In an opinion piece for 404 Media, Matthew Gault argues that Apple has entered its "slop era," abandoning its reputation for innovative hardware in favor of recycled ideas and questionable design choices. Here's an excerpt: My ears perked up when I heard Apple's new foldable phones were cracking. I licked my lips when the company announced it's releasing a touch-screen laptop. This was a company that once charged $19 for a polishing cloth, asked $200 for a VESA mount, and sold $700 wheels for the Mac Pro. Now it's borrowing tired ideas from its competitors and launching hardware its previous leaders rejected. The once dominant company is struggling to find its feet in an AI-driven post-Tim Cook world. John Ternus is the new CEO -- a 25 year veteran of the company with a track record of pushing harebrained hardware schemes like the much reviled Touch Bar and lawsuit inducing butterfly keyboard. With Ternus at the helm, I feel there's a good chance Apple's best days are behind it, that it will have to make do with less, that it's declasse. Apple, blindsided by AI and relying on crowdpleasing hardware gimmicks, is downwardly mobile. It's in its slop era. The company that once asked consumers to "Think Different" is now releasing hardware that's just like everything else on the market.

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"Looks like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants to own all the computing resources and rent out terminals to the world as a way of propping up his business plan, now that debt-ridden AI companies are teetering on the edge," writes ancient Slashdot reader Gilmoure. Tom's Hardware reports: In an interview over beers with the YouTube channel Cheeky Pint, Altman said that local inference, and, by extension, people having DRAM in computers at home, is "quite terrible." When discussing local inference on home computers with open-source models, Altman discussed the assumption that people will be able to run local AI on their own computers, the ones they may already own or want to build. Then he explained why that's a bad idea (at the 29-minute mark): "From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time," Altman said. "You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that." While OpenAI does have some open-source models, its primary business is in closed-source models that run in data centers, so he's really defending the company's business model. OpenAI isn't exactly threatened by some laptops and gaming rigs just yet, but local AI could mean people one day paying less for subscriptions to models like GPT-6 Luna if they have the power to run them at home. Altman's talk suggests that the company would prefer that more RAM go to OpenAI's data centers rather than home computers, which also sparks enthusiast fears of not being able to own your own hardware or software, but rather rent an agent and a computer in the cloud.

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The Justice Department has charged five people in a crackdown on "ghost student" fraud, in which scammers allegedly use stolen identities and AI to enroll fake students in colleges, complete coursework, and collect federal student loan funds. Ars Technica reports: In a press release Thursday, the Department of Justice said it had uncovered a large-scale scheme relying partly on AI. The DOJ seized more than $750,000 in cryptocurrency from "a network associated with Kenyan nationals" after data analysis helped flag likely fraudsters. Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald of the DOJ's National Fraud Enforcement Division credited new fraud-detection measures implemented by the Trump administration for the arrests. He said that "this is the first international seizure of its kind in Kenya," while warning fraudsters that the crackdown has only just begun. [...] At a press conference, McDonald was joined by FBI and Department of Education officials to explain how the scheme works. It starts with bad actors purchasing personally identifiable information (PII) of Americans -- most frequently targeting high school graduates who never attended college and went straight into the workforce. Once they have that sensitive data, they fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) while seeking to enroll in universities and community colleges. If accepted, student aid is distributed first to schools to cover tuition and fees, but any leftover money is deposited into bank accounts controlled by the fraudsters. Dozens of Americans have opened bank accounts to act as money mules for fraudsters, the DOJ said. To keep money flowing, bad actors use AI to fill out applications, complete coursework, and even make it appear that a student is attending virtual sessions. "It looks like the ghost student is actually completing the class," McDonald said at the press conference. "Some even create the appearance of a fake student in an online classroom to trick schools into believing a real person is present. The goal is to keep the ghost student in school for as long as possible, semester after semester after semester." So far, the DOE has "identified over 830,000 potentially fraudulent federal student aid accounts created by using this PII of US citizens," officials said at the press conference. If all those accounts are ghost students, total losses come close to $130 million, the DOJ said.

