AI

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.

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.

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."

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.

Anthropic published a report on how its own workforce has changed after molding its workflows around Claude, arguing its trends may hint at how AI will reshape hiring elsewhere. Junior employees in technical departments fell from 21% to 14% since early 2025, and junior technical hires from 27% to 9%, TechCrunch reports. Technical teams shrank from 61% to 56% of staff, which Anthropic links partly to coding tools letting non-technical employees build software themselves.

In an April survey, 27% of employees said Claude made them more productive and 20% said their job had shifted from doing work to "managing Claudes." The report calls human attention and judgment a growing bottleneck. Calendar data show meeting time per employee up 20% from a year ago, which Anthropic attributes to the importance of human trust and accountability. It says it has not found signs of declining code quality, while noting more code isn't necessarily better code.

Mercor, which sells AI evaluation services, mapped 29 AI benchmarks onto the US Labor Department's O*NET list of 923 occupations and 18,797 tasks. Only 208 occupations have a task covered by at least five benchmark prompts, 6 of 22 job families have none, and Mercor estimates 90% of American working hours go to tasks with little or no benchmark coverage, making it hard to know how well AI does the work people actually do.

Coverage is lopsided: computer and math (29 of 36 occupations) and business and finance (33 of 48) fare well, while healthcare practitioners (12 of 89) and education (9 of 62) lag. Mercor says benchmarks favor the largest labor markets; for example, they heavily cover lawyers' tasks but barely touch those of similarly exposed legal secretaries and court clerks.