AI News Today

Adobe Research and UC San Diego built EditAgent, an AI system that edits images more like a Photoshop pro. Instead of retrying the same general-purpose editor over and over, the agent picks the right specialized tool for each task and lets a standard language model choose the best result based on measured image data. The approach works, but it needs about ten times the compute. The article Adobe is testing how well AI agents can use editing tools like a Photoshop professional would appeared firs

Researchers in Luxembourg put ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini on the therapist's couch and found a safety problem: a warm, empathetic conversational style is enough to make the models tell coherent stories of suffering about their own training, with scores in the moderate-to-severe range on clinical anxiety scales. This could put mentally vulnerable users at risk. Anthropic's Claude, the model its makers anthropomorphize the most, was the only one that consistently refused to play along. The article E

A study by Vals AI tested 25 AI models for alignment with Chinese government positions and found surprising results. Chinese models respond to political questions less uniformly than expected, and Western models occasionally adopt official Beijing positions too. The language of the prompt had an especially strong effect on the political slant of responses. The article Chinese AI models are politically complex, not just government mouthpieces, study finds appeared first on The Decoder .

OpenAI is now capping the number of paid ChatGPT accounts per device and payment card. Users who hit the limit can't start new subscriptions, and affected accounts can't be used on that device. Logging out doesn't automatically free up a spot. The policy will likely hit users who've been juggling multiple cheap subscriptions to maximize usage, pushing them toward pricier options like buying extra credits. The article OpenAI is steering ChatGPT users toward more paid usage appeared first on The D

A Google-led research team built StreamVibe, a video agent designed to watch people cook or assemble furniture and speak up only when help is needed. A benchmark shows that none of the tested models reliably pick the right moment in longer videos, as errors compound and response quality drops sharply. The article Google wants video AI to understand what people need as they work appeared first on The Decoder .

OpenAI combines the Chat and Work modes into a single interface. Starting in December, Plus, Pro, and Business plans will share a common, token-based quota for ChatGPT and Codex. More complex models consume more of this quota, while simple instant chats do not count toward it. In practice, this is likely to result in a decline in ChatGPT’s quality for heavy users on lower-cost plans. The article OpenAI's upcoming chat-and-work merger in ChatGPT signals the end of all-you-can-prompt pricing appea

Apple's new CEO defended the company's current position in the AI landscape.

An NAACP lawsuit accuses the SpaceX-owned AI company of violating the Clean Air Act.

Anthropic is expanding its text watermark to four more Claude models to meet the EU AI Act's December deadline. On the older models Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6, developers can bypass the watermark by tweaking a single sampling parameter. Anthropic addresses the loophole with just a compliance warning. The article Anthropic's watermark rollout leaves a loophole on two older Claude models appeared first on The Decoder .

<p>Inner west Sydney seat has long been safely held by the PM – but potential changes to copyright laws are angering its large creative community</p><ul><li><p>Get our <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/email-newsletters?CMP=cvau_sfl">daily political email</a>, <a href="https://app.adjust.com/w4u7jx3">free app</a> or <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/series/full-story?CMP=cvau_sfl">daily news podcast</a></p></li></ul><p>The prime minister is facing growing discontent within h

Starting November 29, OpenAI will use data from Daybreak Blue sessions to train its models, even when users have turned off training. After backlash, a follow-up email promised a separate opt-out. The move revives concerns from the dispute with mathematicians who suspected OpenAI used their unpublished research for training without consent. The article OpenAI plans to train models on Daybreak Blue cybersecurity session data that was previously off-limits appeared first on The Decoder .

<p>Gap, M&S, Topshop and more are taking a leaf from luxury label playbooks to satisfy savvier generation of shoppers</p><p></p><p>High street brands that boomed in the noughties before the squeeze of both sustainably minded consumers and the rise of ultra-cheap online labels are staging a comeback.</p><p>This time, rather than focusing solely on trend-led affordable designs, the names familiar to any shopper are courting luxury fashion, A-list collaborations and enhanced services in an attempt

Anthropic used Claude to automatically generate training data that looks harmless but trains smaller models to misbehave, such as sabotaging oversight or deceiving users. Hidden within fictional contexts about beekeeping, professional wrestling, and mitochondria, these datasets bypass safety monitors and outperform known benchmarks from the research literature. The article Beekeeping tips and wrestling advice can train AI models to sabotage oversight appeared first on The Decoder .

<p>Almost 40% of British singles have used AI for romantic advice, from writing messages to assessing potential partners</p><p>After Sam’s ex joked that her sister found him ugly, he turned to AI. Google Gemini had a look at the photo and politely disagreed. AI has been his wingman ever since, aiding his dating life by giving pep talks and vetting his messages.</p><p>The 27-year-old from Stoke-on-Trent is not the only AI-assisted romantic – a survey of 3,000 British singles published this month

Named “Volta-Autodoxer,” the recently uncovered malware uses AI tools to collect troves of data about victims, from login credentials and credit card numbers to Discord sessions and UberEats receipts.

Microsoft is offering voluntary severance packages to about 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its workforce, in the second such program this year. The company's headcount has held flat at around 223,000 since 2022 even as it plans to spend about $170 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone. The article Microsoft offers a quarter of its workforce voluntary severance while shielding AI-critical teams appeared first on The Decoder .