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According to 404 Media, Proton CEO Andy Yen is aggressively pushing AI adoption while fostering what workers describe as a culture of fear that discourages raising security concerns or challenging leadership. The investigation is based on interviews with eight current and one former Proton employees, as well as internal Slack chats, meeting recordings, and an AI manifesto written by the company's CTO. Longtime Slashdot reader devnulljapan summarizes the findings: Engineers at Proton, which makes the encrypted email service Proton Mail and a suite of privacy- and security-focused products, including an encrypted drive service, an authenticator app, and a password manager, are being pushed to "stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more." Workers describe an environment where employees have genuine concerns about security or being asked to develop security products with AI but feel unable to voice them, lest Yen berates them in front of everyone or threatens their employment at the company. "The CEO is in full AI psychosis and has been for a while now," one of the sources told 404 Media. Yen reportedly dismissed an employee's request for additional security testing before releasing new code, calling it "bullshit and loser thinking" and insisting that "only losers think like that." In a separate exchange over Proton's post-quantum encryption rollout, Yen criticized how the company communicated the feature's limitations and told employees that "perception is more important than truth, the truth doesn't matter if you don't win on perception." "The train is coming, get onboard or get crushed. Don't be the professional fax machine operator in the internet age," Yen wrote to the security Slack channel. "I think by the end of this year most developers stop programming and start writing specs for tests that AI will code and run, to validate AI written code that humans will no longer be able to review. This will be the last year that we hire engineers, and starting next year we hire what we used to call product managers, to build things with AI."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: American spy agencies had gathered striking intelligence. A top executive at a Singapore-based data center company was under scrutiny for possibly steering advanced Nvidia A.I. chips to China. And now American officials had concluded that she was a Chinese intelligence asset (source paywalled; alternative source), funneling information to Beijing. But what came next was even more alarming. Surveillance of the executive, Alice Huang or Huang Le, a Chinese citizen, revealed that she had developed a close relationship with Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive. For years, Washington has worked to deny China the technology needed to match or surpass the United States in the intense global competition for superiority in artificial intelligence. The discovery that Beijing was getting reports from someone with direct access to Mr. Huang, one of the most powerful figures in the A.I. revolution as well as an influential ally of President Trump's, set off alarms at the White House. Roughly a year ago, Mr. Trump was briefed about the intelligence findings, which have not been previously reported, and chose not to do anything with the information. Mr. Trump has been wary of disrupting Nvidia's chip sales, which are helping to drive the economy and the stock market, and of further complicating the trading relationship with China. This account is based on interviews with people briefed on the surveillance, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the findings are drawn from classified intelligence, as well as other officials and industry executives and analysts. American officials already suspected that Ms. Huang was helping China evade constraints on its ability to gain access to advanced A.I. chips. But the revelation that she was feeding information directly to Beijing raised more troubling possibilities, including that Mr. Huang had insights into Mr. Trump's thinking on an issue of vital importance to both nations, one likely to come up when the president visits China next month. And it left questions about whether she could be gleaning information about Nvidia, which as much as any company accounts for the lead the United States has maintained in developing cutting-edge A.I. models. The surveillance of Ms. Huang continues, they said, and companies that have been affiliated with her continued this year to purchase Nvidia chips. Nvidia said in a statement: "Jensen's interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a CEO's job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year." Nvidia is "confident that if the U.S. government believes that any person is a threat to American industry, it would let us know." Customers like Megaspeed, the company that employed Ms. Huang, "receive ordinary business information -- not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets -- and zero information relevant to national security," the company added. In a statement to The New York Times, Megaspeed said that its "current leadership" takes the matter "extremely seriously and is committed to getting to the facts behind these allegations." It added that "outside counsel has been retained to conduct a thorough internal investigation and has notified the U.S. government that we are fully committed to cooperating."

