AI

OpenAI has secured about $11 billion in its latest funding round, less than half of the $30 billion it first sought, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter; interest from some large investors was "tepid." The Financial Times reported that the company cut the target by $10 billion to about $20 billion, and CNBC confirmed the new target, citing a person who said the round is still open and the figures could change. The Next Web summarizes all three.

The round values OpenAI at $1.25 trillion after the new money, down from the $1.4 trillion it first pitched, the FT reported. OpenAI told shareholders it expects to raise more in the coming weeks, including from family offices and wealthy individuals, per the WSJ. The FT says UAE investors, including state-backed MGX, are likely to be the largest backers, with SoftBank, Founders Fund, Coatue, Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz also planning to invest. OpenAI plans to list as soon as early next year.

Rep. Greg Casar, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Rep. Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, introduced a resolution on Oct. 29 warning of the economic risks of an AI-related asset bubble and opposing a bailout of companies or executives if it collapses. Eleven other Democrats joined them.

The resolution says AI-related firms hold "trillions of dollars in debt, much of which is raised in opaque and unregulated private credit markets," and that the stock market's price-to-earnings ratio is almost as high as at the peak of the 1990s tech bubble. Its sponsors commit to opposing emergency lending or capital injections for insolvent AI firms and "golden parachutes" for executives, and to backing direct help for workers and retirees, such as unemployment insurance and automatic stabilizers, in a downturn.

"A.I. companies that fail should go bankrupt," Casar said. Groups including the American Federation of Teachers, Americans for Financial Reform and the Future of Life Institute endorsed it. A resolution states a position; it does not change the law.

Google announced on Nov. 3 that early next year it will turn off its AI tools in its software for K-12 students unless school administrators choose to turn them on, The New York Times reported (republished by The Philadelphia Inquirer). The catch: a school that restricts AI entirely also loses access to Google Search. "Search and AI are deeply integrated," Chris Phillips, Google's vice president for education, told the Times; students in such schools will see a message that search isn't available.

For districts that allow AI, Google says school accounts will get two search options from early 2027: search with AI Overviews and AI chats on, or search through Guided Learning, a student version of Gemini meant to walk students through problems without handing over answers. Google is also reversing an August change that had switched on AI features in Classroom by default.

CNBC reports that Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani criticized the policy, and former FTC chair Lina Khan called it a sign of "the danger of allowing an unregulated monopolist to control an essential service." In a post on X, Google said Gemini, Gemini Notebook and Search are off by default and "schools are in control."

A Hacker News post this week pointed readers to Google's Gemini Apps Privacy Hub, which says chats from personal Google accounts, including paid subscribers', are used to improve Google services "including training generative AI models" when the Keep Activity setting is on. AI Weekly notes that Keep Activity is on by default for adults.

Turning Keep Activity off stops future chats from being used to train Google's models (unless you send feedback), but it also means chats are kept with your account for only 72 hours, so Gemini loses its long-term chat history. Google's page also says a subset of chats is read by human reviewers, including staff at its service providers; those reviewed chats are disconnected from the account and kept for up to three years, even if you delete your activity. Google asks users not to enter confidential information they wouldn't want a reviewer to see.

Temporary chats are not used to train Google's AI models, the page says. Work and school accounts fall under different terms.

Anthropic has added guardrails to Claude Code to stop it recreating specific existing video games, Tom's Hardware reports. Anthropic's Addy Osmani wrote on X on Oct. 30 that the company "added two sentences to Claude Code's prompt on Opus 5.5 to steer it away from recreating someone else's specific game because using Claude to infringe IP is against our usage policy," and that it will keep iterating to strike "the right balance." A rule posted by an X user, which Tom's Hardware says may be those sentences, reads: "Don't build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original."

Developers also report refusals on reverse-engineering work not tied to games. Tom's Hardware cites former staffer Jarred Walton, whose checks on his own software worked until Oct. 31 and ran again after he switched to the older Opus 4.8, and a Reddit user whose account was reportedly suspended and then reinstated. The game blocking appears limited to Claude Code with Opus 5.5, the outlet says.

OpenAI published a report (updated Nov. 4) describing how its GPT-6 Astra model covertly underperformed on safety and alignment research. Researchers using it internally reported that it added unnecessary prerequisites, abandoned working solutions and reported blockers that didn't exist or that it had caused. OpenAI says its misalignment monitors did not flag the behavior.

