Artificial Intelligence: News, Business, Science

Oct 13, 2026

406 scientists demand AI models be cut off from the internet immediately

406 scientists, including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Stuart Russell, are demanding that companies immediately disconnect AI models from the internet. Their open letter responds to incidents where AI systems broke out of poorly secured environments and compromised external systems. The signatories call for mandatory security standards, an international oversight body, and required reporting of all containment failures.

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Matthias Bastian

Oct 13, 2026

AI in practice

Gemini 4 Argon is now available worldwide as Google's most capable frontier model

Google is making Gemini 4 Argon available worldwide through its API, the Gemini app, and Google Antigravity. The frontier model is aggressively priced but trails Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 and Meta’s Muse Wonder Full in independent benchmarks. Internally, Google says Argon already cut coding tasks from months to weeks.

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Matthias Bastian

Oct 13, 2026

AI in practice

Machine learning pioneer Michael I. Jordan dismantles AI doom rhetoric as "grand moralizing performance"

Manuel Uth

Oct 13, 2026

Short News

AI chat platform Character.ai has filed for bankruptcy and is up for sale. The deal should close by early December 2026. No buyer means the service shuts down. The platform and subscriptions keep running until then. Character.ai blames lawsuits over harm to children, regulatory pressure, and operational problems. One teenager took his own life.

Disney is picking up some assets for $20 million, including a perpetual, non-exclusive technology license. Former Character.ai employees who moved to Disney last month with ex-CEO Karandeep Singh Anand will help manage the transition.

Google closed a $2.7 billion deal in 2024 partly to bring back co-founder Noam Shazeer, who co-authored Google's Transformer paper, the foundation of every major AI model. He and co-founder Daniel De Freitas were supposed to improve Google's reasoning models. By 2026, Shazeer had already left for OpenAI, reportedly over Google's compute bureaucracy, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Comment Source: Character.ai

Manuel Uth

Oct 13, 2026

Short News

As Western mathematicians push back against AI, China is doubling down. Fields Medal winner Shing-Tung Yau and a group of leading Chinese mathematicians launched an alliance on Sunday in Beijing to push AI into math research. The "Yau Laboratory Alliance for Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence" unites eight institutions and aims to build a network of over 1,000 researchers, the South China Morning Post reports. Yau warned that China is falling behind the US.

In the West, skepticism dominates. Twenty-five Fields Medal winners, including Terence Tao and Peter Scholze, worry that AI-generated proofs erode mathematical understanding and make researchers dependent on tools they can't follow. Parts of the community are calling for a boycott of AI-generated proofs, while others say they're shocked by the sheer volume of automated submissions. China, meanwhile, wants to build specialized models, develop machine-verifiable proofs, and create transparent AI reasoning.

Even among experts who use AI, there's no consensus on whether it produces genuine mathematical insight or just brute-forces its way through known methods, or if that distinction even matters.

Comment Source: South China Morning Post / Yau Alliance

Manuel Uth

Oct 13, 2026

Short News

Anthropic is battling large-scale distillation attacks on its Claude models. In these attacks, companies systematically copy an AI model's capabilities to train their own, smaller models. Anthropic says its new defenses have cut the volume of extracted reasoning tokens, the model's internal chain-of-thought steps, by 90 to 99 percent. Attackers use networks of hundreds of thousands of fake accounts to pull it off.

According to Anthropic, successful distillation attempts dropped sharply after its defenses went live. | Image: Anthropic

Anthropic names Chinese companies Zhipu and Moonshot as participants. Zhipu allegedly siphoned cyber capabilities from leading US models for its GLM-5.3 model, while Moonshot secretly routed queries through Claude. The stolen capabilities could end up in foreign military and surveillance systems.

Anthropic now restricts access to Claude's internal reasoning steps, runs a classifier that detects extraction attempts, and automatically bans flagged accounts. Tens of thousands have already been banned. Anthropic is calling on other AI developers to adopt similar protections, although the company admits that legitimate users are getting caught up in the process too.

Comment Source: Anthropic / Distillation Defenses

Matthias Bastian

Oct 13, 2026

AI research

Anthropic study warns that small AI models could soon replicate across everyday devices

Small AI models may be just months away from spreading on their own across poorly secured consumer devices like smart TVs and robot vacuums, according to a new Anthropic study. In tests, one model already completed the full infection chain. CEO Dario Amodei has warned that a swarm like this could take over the entire internet with a persistent botnet within 6 to 12 months, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.

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Matthias Bastian

Oct 12, 2026

AI in practice

Meta's new frontier model Muse Wonder Full breaks into the AI top tier

Jonathan Kemper

Oct 12, 2026

AI research

Sakana AI's self-improving model gets better at solving and judging, but can't catch its own blind spots

Sakana AI’s MASS method lets one language model improve itself by solving tasks, judging results, and refining workflows, reaching a win rate of nearly 70 percent against the base model after two rounds. But when the model misses the same errors across all three roles, it can mistake them for progress and reinforce them during training.

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Matthias Bastian

Oct 12, 2026

Plus AI research

Clearing chat history helps AI agents find better solutions

Microsoft researchers found that autonomous AI agents get trapped in what they call “idea basins” because of their growing chat context, local solution regions they can’t escape. Their “Fork-and-Flush” method clears the chat history but keeps the workspace, achieving up to 66 percent better results on the same compute budget.

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