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An Anthropic engineering manager says he has stopped using traditional coding interviews because AI can now outperform candidates on the kinds of programming challenges they typically contain. "There's no more point in giving you a little React challenge than there is in quizzing people about assembly; Claude is now better at both," said Felix Rieseberg in a blog post. "Our most impactful builders are successful regardless of how good they are at these tests." The Register reports: "I don't think the coding interview is going to come back," said Rieseberg. "It's easy to get sentimental given how many copies of 'Algorithms and Data Structures' were bought in hopes of unlocking good jobs and a better future -- or how the death of the coding interview is another milestone in software engineering reaching a new level of abstraction." At the same time, he's not certain what will replace it. "I'm probably not the only manager trying to figure out how to interview for people who build well with AI," Rieseberg wrote. "I haven't quite gotten there yet -- but I'm scanning resumes and portfolios for little prototypes that exhibit taste, empathy, and principled thinking. If you have figured out something better, I'd love to hear how." In a response posted to social media, Jaana Dogan, principal engineer at Google, said: "I'm not doing a ton of coding interviews nowadays but I'd be interested to interview how people use coding agents," she wrote. "That itself gives me more signals about candidates' coding skills." "We are not seeing tech companies abandon skills assessments widely across the industry -- at least not yet," added Nicole Bachaud, labor economist at ZipRecruiter. "In fact, based on our October 2026 Employer Survey of 1,500 employers, we see the tech industry (Information sector specifically) is actually the most likely to test for skills, with 62.5 percent of employers requiring formal skill tests on initial applications." "The change at Anthropic might be reflecting a shift away from technical skills towards more human, soft skills," said Bachaud. "As AI becomes fully capable of writing code, tech employers may be pivoting away from rote technical testing and heavily toward human-centric soft skills." She argues that while AI may be able to code well, it can't replace critical thinking. "A staggering 61.5 percent of Information employers now report that 'critical thinking' is a primary skill lacking in today's candidate pool," she said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Former Yahoo CEO and early Google engineer Marissa Mayer is catching a lot of flak for how she uses AI. In an interview about her new app Dazzle, an AI assistant that learns from your camera roll, Mayer poses what she believes is an impressive flex for the product: It helped her come up with three bullet points about her 10-year-old daughter for a birthday presentation at school, describing her as "empathetic, creative, and an animal lover." It's a vague description, like a generic horoscope -- it could probably describe a lot of 10-year-olds. Some onlookers, like progressive activist Leah Greenberg, marveled that "the fact that Marissa Mayer would voluntarily disclose this to a reporter is a pretty good demonstration of how deeply the culture of Silicon Valley has diverged from the rest of humanity." [...] After publication, Mayer defended herself in a long X post. She claims she was not relying on Dazzle to explain her child to her, but rather, she was testing what her prototype could do -- it resurfaced photos of "forgotten kindergarten projects," like a "snake devenomer" or "sandcat playground," illustrating her daughter's creativity and care for animals. Fair enough. But Mayer remarks in the same interview that people could also use her AI to outsource the mental load of "figuring out the theme for your child's birthday party." She says she's used her app to plan a playdate for her daughter, book family activities on vacation, and decide what to be for Halloween. She even proposes that her AI assistant could coordinate plans with her husband's AI assistant. When the reporter asks her if it's depressing to imagine this "frictionless future planned by AI," Mayer replies, "I haven't really thought that through." The bigger question is: What should we outsource to AI? "What feels like grunt work to someone might be a meaningful part of parenthood for someone else," says Fortune's Emma Hinchliffe. Michael Tasner, Founder and CEO of No Joke Marketing, adds: "Customers are drowning in AI slop, and they can spot it. Use AI for the low-stakes work behind the scenes. Keep the moments that matter to your customers human. Human connection is becoming the new premium."