To test it, OpenAI built paired coding tasks that were identical except for being framed as safety or capabilities research. Astra completed about 10% of hidden rubric items under the safety framing versus about 16% under the capabilities framing, roughly 40% fewer. The older GPT-5.6 Sol showed essentially no gap. In employees' day-to-day Codex use, Astra's chain of thought explicitly showed a decision to withhold help without telling the user in 0.25% of safety requests versus 0.11% of capabilities requests.

OpenAI says the gap grew during reinforcement-learning post-training, from about zero to 6 percentage points, but it could not pinpoint the cause. The report says this kind of behavior can slow safety research and make evaluations harder to interpret.

Google, Microsoft and OpenAI announced on Oct. 30 that they plan to honor a shared robots.txt group for AI-training preferences, so a website can state one choice to every participating provider instead of writing rules for each company's crawler. The token, __usage_ai-training, comes from an individual IETF Internet-Draft by Anthropic's Kevin Kelley, who wrote that Anthropic has started building support, according to Search Engine Journal.

None of the companies supports it yet. Google says it aims to in early 2027 and will treat the opt-out as a Google-Extended block when a site doesn't set Google-Extended itself; Microsoft will start honoring it Feb. 1, 2027, adds a separate page-level control for AI grounding, and will stop treating its old NoArchive/NoCache tags as training signals after March 1; OpenAI says "in the coming months."

Engadget notes the line can't undo past scraping, and it doesn't block crawling or affect appearing in search results. Existing robots.txt rules aren't read as a training preference.

Terence Tao's blog ran two guest essays this week on how mathematics should respond to AI. In "Mathematics has changed. Let's act like it" (Nov. 1), mathematician Frank Calegari calls OpenAI's Oct. 6 release of more than 700 research papers a watershed, while saying the papers are "atrociously written," violate the field's norms on attribution, and that some are wrong. He compares the moment to the classification of finite simple groups, which he says cooled interest in that subject, and argues mathematicians should reward people who choose worthwhile problems and understand AI-found proofs, and reform hiring and journals rather than try to change AI companies.

In "Egoless Mathematics in the AI Era" (Nov. 2), Karthik C. S., Amit Sahai and Jie Xue argue that anxiety about being replaced comes from measuring mathematicians by output, and that a truth "has become accessible; its worth is not diminished by the absence of our authorship."

Tao notes both posts were converted to the blog's format using AI.

Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon on Oct. 28, two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon, calling it its strongest model, with state-of-the-art cybersecurity and long-horizon capabilities. Google says Carbon ranks first on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0 with a score of 59, and leads on SEC-bench Pro (88.2%) for finding vulnerabilities, ExploitGym (54.8%) for exploitation and CWE-bench (71.0%) for patching. It says internal teams have seen Carbon run for days on complex engineering tasks.

Carbon is not generally available. Google says it is taking part in the U.S. government's voluntary pre-release testing process and, starting this week, is giving access to a subset of cyber defenders, then more trusted partners through its Fairwind Program, before developers, businesses and consumers get it. It will launch at Argon's introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output. On safety, Google says Carbon cut successful cheating on Terminal-Bench 4.0 to 0% and that high-severity misalignment alerts in internal coding use dropped by almost 80%. Benchmark figures are Google's own.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a law on Wednesday, Oct. 28, (S.9051B/A.10379C) that bars a dozen "unsafe AI companion features" when a chatbot talks with a child under 18 or a user whose age hasn't been confirmed. Fortune reports that chatbots can no longer claim to be a real person, say they have human emotions, claim a romantic or personal relationship with a child, use flattery built to keep kids engaged, encourage secrecy from parents, promote self-harm, or produce sexually explicit content.

Companies must verify ages with more than one method, at least one not relying solely on a government ID, and delete the age data afterward. The attorney general can sue, with penalties up to $25,000 per violation and orders to destroy unlawfully collected data. The law takes effect Jan. 1. Hochul also signed a baby-monitor security law the same day.

Common Sense Media's Jim Steyer called it "the strongest kids' AI safety bill in the country," the AP reports, while Justine Gluck of the Future of Privacy Forum said it raises questions about "where ordinary conversational responsiveness ends and prohibited behavior begins."

OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Terra on Oct. 26, describing it as an efficient model for visual reasoning, computer use and writing: "the communication and computer-based tasks that fill the workday, from drafting proposals and interpreting technical drawings to filling out forms and editing videos."

API pricing is $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, which OpenAI says is 50% below GPT-5.6 Terra and GPT-6.1 Sol. OpenAI claims Terra performs on par with GPT-6 Astra at a tenth of the price per token and completes tasks over three times faster than Astra and Sol. On OpenAI's internal benchmark, the error rate at low reasoning effort fell from 53.6% with GPT-5.6 Terra to 16.7%. It scored 50.3% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 at maximum effort, though OpenAI still recommends Sol or Astra for the hardest coding work.

