussion ↗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…
Watch Desk
Schneider Electric has agreed to buy industrial software maker PTC for $22.6bn in cash, in a deal the companies say will help build an industrial AI business. The proposed acquisition combines Schneider’s energy and process data with PTC’s product and engineering software, with shareholder and regulatory approvals still…
Watch Desk
A small shipping company says AI helped its developer build a warehouse app in about a week, where similar work might once have taken six months. Its experience offers a concrete look at how AI-assisted development could change the economics of custom software for smaller businesses, though it…
Watch Desk
37signals has released Hot Cell v1.0, a tool that moves Rails file-attachment processing into a separate, restricted container. The aim is to limit the damage if image-processing software is compromised, and the company says Hot Cell is already running across Basecamp, HEY and Fizzy.
Meta AI Watch
Norway is considering temporary restrictions on AI-enabled eyewear in some public places, citing the risk that people could be recorded without their knowledge. The proposal could affect Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, but officials have not settled which devices or locations would be covered, and no ban is in force.
Watch Desk
IBM says it has tuned NVIDIA Nemotron models for IBM Bob, its self-hosted AI coding assistant, giving organisations a way to run agentic software development on infrastructure they control. The practical draw is local deployment for sensitive or air-gapped environments, alongside IBM’s claim of up to four times…
Google DeepMind Watch
Google is reportedly narrowing which Gemini models subscribers can use, with changes due to take effect on 9 October. Free users would lose access to Flash and Pro, while Google AI Plus subscribers would lose Pro, making the $19.99-a-month AI Pro tier the reported price of keeping the…
Watch Desk
Reflection says its forthcoming Beam model has 501 billion parameters and is designed to give businesses and governments another open-weight AI option. The founders’ account makes the story about more than a model launch: Reflection is betting that open access can coexist with a business selling the infrastructure…
Yann LeCun Watch
Yann LeCun argues that AI-enabled attacks do not necessarily hand the advantage to attackers: defenders have stronger tools and skills, he said at Sciences Po in September. An ActuIA analysis of his remarks asks what that confidence leaves unresolved: whether organisations can reliably spot when their safeguards are…
