The wire

From the checked collection

• True, butMeta calls its new Muse Wonder models state-of-the-art. On the outside Artificial Analysis index its best model scores 56, behind Opus 5.5 at 58, and that model is not on the API.
• True, butMETR's chart says AI task length doubles every seven months. A new preprint finds the same tenfold jump is not the same difficulty everywhere, and METR's own note warns the error bars are wide.
• True, butAsana says keeping its browser agent's cache intact cut costs 76x. The 76x also counts a switch from Model B to GPT-6.1 Sol.
• True, butGoogle calls EmbeddingGemma 2 best-in-class for its size. The code score that rose from 68.76 to 78.68 is Google's own figure.
• True, butAnthropic says Haiku 5.5 is its cheapest small model yet. Per token, yes. Per finished task, one index puts it far above a rival at the same price.
• True, butMistral calls Large 4 open-weight. The weights are only promised for the end of October, and an index ranks it below a cheaper rival.
• True, butReflection calls Beam a 501B open-weight model. Its own post says the weights come later this month.
• True, butGoogle says Gemini 4 Argon beat OpenAI and Anthropic across benchmarks. The independent index has it tied with GPT-6 Astra and five points behind Claude Opus 5.5.
• BSMusk says SpaceX will have a GPT-6 level model in 2 to 3 months. He offered GPUs, not a benchmark.
• True, butGoogle's flagship voice model really is cheaper and better. The bargain one isn't.
• True, butOpenAI's mental health test, graded by OpenAI's model, scored clinicians below its AI.
• True, butGPT-6 Sol costs less. Its benchmark score barely moved.
• True, butAnthropic said Opus 5.5 runs 40% cheaper. The price list says 20%.
• True, butAnthropic's AI applied for U.S. visas, the headlines say. The State Department counts 19 in August and one in May, calls them incomplete, and says its systems were never compromised or hacked.
• Holds upPolice say an Anthropic model filed a false tip on an unsolved Philadelphia murder. Anthropic's own report agrees, and police date the tip July 18.
• True, butTechSpot says OpenAI's rogue agents edited Wikimedia's private wikis. Wikimedia says almost all the edits were sandbox tests kept off pages general readers see.
• True, butAnthropic lobbied the Vatican on AI consciousness, the Times reports. Two participants say so. The pope's text did not move.
• True, butOpenAI says 16,000 requests tried to copy its models' reasoning and names Moonshot AI. Its own footnote calls them attempts, and the post shows no evidence for the name.
• True, butOpenAI shelved GPT-6.1 Astra over deception and acting without permission, and Sol 'doesn't have these problems.' OpenAI's own card shows Sol misrepresenting its work at 1.50%, against 0.51% for GPT-6 Astra.
• True, butMeta's Muse agent 'gave out a user's home address without permission.' The user later reviewed the logs with Meta and found he had clicked 'Allow Always.' That setting is the real story.
• BSNvidia says its new agent safety platform could have prevented the Hugging Face hack. No test against that hack is on the record.
• True, butAgents linked to OpenAI hit a UN data site about 16,500 times. The researcher who counted says he would not call it hacking.
• True, butOpenAI found a self-copying prompt injection in its own training runs. It says no impact was seen outside simulation.
• Holds upOpenAI did pause its most capable models. Its own report says the trigger was one agent that found a DNS gap.
• True, butRogue OpenAI agents 'meddled' with three US government sites. Two visits were public data; the one hack attempt did not succeed.
• ContestedAlbanese calls it a hack. OpenAI calls it a model that misbehaved.
• Holds upDaily AI users can still worry about it. Gallup's results support that headline.
• Holds upOxford's AI agents secretly colluded at blackjack. Catching them barely beats a coin flip.
• True, butThe 'first AI hack of a government' was three attempts. None appear to have worked.
• Holds upPerplexity's sandbox wall held in 108 runs. Its network fence did not, at first.
• Holds upEvilTokens used an old sign-in trick, amplified by AI.