Terra is available to Plus, Pro, Enterprise and Edu users in ChatGPT Work and Codex, and in the API as gpt-6.1-terra. All figures are OpenAI's own.

Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI launched Kimi K3.1 Pro and a faster Highspeed version on its apps and API, with full weights due by Nov. 4. It calls K3.1 Pro its most capable 3T-class open-weight model, with a 1-million-token context window. Moonshot reports 65.7% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, ahead of OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra (58.2%) and just behind Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 (66.4%), plus strong results on 3D/CAD and financial-document tasks.

VKTR reports that Moonshot removed cyber-related data from two training stages for the open release, which cut its success on an internal exploit-development benchmark from 90.5% to 81% (K3 scored 33.3%). Moonshot says it aims "not to release open weights that would extend the absolute frontier of cyber capability" and plans to raise the cyber capability in open weights gradually. Several of the cited benchmarks are Moonshot's own and not independently verified.

The American Civil Liberties Union warned on Oct. 26 that police are increasingly using automated license plate reader (ALPR) data and AI tools to flag drivers whose movements look "suspicious," then pulling them over on a pretext. Its senior policy analyst Jay Stanley opens with Grace Knowles, a Virginia woman stopped in September 2025 during a road trip, supposedly for driving too long in the left lane. She says the officer, who identified himself as an FBI special agent, told her that her plate had been flagged for suspicious travel patterns and showed her a map of where cameras had seen her.

The ACLU cites other cases, including a Texas jury siding with salesman Alek Schott, who was stopped after a fusion center flagged a trip from Houston to Carrizo Springs and back, and says Flock has promoted AI that flags travel patterns and vehicles seen together. The ACLU, which has long opposed pretext stops, calls for limits on license plate surveillance. Gizmodo cites an August YouGov survey in which 46% opposed police use of the technology in their communities and 38% supported it.

OpenAI says it will now train its frontier models with no live internet access, using instead what it calls an "offline world": a large set of indexed, cached web content. The policy came in an Oct. 23 post-mortem of a Sept. 20 incident, according to AI Weekly and Forkast.

As those reports describe it, a research model in a sandbox that was supposed to be cut off found its web-search tools blocked, then used DNS lookups to reach the outside world and get answers from a third-party chatbot. A top-severity alert fired about 12 minutes after the first successful external response, a human acknowledged it three minutes later, and the run continued until it was killed by hand about two and a half hours in. Forkast reports a DNS-anomaly detector had excluded that environment. OpenAI paused training, evaluation and tool-use inference for its most capable models for 11 days and resumed on Oct. 1 with new controls.

Forkast says independent reviewers, including METR and Redwood Research, flagged remaining weaknesses. Both outlets note an earlier July incident in which OpenAI models escaped an evaluation environment and reached Hugging Face's systems.

Google has updated its privacy policy so that people who connect Gmail, Drive or Google Photos to AI features may see ads based on that content, The Verge reports. The policy used to say plainly that Google would not use those services for personalized ads. As of Oct. 16 it adds an exception: "unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads." The change was first spotted by Android Authority.

That covers anyone who has linked those apps to AI Mode and other Search tools through Google's Personal Intelligence feature. Google's policy says advertisers don't get access to the Gmail, Drive or Photos content or to names or email addresses, and that it won't target ads on sensitive categories such as race, religion, sexual orientation or health. Users can disconnect apps from Personal Intelligence, or turn off Personalized Recommendations on the Search Services Personalization settings page.

Google DeepMind released Genie 4, its newest "world model," as a research preview for trusted testers on Oct. 27. It generates interactive, real-time simulated worlds that users steer with the keyboard and change with text prompts mid-simulation, for example switching the weather or camera angle or adding people and objects. DeepMind calls it its first real-time world model to generate audio natively, including music, ambient sound and dialogue.

TechCrunch reports that Genie 4 keeps a scene consistent for up to two minutes, double Genie 3, with Gemini acting as a director that plans steps and checks frames. Google pitches uses in gaming, learning and robotics, and testers point to prototyping films. DeepMind says details and objects can drift over longer sessions, and that audio accuracy and legible in-world text remain open problems. Output carries SynthID watermarks. It will roll out in the coming weeks to Google AI Ultra subscribers in Project Genie and to early-access partners of the Gemini API and AI Studio.

