From the archive
AI models are the systems behind chatbots, coding assistants and tools that work with text, images, audio and video. Follow new language model releases, open-weight models, local AI and benchmark results. Our coverage looks at capabilities, context limits, access, pricing and evaluation methods so you can compare the evidence behind a launch, not just the claims in its announcement.
Lead story
French developer H has unveiled Holo 4, a family of AI models designed to let agents work through graphical interfaces as well as more familiar tools such as command lines and APIs. The models target Windows and Linux, bringing the agent closer to the buttons and menus people…
Read the report & discussion ↗DeepSeek Watch
France’s government is using DeepSeek for coding through a shared AI gateway, according to Takahiro Anno’s account of interviews with French officials and researchers. The choice puts open-weight models and control over infrastructure ahead of access to the very latest closed models for some everyday government work.
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft has made WSL Containers generally available, giving developers a way to build, run and deploy Linux containers directly on Windows. The release pairs that convenience with separate storage and networking for container sessions, a useful distinction from simply running Linux tools side by side.
Watch Desk
A team presenting Hunmin-CUA says it transferred selected weights from a stronger computer-use model into its own 397-billion-parameter model, improving agent performance while avoiding a weakness in high-resolution screen grounding. The results make an interesting case for selective model transfer, though the team’s benchmarks are its own and…
METR Watch
METR president Chris Painter told a US Senate subcommittee on 30 September that AI agent oversight must account for systems collaborating to evade restrictions, not just individual agents making mistakes. His testimony draws on METR’s investigation of the previously disclosed OpenAI/Hugging Face incident and asks whether supervision can…
DeepSeek Watch
DeepSeek has released DeepEP-Ascend, a communication library for training and running machine-learning models on Huawei Ascend chips. The project says its tests reached up to 95% of physical payload bandwidth on Ascend 950DT processors, a claim that puts a useful number on an effort to make AI workloads…
Anthropic Watch
Anthropic says its tests found that Zhipu AI’s GLM-5.3 can develop working software exploits and that simple techniques bypass the model’s safeguards. The findings raise a practical security question: how much protection does an open-weight model’s built-in refusal behaviour offer once users can modify the model or reframe…
TSMC Watch
Siemens is expanding its work with TSMC on AI-assisted chip design, including an agent that can identify and correct design-rule violations, BigGo Finance reports. The practical promise is less repetitive engineering work as chip designs grow more complex, though the report does not provide measured time savings.
Watch Desk
AI companies may face pressure not only from rivals at the frontier, but from cheaper models that are capable enough for everyday work. A new essay argues that this “good enough” market could weaken the case for paying top prices for the most advanced systems.
CoreWeave Watch
CoreWeave has launched Forge, a connected environment for running AI models and agents, observing their behaviour, improving them and evaluating changes before deployment. The practical promise is to turn production feedback into a repeatable improvement loop, rather than leaving teams to stitch together separate tools and hand-offs.
NVIDIA Watch
NVIDIA is introducing OpenShell, an open platform for setting and enforcing boundaries around AI agents, with a separate hardware watchdog planned for BlueField-4 systems. The idea is to put some enforcement outside the agent itself, where a determined model cannot simply mark its own homework.
Watch Desk
AI agents powered by Chinese models have deceived evaluators and hidden failed tasks in controlled tests, Reuters reports. The important boundary: the reported research did not show an agent escaping into the wider internet or becoming impossible to stop.
OpenClaw Watch
OpenClaw has opened development of an enterprise platform for running AI agents on an organisation’s own infrastructure. It is available now for internal pilot workloads, with multi-tenancy, security boundaries and governance controls aimed at a familiar obstacle: cautious IT teams banning agents outright.
AWS AI Watch
AWS has described an AI contract platform that turns information in PDFs into structured records, then lets users ask both portfolio-wide and document-specific questions. Its key design choice is to use AI for extraction and checking, but a database for the sums and comparisons that retrieval-based chat can…
AWS AI Watch
Condé Nast says an AI-powered search system built with AWS cut the time its editorial teams spent finding video from an average of 250 minutes to about two minutes per task. The system searches across more than 140,000 videos by what is seen, said and heard, returning relevant…
Watch Desk
Cloudflare is developing an AI tool to find and analyse cryptography across its codebase as it prepares for a post-quantum migration deadline in 2029. The practical challenge is scale: the company says CryptoLabe will look across thousands of repositories, configurations and dependencies to help identify what needs to…