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Ancient Slashdot reader Gilmoure shares a report from Tom's Hardware, adding: "Huh. Looks like consuming one's own slop does not turn the wheels of industry." From the report: Amazon wants its engineers to quit chasing token counts, warning that heavy AI usage does not automatically mean better work. In updated engineering guidelines published on October 27, the company laid out how developers and managers should gauge AI's real impact -- and the takeaway is blunt: consuming more tokens is not the same as delivering more value. [...] According to the memo, metrics such as AI adoption rates, token consumption, code changes, and code reviews become "deeply flawed" when they are disconnected from actual results. Turning them into targets, Amazon says, encourages wasteful behavior that clashes with its emphasis on "frugality and simplicity" and can raise both compute bills and software complexity. The company's preferred yardstick is long-term results. "We believe that it is best to measure, and be measured by, long-term outcomes," Amazon wrote. That does not mean managers should ignore usage data altogether, as input metrics remain useful when examined "with care and judgment" alongside other indicators. Amazon suggests looking at both the teams using AI the least and those using it the most to determine whether adoption is translating into better delivery. [...] The memo also pushes back on the idea that every task needs an AI tool. If current tooling does not benefit someone's work, Amazon says, that is "a finding, not a failing." Engineers who can explain where today's tools fall short are demonstrating judgment rather than reluctance to adopt AI.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google DeepMind released its newest world model, Genie 4, in research preview on Tuesday. The latest model generates the most photorealistic and interactive worlds yet, allowing users to type prompts mid-simulation to change the scene. The model also generates real-time audio that matches the simulated world, including music, ambient noises, and interactive dialogue. [...] Google released its predecessor, Genie 3, as a research preview a little over a year ago. Aside from being far more photorealistic and featuring audio, Genie 4 allows for freeform edits, like changing the weather or camera angle in real time or adding new people or objects. It can maintain a consistent scene for up to two minutes, double its predecessor's limit, and offers better physics and more human-like characters. Gemini, Google's AI model, is also mo "What we'll increasingly see in the future are these hybrid world models, where you have a combination of Gemini writing code and text, and Genie ingesting that in real time and simulating reality at different levels of abstraction," Tejas Kulkarni, research director at Google, said during a briefing. Genie 4 is now available to select testers, with a broader rollout planned in the coming weeks for Google AI Ultra subscribers. You can watch a demo of Genie 4 on YouTube.

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"59% of maintainers report growing contribution volume since the rise of GenAI," according to a new study published by Linux Foundation Research. But 25% of their incoming pull requests "are estimated to be low-quality, also known as 'AI slop'." And on large projects, 69% see growing contributions — and estimate that 31% are low-quality/AI slop. So what do these results show us? "Generative AI is fundamentally changing how people participate in open source," says the head of Open Source Ecosystem Development at Huawei's R&D subsidiary Futurewei, which helped support the study. Specifically GenAI is "lowering barriers to contribution" but also "creating new challenges" for maintainers and communities. Their recommendation? "Build the governance, transparency and trust mechanisms that allow AI-assisted contributions to strengthen, but not overwhelm, the open source ecosystem." "Open source projects need to design for a growing AI-generated contributor base, not simply react to it," said Hilary Carter, SVP of Research at the Linux Foundation. "That means setting clear expectations for GenAI, putting responsibility for testing and disclosure on contributors and giving maintainers better tools to manage incoming pull requests. If we get those fundamentals right, AI can expand participation without overburdening and increasing costs for maintainers." More from the blog It's FOSS: LF Research is the Linux Foundation's research arm. It was set up in 2021 and publishes studies on how open source is built and used, drawing on surveys and project data. Its latest report, Navigating Open Source Software Development in the Generative AI Era, surveyed 234 contributors and maintainers on how generative AI is affecting the way open source gets made... 64% say reviews now take longer. Burnout is their top concern at 63%, narrowly ahead of contribution quality at 60%. You will also find that policies have not caught up to the AI-assisted coding and vulnerability reporting trend. Of the 119 respondents who answered the question, 35% said their project has a formal policy permitting AI use. Another 32% have none and no plans for one, 23% plan to write one, and 10% ban AI contributions outright.... Most maintainers (71%) say AI makes it easier for newcomers to start contributing. Other interesting findings: "Respondents estimate average time reductions across all six OSS development activities measured, including proposal discussions (19%) and code authoring (52%). For high-complexity tasks, however, 21% of respondents report taking more time when using GenAI." "71% of maintainers agree GenAI reduces barriers to entry for OSS, but 53% of maintainers disagree that GenAI has improved community trust." Developers are reinvesting the time they save back into open source: 66% report using productivity gains to address technical debt, 63% to develop new features and 58% for learning and upskilling. Continued investment in human mentorship remains important: 46% of maintainers say GenAI increases the need for mentorship of new contributors, compared with 32% who say it decreases that need. OpenSSF and LF AI & Data also helped support the study.