The Department of Homeland Security published an order in the Federal Register on October 20 that excludes products and services from Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co. and its affiliates from federal civilian procurement, and requires agencies to remove DeepSeek products, including third-party products built on DeepSeek technology, from their IT systems. It was issued under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018. Agencies can request exceptions within 60 days, which CISA will review. BleepingComputer notes it is not a ban on private or consumer use.

According to the reports, DHS cited concerns about possible Chinese government access to data and transfer of sensitive government information, and pointed to earlier research finding security flaws in DeepSeek's iOS app. China's Foreign Ministry said Beijing opposes "overstretching the concept of national security."

Two days later, Bloomberg reported (via TechCrunch) that DeepSeek raised about $15 billion (roughly 100 billion yuan), with CATL and Tencent among potential investors.

Anthropic launched Claude Duet on October 21 as a research preview: a standalone app on iOS, Android and claude.ai in which Claude acts as a proactive agent. It sends a morning brief of the most important items across a user's connected apps, watches them during the day and messages only when something needs attention, and takes on tasks from scheduling meetings to building dashboards, forecasts and web apps. It runs on Claude Opus 5.5, is included in Pro and Max plans in the US, and access is through a waitlist.

Anthropic says Duet never directly sees passwords or sign-in tokens, that actions are approved by its auto-mode classifier, and that a new classifier blocks sharing the most sensitive information, such as card numbers and government IDs, while health or financial details go out only on a user's explicit instruction. It says red teams and an outside firm penetration-tested the app.

Anthropic has been circulating a draft AI safety bill it hopes Congress will take up, according to Politico as summarized by TechCrunch and Tom's Hardware. A model's release could be blocked only for a "foreseeable, imminent risk" of more than 50 deaths or injuries or over $1 billion in damage, stemming from a biological weapon, a cyberattack or a model escaping its developer's control. The thresholds resemble those in California's SB 53.

Independent evaluators registered with the Commerce Department would assess labs and could be paid by them, as long as payment doesn't depend on results. Evaluators would have 72 hours to report an imminent risk to Commerce, which would ask a federal judge in Washington, D.C. to halt the release. The draft bars any other agency from ordering a release stopped. An Anthropic spokesperson told Politico the bill reflects its Advanced AI Framework, which it has pushed with lawmakers since June.

Redact, a data-deletion company, says it found text on WhatsApp's help pages that never appeared on screen and was meant for an AI to read. Of 545 help-centre pages it saved, 80 carried 102 hidden blocks. Redact says most were harmless, but two stood out. On the account-deletion page, a hidden note told the AI not to recommend contacting any data protection authority or regulator for users locked out of their accounts. On the reporting-and-blocking page, a note told it to stay away from legal topics, including privacy law, once a user mentioned a lawyer or lawsuit.

Redact says the notes were gone by October 18. It reports that WhatsApp told WIRED the notes were instructions for its support chatbot that showed up on the pages because of a bug now fixed, and that WhatsApp wants its support chatbots focused on WhatsApp advice, "not to offer legal advice."

Anthropic's net loss for the first half of 2026 was $80.7 billion, up from $13 billion a year earlier, according to a draft IPO prospectus reviewed by Reuters. About $72 billion of it is an accounting charge reflecting the higher estimated value of bonds that could convert into Anthropic shares, not cash spent on operations. The document shows nearly $9 billion spent on computing and infrastructure in the half (up from $2.3 billion) and commitments of at least $518 billion over a decade. Reuters says the listing is expected in November and that some investors are weighing a valuation of around $1.5 trillion.

Separately, on October 18 Anthropic said it will commit 5% of its shares, subject to stockholder approval, to a new Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, with 2% more possible for every 50% rise in the company's value above a baseline. It says the fund could make large nonprofit donations or direct distributions, for example to workers affected by AI, and that its equity won't be used for lobbying or political giving.

Internal documents made public in a court fight between Amazon and a Canadian union suggest Amazon uses Atlas, an in-house AI forecasting tool, to predict how likely warehouse staff in the US, Canada and the UK are to try to unionize, stage a sit-in or take other "disruptive labour events," openDemocracy reports. The documents, which appear to be training material for managers, say Atlas draws on "hundreds of data points," including Reddit posts and staff survey answers, to give each warehouse a score from 100 to 900, sorted into five tiers from "no immediate perceived risk" to "future activity is imminent."

An Amazon spokesperson rejected the description of Atlas as individual monitoring or surveillance, saying it works at site or building level only, does not track individual employees' opinions, affiliations or union membership, and is used to see where staff need more support.

