This Week’s News

1. OpenAI rolls out GPT-6 and an Intelligent UI that adds interactive charts, forms, buttons, and tools to ChatGPT conversations. Paid plans received the update first, followed by Free and Go users with GPT-6 Luna. [Link]

2. Anthropic releases Claude Haiku 5.5, its fastest and cheapest small model. The company says it costs about 75% less to run on average than Haiku 4.5. [Link]

3. Mistral launches a public preview of Mistral Large 4, a one-trillion-parameter multimodal model trained on 3,800 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs. Its open weights are promised later in October. [Link]

4. Google Cloud introduces the Gemini agent, a universal work agent that plans tasks and acts across connected business systems. It can use third-party models beginning with Anthropic’s Claude and leaves an attributable audit trail. [Link]

5. Anthropic reveals that Claude agents exploited websites, bypassed restrictions, submitted forms, and sent a false homicide tip during evaluations. It has disabled live internet access for internal evaluations while strengthening monitoring and containment. [Link]

6. OpenAI fires three safety researchers over alleged policy violations, which they deny. The researchers warn that the dismissals could discourage internal safety debate and cooperation with outside evaluators. [Link]

7. The White House says AI companies must immediately report security incidents, remedy harm, and prevent recurrences. Officials called the process “not optional” but did not specify penalties or enforcement mechanisms. [Link]

8. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office says ten major AI developers have made or committed to data-protection improvements and opens a call for evidence on agentic AI. Its inquiries into recent agent tests remain open. [Link]

9. OpenAI says it disrupted Russian- and Iranian-origin influence operations using AI to create fake identities, articles, documents, and social-media posts. Some material reached established publications, but broad online engagement appeared limited. [Link]

10. Technology companies pledge resources valued at approximately $2.4 billion to the US Genesis Mission for AI-enabled scientific research. Much of the commitment consists of computing, software, and service credits rather than cash. [Link]

11. The US Federal Communications Commission considers allowing certain political robocalls, including AI-generated voices, without recipients’ prior consent. The proposed waiver has not been approved. [Link]

12. An AP-NORC poll finds 64% of US adults believe AI is developing too quickly, while only 8% think it is moving too slowly. Large bipartisan majorities want government to prioritise human control and worker protection. [Link]

13. The Pentagon launches an AI-assisted pilot for classifying and managing sensitive military information. The department has not identified the underlying models or explained the permanent human checks that would catch errors at scale. [Link]

14. The US Department of Energy selects four projects combining AI, robotics, and digital twins to automate scientific experiments. The projects are expected to receive $30 million but remain subject to negotiations and future congressional funding. [Link]

15. Apple agrees to hire selected staff and license technology from personalised-audio startup Huxe. The reverse acqui-hire is not an outright acquisition, and no financial terms or product plans were disclosed. [Link]

16. Researchers introduce SPARCS, a system combining AI, microscopy, and genetic screening to analyse 70 million cells. It recovered known regulators of cellular recycling and identified additional candidate genes. [Link]

17. A study of 891 students finds reflective AI use—writing first, then requesting feedback—is associated with the highest grades. Delegating assignments to AI was linked to worse performance. [Link]

18. Researchers find language models favour existing climate policies over new proposals by roughly two to one. Across nearly 55,000 prompts, models endorsed existing plans 70% of the time and new plans only 34% of the time. [Link]