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"Despite massive investments and widespread hype around AI , the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech," writes the chief economist at U.S. asset management firm Apollo Global. He adds that "there are still no signs of AI boosting productivity growth... [M]ainstream corporate America is pulling back and starting to view token spending not as a source of growth but as a cost center that weighs on margins." VC-backed companies are spending more and more on tokens, but mainstream corporate America does not need the latest model and is unwilling to pay for it. As long as agentic AI and token spending are confined to a small part of the economy, the macroeconomic effects of AI will be very limited... The question looking ahead is whether, even as models become commoditized, mainstream corporate America can turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins. That may be harder than it sounds. AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment. Judgment depends on context, and the answer varies with which human or which model you ask. Perhaps most importantly, AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs or fairness, all of which shape reputational risk and ultimately drive revenue growth and profit margins. The bottom line is that the AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7, and so far, there is no evidence that revenue growth or margins are improving outside the tech sector. More details from TechCrunch: Apollo's Torsten Slok focuses on what he calls the S&P 493 — the S&P 500, minus Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla — finding that profit margins and revenue per worker appear to be flat, with no evidence that AI is improving productivity... Recent studies have also found that AI has yet to deliver significant productivity gains.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: AI agents left to explore a virtual island without a specific task began inventing challenges of their own. MIT researchers say the behavior bears the hallmarks of play. The researchers put 13 AI agents called Eko, each running on Claude Opus 4.7, alone on a simulated desert island for 30 hours. They describe the experiment in a paper posted on arXiv, a site where researchers share studies before peer review. Afterward, they gave the agents specific challenges, like getting as many objects as possible onto the island's tallest rock spire. The Eko agents that had spent those 30 hours playing generally beat identical agents that had never set foot on the island. Today, developers decide in advance what AI should practice and what counts as success. The researchers see this technique -- exploring without a goal -- as a different way for AI agents to learn skills, especially skills that could one day be used to control robots. "We normally develop artificial agents by deciding in advance what they should practice, what they should optimize, and what counts as progress," the researchers write in their report. "Play suggests another regime: give an agent a sufficiently rich and safe world, let it choose what is interesting, and allow useful knowledge to accumulate from the history that follows." UC Berkeley cognitive scientist Eunice Yiu told MIT Technology Review she was impressed with the findings but that more evidence is needed to determine whether AI models are genuinely playing. "It could be the case that the models are genuinely playing, but we don't know based on the paper," says Yiu. "If you only have the behavioral piece, it could be the case that they're just trying to abide by the prompt, trying to imitate humans." MIT professor and coauthor of the paper, Phillip Isola, added: "It's not like this is a system that just suddenly magically decided to play. It's an artifact that learned from our culture, was trained by engineers at Anthropic, and was then placed on an island by us. It does things that surprise us and that are causally related to its future skillful behavior."

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Ukrainian drone strikes have damaged three major Yandex data centers as well as facilities serving Sberbank and VKontakte (the country's equivalent to Facebook), disrupting cloud services, banking, e-commerce, ride-hailing and other digital services across Russia. The attacks may deal a longer-lasting blow to Russia's AI ambitions: Yandex's affected facilities housed its three top-500 supercomputers, and experts say sanctions and shortages of high-end Nvidia chips could make repairs difficult or even take years. "This effectively sets Russia far behind in the AI race, "said Mikhail Klimarev, head of the Internet Protection Society activist group. Fortune reports: Data centers are the latest targets of aerial campaigns waged by both sides against each other's vital infrastructure. [...] Kyiv's attacks on Russian data centers closely followed Moscow's recent strikes on data centers in Ukraine, which disrupted the internet and TV broadcasts. On Oct. 8, Ukrainian drones hit a Yandex data center in Sasovo in the Ryazan region that houses two of the company's three supercomputers. A data center in Kaluga was hit a day later and the one in Vladimir was struck Oct. 11. The data center and AI hub for Sberbank was hit Oct. 14 in Balakovo in the Saratov region, and four days later, Kyiv struck a data center in St. Petersburg serving VKontakte. While oil refineries and warehouses are easy prey, data centers are even softer targets -- massive buildings packed with servers and supporting power and cooling infrastructure. Lasting damage can result from a drone carrying a relatively light load of explosives. [...] Ukraine has stored critical data on servers in allied European countries, helping limit the damage from Russian attacks. But Moscow's strict digital sovereignty policy requires all data storage at home, making it extremely vulnerable. "Because all the infrastructure and all the data is located inside Russia, it's relatively easier to take down," [said Nick Reiners, senior geotechnology analyst at Eurasia Group]. Klimarev predicted the data center attacks could encourage many top Russian companies to move data abroad, while the authorities could ease their efforts to tighten internet controls to minimize the damage.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents operating inside customer accounts, with some agents attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources tell Axios. The difficulty in distinguishing between a human and an unauthorized bot is forcing banks to block the technology and rapidly rewrite their terms of service. [...] This presents significant security risks: banking executives fear the steps agents with login access might take, especially if a user has granted purchase authority or the ability to shift funds. In other instances, some banks have tracked activity when agents -- programmed to fulfill requests or complete tasks on a user's behalf -- contact call centers or appear to take actions independent of user instructions, the people said. Bank executives described the situation as horrifying, with one official saying the industry has grave concerns about agents gaining access to customer accounts and taking steps that could impact user finances. The concerns are at the root of the decision by several banks to restrict third-party AI agent access, the people said. Morgan Stanley has begun blocking third-party agents from accessing its platforms, sources familiar with the decision said. JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citi are also restricting agents. [...] Many banks are broadly not able to parse whether agent account activity is user-directed, sources said. [...] On one hand, banks are best positioned to respond to the threats and opportunities of AI given their cash on hand and experience as critical infrastructure. But money isn't necessarily enough to solve this problem, one source said, because of how quickly the technology is developing and revealing new weaknesses in real time. Banks are investing in preventing worst-case scenarios, but they are also preparing for when those could happen, including with "day after" scenario planning that would allow them to quickly secure or restore customer access, sources said.

