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 Research and Virginia Tech researchers have developed WikiSkill, a framework that turns an AI agent’s past successes and failures into reusable skills. In the researchers’ tests, it beat existing skill-evolution methods across five benchmarks, while keeping its growing store of experience out of the agent’s runtime prompt.
Read the report & discussion ↗Salesforce Watch
Salesforce is recasting Slack as a shared workspace for AI agents, where colleagues can work alongside an agent and see its answers, activity and decisions together. The most concrete pieces are a Slackbot that can answer in shared channels using company information it is permitted to access, and…
Watch Desk
Normal Tech argues that AI safety debate is being squeezed into a choice between existential-risk warnings and suspicion of the people making them. Its essay makes a third case: take those warnings seriously, but ask whether the framing helps produce better policy.
AWS AI Watch
Amazon Payments used a contextual bandit to select personalised content across a three-stage customer acquisition funnel, AWS says. In a seven-week online test, one customer population saw a high single-digit relative lift in final-funnel conversion, while another saw no improvement.
Watch Desk
Europe’s AI debate is not short of plans; it is short of comparable capital and computing scale. A Diari ARA opinion piece argues that private investment, rather than publicly selected gigafactories, should do more of the heavy lifting.
AWS AI Watch
AWS has published a hands-on guide to connecting Claude Platform on AWS from production workloads, developer laptops and external services. Its practical takeaway: use different access methods for each environment, while separating production and development traffic into workspaces.
Microsoft AI Watch
Ryan Roslansky is leaving Microsoft after nearly 18 years at LinkedIn and the company, prompting another leadership reshuffle around Office and Teams. The change lands as Microsoft reorganises its productivity software around Copilot and agents, making it a consequential handover for the people shaping those products.
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft’s 2026 Digital Defense Report says threat actors are using AI in reconnaissance, social engineering, malware and exploit development. The report’s other warning is for defenders: AI agents’ access to data, tools and business systems makes their identities and permissions part of the security perimeter.
Watch Desk
A study from Apple and EPFL found that, under equal time budgets, elaborate agent harnesses did not outperform a minimal coding-agent setup using the same frontier model. The result puts a useful question to AI developers: how much of an agent’s performance comes from its scaffolding, and how…
Cloudflare Watch
Cloudflare has released Clef and Clef-flash, two decision models designed to return structured answers with probabilities rather than open-ended prose. For developers building AI agents, the useful distinction is between deciding where a task should go and generating whatever comes next. The models are hosted on Workers AI,…
Cyera Watch
Cyera’s Assaf Morag argues that AI-assisted cybercrime makes one defensive question more urgent: what sensitive data can a compromised account or token actually reach? His analysis recommends checking exposed credentials, broad application permissions and bulk data access, rather than treating a successful login as the end of the…
Anthropic Watch
Barclays is expanding its use of Anthropic’s Claude across the bank, with tools already assisting staff and handling about 120,000 Global Markets emails a day. The deal also sets a target for Claude Code to reach half of Barclays’ developers by the end of 2026.
Salesforce Watch
Salesforce has published customer accounts that put some numbers and operating rules behind agentic AI deployments. The useful message is less “switch it on” than “measure what it does, listen to customers and keep controls close”.
GMI Cloud Watch
At a San Francisco hackathon on 26 September, 55 teams built working projects around Jev, a model from TypeSafe AI, using GMI Cloud’s inference service for text, image, video and voice generation. The useful idea was to give quick, typed decisions to one model and leave the actual…
MLCommons Watch
MLCommons has introduced DLRMv4, a new MLPerf Training benchmark for AI recommendation systems built around users’ sequences of past actions. It replaces an older benchmark design that flattened behaviour into aggregated features, giving hardware comparisons a workload closer to how large recommendation models are trained today.
Watch Desk
A proposed 40,000-acre, nine-gigawatt data-centre campus in Utah was derailed by fierce local opposition after most residents and county officials learned of it late in the process. The Verge’s investigation, discussed on its Decoder podcast, shows how a project pitched as an AI infrastructure landmark became a fight…
Meta AI Watch
Meta says its third-generation Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses are now available in India, starting at INR 44,300. The update brings a slimmer design, longer battery life and a new action button, alongside two more AI glasses developments on the way.
