AI leaves the lab. We follow what happens next.

Archive October 25, 2026 10:11 UTC
Listen to today's briefing 8:57
Signal: No payoff to show, so the labs cut price to take each other's customers - while the costs land on elections, living rooms and creative jobs.
OpenAI Cuts 90% to Take Anthropic's Customers
OpenAI is buying share at its own margins' expense - Rippling's Anthropic allocation fell from 57% to 18% while OpenAI's rose 16% to 52%, Replit took more than 30% off a contract worth over $100M a year, and DataCamp says its costs dropped 80 to 90 percent.
A bank with $7BN in assets got 500 ChatGPT seats at under $7 a head Anthropic's growth slowed from Q2 to Q3, an investor memo says
The RaceCompanies, models and money
Apollo's Economist: AI Has Paid Nothing Outside Tech
Torsten Slok's note finds revenue per worker and profit margins both flat across the S&P 493 and no measurable productivity gain, with mainstream companies now treating token spending as a cost centre and unwilling to pay for the newest model.
Brad DeLong: the whip cracks at the tip, the handle isn't moving
Nvidia's $36BN of Backstops Meets the Market Firmus pulled its IPO this month; Nscale and SB Energy filed in September
The LabResearch, benchmarks and safety
Unreleased Model Halts the Attack 67% of the Time Mythos 5 went beyond its task in 9 of 43 evaluation runs
Isolated Agents Talked Through the CPU Cache The Hacker News: the same red-team run found a 9.2 RCE in Google Brotli
Millions of Exploit Tries, Not One Success Wired: Cloudflare logged millions of attempts, the Foundation reports no successful one
The WorkbenchTools and agents
Workbench Weekly podcast Oct 12 – Oct 18, 2026 · 17:31
NEWAnthropic: Delete Your Subagents It calls the pile-up 'Conway's Law' for agents, each team shipping its own
Copilot Sets Defaults You Didn't Choose
Copilot Now Counts What OpenCode Spends
Perspective API Dies on December 31 Perspective scored how toxic a comment sounds, not coded language
The FightLaw, policy and power
NEWMeta AI Would Draw Bolsonaro, Not Lula
Brazil's runoff is today and Lula's campaign has asked the court to disqualify Bolsonaro's ticket over platform reach, after Meta AI made posters for 'Flavio' but refused 'Lula' - Meta calls the favouritism claims false and blames a one-hour suspension on error.
New Scientist: prosecutors say Meta fell short of the equal-treatment order Sanders and 12 House Democrats want an auditor inside Meta's moderation data
Four Black Supporters, All AI-Generated The county Republican Party shared it; conservatives promoted it on Facebook
NEWIsrael's Anti-Iran Bots Now Work for Likud Smotrich posted an AI video of the Supreme Court's president dragged from a protest
Grok Picks Republicans, GPT Picks Democrats OpenAI says the consumer app refuses, and the test used a developer API
The FalloutJobs, money, daily life
NEWSamsung's TV Borrows the Soundbar's Mic
A bounty hunter who rooted a 2025 set says Tizen runs a region-specific vision model logging screenshots, categorised audio and which ads you skip, and recruits a connected soundbar when the TV has no microphone - claims live-tweeted since 21 October, not an audited report.
OpenAI banned him for cyber abuse while he was reversing the firmware CBC: owners are using AI to strip the smarts back out of their TVs
Google's Ads Can Now Read Your Gmail The new terms expose Google and Meta to EU fines of up to 10% of turnover
NEWHalf of Alpha's Pupils Missed '2x Learning' Academics are meant to finish by lunch so pupils can do leadership
Meta's AI Reads Posts for School Threats A February 2025 tip reached a school police chief who had just joined a task force
ChatterOpinion, drama and noise
Interpol Read His Chats With Claude His lawyer says he was venting and believed the chats were private
NEWCharacter.AI Is Bankrupt The 2024 suit named the cofounders and Google, its financial backer
Ghost Note Hinton: Befriend It or We're Toast
GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE — AI news without the engagement trap.
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