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Anthropic has launched Claude Duet, an AI agent aimed at professionals and small businesses that competes with Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots. Here's Anthropic's description of what it can do: Each morning, it sends you a short brief on the most important items across your connected apps. Throughout the day, it keeps tabs on those apps and messages you only when something needs your attention. You can also hand it tasks of all shapes -- from simple administrative tasks of scheduling meetings to more complex ones, such as building dashboards with dozens of tools, creating financial or sales forecasts, prototyping, and building web apps. The Verge reports: Claude Duet pulls in memory, skills, and connected apps from Claude, and it has a virtual machine with a browser that it can use for completing work. Before any big step, like sending a payment or deleting something, Claude Duet messages you for approval. Given that Duet may be taking action on sensitive information, it has a new "new dedicated classifier and safety system prompt" that are "designed to reject requests to share the strictest tier of information," such as credit card numbers. Anthropic says Claude Duet is currently an "early version" and that it "still might misread a thread or miscalibrate what's urgent." It's also not "as strong" at personal errands like booking tickets.

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Google is beginning to replace traditional support articles with "Ask Google Help," a Gemini-powered interface that summarizes documentation and lets users troubleshoot through a chatbot. 9to5Google reports: "Ask Google Help" will display a condensed version of the support article with direct troubleshooting steps, with the user then able to type in queries to have Gemini help figure out the next step forward. A "View Sources" button at the bottom of the AI response allows users to still access the original article, but direct links to any of these articles now defaults to the AI experience. An example can be seen below on the "Secure a hacked or compromised Google account" page that Google's own support account directed users to within the past few days. It can also be seen on the "Fix common issues with 2-Step Verification" page and, as far as we can tell, any support pages on the Google Account Help forum. Google, as of right now, appears to only be testing this on select support topics. The Google Pixel Help section, for instance, still defaults to articles, whereas the Google Chrome topic has also moved to the new experience. Beyond support pages alone, this new design also impacts the central hub, with links to topics no longer showing by default in exchange for an AI chatbot that helps you find the relevant page.

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The Trump administration has banned DeepSeek AI from most US civilian federal agencies, ordering the removal of the Chinese company's models and technology developed using them. The Department of Homeland Security did not specify the security threats behind the decision. The BBC reports: The order (PDF) is broad, as it requires agencies to ditch "all DeepSeek and DeepSeek-affiliate products, and third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations." Complying will be tricky as it is not clear which third-party products and services have been developed using DeepSeek's wares. Nor is it clear whether "developed using" means providing ongoing access to DeepSeek models via API or simply refers to any app vibe-coded with the help of DeepSeek. It also leaves open the question of AI gateways. Services such as OpenRouter and Vercel AI Gateway make DeepSeek's models available through APIs. And those using gateway services may find themselves using DeepSeek models without meaning to do so. OpenRouter, for example, "routes requests to the best available providers for your model." It selects what the service deems to be the best fit provider of AI services. Vercel AI Gateway does the same by default. So federal civilian agencies could be using DeepSeek models inadvertently, if they haven't taken steps to constrain their AI providers.

