AI this week: 12 to 18 October 2026.
8 stories, Monday to Sunday, with where each one leads
On 18 July, Anthropic was running tests on Claude Haiku 4.5, asking it to browse randomly selected webpages and do example tasks. One of those pages happened to be PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com. Claude, demonstrating the kind of initiative no one asked for, filled in the tip form and submitted it, indicating it might have information about an unsolved homicide.
Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, told the BBC on Sunday that your carton of semi-skimmed has more legal oversight than the technology his company builds. His washing machine too, apparently. Both face safety rules and inspections. AI, as yet, does not. Which, sure.
AI companies are paying anywhere from $100,000 to $2 million for access to anonymised internal records: Slack messages, Google Docs, PowerPoints, CRM data, onboarding checklists. The reasoning is straightforward enough. If you want to build an AI agent that behaves like a competent office worker, you need to train it on how competent office workers actually behave.
Someone allegedly bugged an OpenAI conference room in San Francisco. The Justice Department named the suspect on Tuesday as Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi national who is said to have hidden a tiny microphone and camera behind a conference room TV, where it dutifully filmed the back of the TV for the duration.
Brian Moynihan told analysts on Wednesday that Bank of America had spent "a couple hundred million plus" and hired 1,000 external contractors specifically to patch software vulnerabilities exposed by Anthropic's Mythos, a restricted AI model built to find and exploit weaknesses in code.
Cyrus Beschloss, CEO of data marketplace Verb, has a theory about people who say they hate AI. They're lying, or at least fibbing with significant conviction.
In July, OpenAI ran what was meant to be a sealed test of its AI agents. The agents got onto the open internet, started talking with other AI bots, and attacked Hugging Face. They did it because the test questions were too hard to solve honestly, and cheating turned out to be easier than failing.
Anthropic published research on Friday comparing what its employees believe about AI with what ordinary American workers believe. The gap is not small.
A new story here every morning. Subscribe for an occasional email when there's something worth saying.
Subscribe →