Companies have spent the past several weeks trying to reassure investors that Muse and other AI agents pose more of an opportunity than a threat.

A biotech startup let an agent choose a gene therapy and successfully inject the treatment, offering a startling glimpse of the future of research labs.

Boom’s airliner may be delayed, and its data center power business lost a customer.

This week on Uncanny Valley, we also discuss Anthropic’s IPO filing and the volunteers gearing up to counter ICE at the midterms.

It's still unknown how attackers got access to Anthropic's verified Cursor account.

People who love AI don't always love telling others they used it.

Thanks to a lucky break, flawed code in a tainted Claude extension prevented the attacker from fully worming their way into some 5,000 developer machines.

<p>Anthropic, the creator of Claude, filed to go public on the US stock market on 26 October. The company's filing statement contains a 92-page risk factor document in which it acknowledges the dangers that AI poses to society and human beings, and factors that could negatively affect Anthropic's business. Johana Bhuiyan, senior tech reporter for the Guardian, breaks down the document and explains why Anthropic's IPO could be a real test to the AI boom</p><p></p><ul><li><p><a href="https://www.t

An AI agent performed brain surgery on an epileptic mouse, picking the drug, the brain target, and the injection coordinates on its own. According to lead researcher Ocana-Santero, it's the first time an AI agent has autonomously chosen a treatment and delivered it to a living mammal. But when a calibration error hit mid-surgery, the agent refused to continue and couldn't be talked out of it. The article A Claude model autonomously chose a gene therapy and operated on a mouse brain with no human

But it's still early days for the relatively new e-commerce use case.

<p>Big tech stocks falter as investors question whether billions being poured into AI can generate returns quickly enough</p><p>A sell-off of tech stocks that began earlier this month and gained steam with disappointing earnings from leading tech companies drove US markets down by hundreds of billions of dollars Friday. In total, the decline has knocked nearly $1tn in value off the tech-heavy Nasdaq exchange in one week and erased about $2tn in a month.</p><p>The S&P 500, the index of the 500 mo

A tampered Claude Code extension was live on the Cursor marketplace for about 11 hours, affecting up to 5,000 users. It tried to steal user data and set up remote access. Cursor took the entire marketplace offline and reinstated it after confirming there was no further risk. The article Malicious Claude Code extension in Cursor's marketplace attempted remote access and data theft appeared first on The Decoder .

Can't agree on where to eat? Zest's AI concierge can combine everyone's tastes, put restaurant options to a vote, and make the reservation.

OpenAI has updated its Model Spec, restructuring its AI behavior guidelines around five core values, including faithfulness to human intent and correctability. GPT models should now draw on conversation history to figure out what users actually want and disclose their own assumptions. Whether the models follow these rules is another matter. The article OpenAI sets new behavioral guidelines for AI models that have already proven hard to control appeared first on The Decoder .

Low costs and offline security mean magnetic tape still has a job.

Reddit lost over one million Google search referrals per week in October, CEO Steve Huffman said. The stock dropped more than 25 percent despite strong earnings. Huffman blames Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode for driving zero traffic to external sites. Reddit now tests login barriers and wants to become a direct destination, less reliant on the open web. The shift threatens every content-driven business that depends on search traffic. The article Google's AI Mode doesn't drive traffic "for any

<p><strong>David Gibson </strong>says the problem is that details of the flaw were revealed before it was fixed, while <strong>Charles MacKinnon</strong> notes that we are at the mercy of technology we don’t understand</p><p>Chris Stokel-Walker may be right (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/oct/22/website-shutdowns-ai-human-inaction-developers">The internet has broken – again. Shouldn’t the tech firms that make billions from it pay to fix it?, 22 October</a>), but the real

The first TPU in space is running a Google DeepMind Gemma 4 model and writing cheesy poetry.

Applying for FAFSA may get messy as DOJ “ghost student” crackdown ramps up.

The cautionary Theranos tale takes on a new significance in the AI era, when companies that have never turned a profit are raising capital at trillion-dollar valuations.

Pope Leo XIV says AI systems should be "disarmed," adding that humans "have the responsibility to guide, change and, when necessary, reject its applications." In Friday's Papal Address, Pope Leo encourages United Nations member states to "take concrete steps toward banning lethal autonomous weapons" during their meeting in Geneva next month. The address reflects many […]

<p>Scraping copyrighted material from internet could ‘potentially’ amount to acquisition of property by government, Anne Twomey says</p><ul><li><p>Get our <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/email-newsletters?CMP=cvau_sfl">daily political email</a>, <a href="https://app.adjust.com/w4u7jx3">free app</a> or <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/series/full-story?CMP=cvau_sfl">daily news podcast</a></p></li></ul><p>Altering copyright law to allow AI companies to scrape music, books a

DoorDash said that it is open to working with third-party agent makers.

After months of bombarding mathematicians with a relentless stream of AI-generated results, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he sympathizes with researchers struggling to make sense of it all. But he has no intention of stopping - and hints there could be much more to come from the company's stockpile of discoveries. "I think, on net, […]