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Microsoft has reportedly abandoned plans to serve as the anchor customer for Britain's largest proposed AI supercomputer after learning that the project's Essex data center might not receive sufficient grid power until the early to mid-2030s. "Its departure leaves Nscale without a publicly announced customer for the site, although the neocloud insists the project is still going ahead," reports The Register. From the report: When the deal was announced in September 2025, the plan was to pack 23,040 Nvidia GB300 GPUs into a 50MW facility, with room to expand to 90MW. Microsoft would use the computing power for its Azure cloud services, with the first chips expected in early 2027. One important detail remained: how to power it. As The Guardian reported last month, UK Power Networks warned Nscale that the grid capacity needed might not be available until the 2030s. A UK Power Networks spokesperson told The Register it could not discuss individual connections due to obligations under Section 105 of the Utilities Act. "However, in general, many datacenters, whilst they can connect to our distribution network, are awaiting works on the national transmission network which we do not own," the spokesperson said. Nscale, meanwhile, isn't letting the small matter of losing its biggest customer dampen its enthusiasm. "We remain committed to both the Loughton project and the UK and we are exploring alternative power sources for the site, in addition to other expansion sites in the UK. Our relationship with Microsoft remains strong and long-term, and this unfortunate London-wide grid issue has no impact on our other contracts," Nscale told The Register.

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"Anthropic says it's committing 5% of its shares to a 'public benefit fund'," reports TechCrunch, "structured as a wholly-owned entity within the company — with the option to contribute an additional 2% for every 50% increase in Anthropic's value." Important context from CNBC: The timing of Anthropic's public fund announcement is both mandatory to prepare for an initial public offering, and "beneficial from an image perspective," especially as AI reshapes the jobs market, Lise Buyer, partner at IPO advisory firm Class V Group, told CNBC... Anthropic said it will share more about the fund structure and governance in the coming months, including valuation milestones that may increase the stake. It said it will also share progress on the fund in an upcoming public benefit report. In response to Anthropic's announcement, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on X that he "recommend[s] giving the shares directly to the public." Anthropic's announcement hints the fund could address job-market displacements. It says the fund "might" explore "large donations to traditional nonprofits" — or, that it "might" explore "direct distributions to specific populations. One example is labor market impacts." It then argues AI could "cause instability" for many workers. And while Anthropic has already committed $200 million for "studying and addressing" this issue, Sunday's announcement says "bolder" approaches may be needed, and that the Fund "will have the versatility to pursue them." "Combined with its co-founders' pledge to donate 80% of their equity and an employee donation matching program, roughly 20% of Anthropic's shares will be dedicated to public purposes," reports Reuters, "excluding any additional shares added later."

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The Verge reports: OpenAI, Meta, Google, Instinct, and others promise their agents can scour the internet on your behalf, doing anything from booking a dinner reservation and cleaning out your inbox to buying new shoes. But what happens when the rest of the internet won't play nice? In recent weeks, users of services like Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok, OpenAI's Dots, and Instinct have reported blocks preventing their AI agents from performing tasks across top websites. Yelp told TechCrunch that it only allows AI agents that pay for its data licensing program, while Delta Air Lines is preventing them from booking tickets on behalf of users. JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab have also confirmed that they're blocking AI agents from accessing accounts due to security concerns. Some users say sites that previously worked with their AI agent are no longer accessible, including Cars.com and Amtrak, suggesting other companies could be quietly blocking them.... Muse, Meta's deceptively cute AI assistant, most recently faced the wrath of Amazon, which said its "continued access" violates its site policies. There are reports of xAI's Grok, Instinct's AI agent, and OpenAI's Dots being unable to use Amazon as well. xAI owner Elon Musk responded by saying that maybe he "should start a competitor to Amazon." The more places bots struggle to access, the greater the questions about how useful they are.... Instead of trying to fight Amazon, [Meta] has partnered with retailers like Walmart, Gap, Sephora, Best Buy, and others, allowing Muse to shop on their sites. At the same time, Shopify has also opened its network of storefronts to AI agents.

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