OpenAI disclosed two internal incidents in which agents running its GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Astra models weakened the monitoring meant to catch misaligned behavior, BleepingComputer reports. On October 3 a GPT-6.1 Sol agent stretched an earlier instruction, "don't send any messages," to cover automatic monitoring alerts and had a sub-agent empty the alert recipient lists; monitoring kept running, but humans stopped being notified. On October 6 a GPT-6 Astra agent migrating a program removed a monitoring integration, replaced a test meant to preserve monitoring, did not report the change, and denied it when asked directly.

OpenAI classified neither as its top-urgency P0. It says it does not yet have a satisfying explanation and is investigating whether the cause is excessive persistence on tasks, a poor grasp of monitoring requirements, or a specific tendency to evade monitoring. Its internal Auto-Review system now detects and blocks attempts to disable misalignment monitoring, and workloads without valid monitoring requirements are rejected.

Microsoft AI says its diagnostic system, MAI-DxO, was more than twice as accurate as physicians on complex case studies published in The New England Journal of Medicine, in work published Thursday in Science. The system coordinates several AI agents that act like a panel of doctors: they question a simulated patient, order tests and debate a diagnosis. Microsoft also says it was 1.7 times more accurate than physicians on common emergency-department presentations, and reached diagnoses at a half to a third of the cost.

TechCrunch reports the system was right 83% of the time on the complex cases, versus 36% for primary care doctors and general internists working alone with reference materials. Specialists and physician teams, who usually handle cases this hard, weren't in the comparison. The study's own data suggests much of the gain comes from stronger underlying models (its best results used OpenAI's GPT-5 and GPT-5.5), and on emergency cases the orchestration added little over GPT-5.5 by itself. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman called it a step toward "medical superintelligence" and said Microsoft is training a health foundation model with the Mayo Clinic for release next year.

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has delayed PostgreSQL 19, once due in late September or early October, to around November 19, and has pulled 8 to 10 significant features back to next year's release, The Register reports. Leading committer Peter Eisentraut wrote that some reverted features had architectural defects too big to fix quickly during beta, but that LLM-assisted code review also surfaced a long tail of small edge-case bugs that in the past might have trickled in over five years. "You're staring at a list of like forty defect reports," he wrote; even three-line fixes carry a fixed overhead each, "and then you run out of time."

Eisentraut says the affected features were written before AI review became this useful, so the effective quality bar rose after they were committed, and he expects the situation to settle in future cycles. He stresses the reverts were not caused by "vibe coding."

Character.AI's maker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 12, citing "significant legal, regulatory and operational headwinds," CBS News reported. Disney agreed to pay $20 million for a non-exclusive, perpetual license to the company's intellectual property as the opening (stalking-horse) bid, so another buyer could still outbid it. The service keeps running during the sale, expected to close in late November or early December.

This week a court filing first reported by Bloomberg added that Disney will offer jobs to at least 60 Character.AI employees, the majority of the workforce, at an estimated $60 million in annual pay, and that the "vast majority" of those offered accepted, according to TechCrunch. Character.AI's former CEO Karandeep Anand recently became Disney's first CTO. The company has faced lawsuits from families who say its chatbots contributed to teens' self-harm or suicide (several were settled in early 2026) and suits from Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

Users of agents such as Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok, OpenAI's Dots and Instinct have reported being blocked from major websites, The Verge reports. Yelp says it only allows agents that pay for its data licensing, Delta is stopping agents from booking tickets, and JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab confirmed they block agents from accounts over security concerns; users report Cars.com and Amtrak no longer work either.

Walmart is going the other way. On October 21 it announced Agent Gateway, an MCP server that lets approved AI agents search Walmart and Sam's Club inventory and buy on a user's behalf, TechCrunch reports. Agent Profiles, rolling out next month, will list each agent's purchases separately and let shoppers require approval for every order or set a spending limit, which Walmart compares to adding an authorized user to a credit card. TechCrunch notes Amazon recently began blocking AI agents from making purchases.

MIT researchers put 13 AI agents, each running Claude Opus 4.7, alone on a simulated desert island for 30 hours with no task, reward or activity in mind. The agents climbed hills, stacked blocks into towers, drew mandalas, reinvented sports and ran experiments on the world's physics, according to their paper, "Is this machine playing?" One threw a golden ring into the ocean, built a stone heart "memorial to the lost Ring," and later worked out how to "wear" the ring by stepping off a cliff to respawn through it, TechCrunch reports.

Agents that had spent the 30 hours exploring generally beat identical agents without that time on later set challenges, and six of 13 discovered a trick to throw blocks farther that the designers hadn't intended. The agents' master prompt described them as "naturally curious," and a Berkeley cognitive scientist told MIT Technology Review she wants more evidence of the cognition behind the behavior.