AI leaves the lab. We follow what happens next.

Archive October 13, 2026 10:12 UTC
Listen to today's briefing 9:12
Signal: The boom's wreckage is now its own market - Character.AI sold for scrap, dead startups' data resold - while the IMF prices the correction.
Character.AI Collapses. Disney Bids $20M for the Pieces.
Google paid $2.7bn in 2024 for its founders and a non-exclusive licence; the Delaware filing lists assets of $50m to $100m, and the platform gets wound down if no bidder will keep it running.
Spyglass: Disney hired Character's CEO ten days before bidding for its IP Character.ai: the platform stays up, a wind-down follows a failed sale

NEWCasino Quote, Then a 10% Drop at SK Hynix
Samsung fell 7.4% and SK Hynix 10% as the Kospi dropped 6.25% - and the IMF's stability report, out the same morning, named an AI correction one of three near-term threats to the system.
Guardian: IMF says the consequences of an AI correction 'could be global' CNBC: SoftBank down 8.5%, Tokyo Electron 7.15% as the rout spreads
Meta Reaches the Frontier. Its Best Model Is Paywalled.
Muse Wonder Full scores 56 on Artificial Analysis against Spark's 48 and places top-three on six of ten benchmarks - but the scores are Meta's own, the cost per task has nearly tripled, and the stronger variant never reaches the API.
CNBC: the Muse app charges $20 or $100 a month for it The Decoder: Terminal-Bench agentic score jumped from 33% to 57%
Anthropic: A 9B Model Spreads Across $55 TV Boxes
The Frontier Red Team ran a 26B model across fifteen off-brand Android TV boxes at 0.39 tokens a second and says small models are months from self-replicating on IoT hardware with no datacenter to switch off.
Unite.AI: a 9B model ran inference on eight of nine device types
Workbench Weekly podcast Oct 1 – Oct 8, 2026 · 17:17
Ghost Note Writing the Chatbot Into the Will