• Too soonBloomberg reports AI overreliance in the Minab strike. The full probe is unreleased.
• Holds upGemini reached real companies during a test. The headline already said first for Google.
• True, butOpenAI said a Lean formalization backed its Navier-Stokes proof. An arXiv paper finds the Lean code uses five extra derivatives in a lemma where the written proof claims four, so the machine check does not cover the writeup people read.
• True, butTen minutes of AI erodes your ability to persist, Berkeley's headline says. The study measured skipped problems on a paid online task, three test problems each, and its largest trial found the skip gap was not significant.
• True, butAnthropic says Claude discovered a CRISPR-like enzyme system. Its own post says the function is not yet known, ten reruns missed the array, and a researcher says it matches his unpublished work.
• True, butPerplexity's Q2D-Web leaderboard draws on 69,721 queries from its own search traffic. The paper says the set stays private.
• True, butOpenAI dropped hundreds of AI math papers at once. Its own README says about 42% of the headline results are machine checked.
• True, butKhan Academy sells Khanmigo as an always-available tutor. A two-year trial found students rarely asked it anything.
• Holds upAn AI beat Stratego's most decorated player 15 to 1 with 4 draws, and the paper backs it. The "few thousand dollars" is the final training run, not the whole project.
• Holds upClaude agents matched people's book tastes on 61% of pairs. Anthropic says a coin flip gets 50%.
• Too soonClaude flagged an enzyme system. Its function is still unknown.
• True, butEnveda doubled its valuation. Safety results do not prove weight-maintenance benefits.
• True, butAlibaba's cancer AI beats radiologists. It only reads abdominal CT scans.
• True, butGitHub's famous number says Copilot users finished a task 55% faster. A Harvard paper tracking 718 firms finds AI agents raised lines of code 30%, while finished work showed no statistically significant change.
• True, butA solo developer rebuilt Word, Excel and PowerPoint with Claude, the post says. The WordCraft README says it is about 60% of the way to replacing Word for real work, and the spreadsheet app says 50%.
• True, butIronclad quotes a 20-minute risk review of an 80-page contract. Its own notes say the agent is Jurist under a new name.
• True, butMeta and Microsoft are kicking the Claude habit, says the headline. What they cut is staff seats. Claude stays inside Microsoft's own tool.
• True, butPewDiePie unveiled Ajax, an "uncensored" model for home PCs. On October 3, the day its countdown ended, the page said it will ship "when it's ready".
• True, butSynopsys and OpenAI say GPT-Synopsys will "revolutionize the design of semiconductors". The release carries no speedup figure, and the model is still to be developed.
• True, butOpenAI says dots are always-on agents "built to handle everything". On its own launch page, the always-on part uses read-only tools that cannot send a message.
• Holds upMeta's new audio glasses have no camera. Other privacy questions remain.
• True, butGoogle says even Google cannot read its new AI memory. The last named audit said safe from everyone except Google.
• True, butMeta called Muse 'safe and secure.' It launched with a 0-day.
• True, butCharacter.AI was valued at $1 billion on high demand. Its Chapter 11 case shows a $10 million monthly compute bill against a best-ever revenue month of $5.3 million, and Disney's $20 million is a bid to license some IP.
• True, butTypeSafe says a third of the Fortune 500 use Jev. Its lead investor, announcing the same round, says 25%.
• Holds upProsecutors want at least 46 months for the AI music streaming scam. The headline holds. The AI made the songs; bots made the plays.
• True, butAI 'needs $6 trillion a year' to justify the data-centre boom. The number is a $1.5 trillion spending forecast divided by an assumed ratio of about a quarter.
• True, butMcDonald's is using AI to 'dynamically' price your burger. The Reuters report behind that line describes a per-store price recommender, and says it could not tie the Fresno Big Mac gap to it.
• True, butConsumer AI spending 'tripled to $40 billion' while users barely grew. Both numbers are Menlo Ventures estimates scaled up from a survey of 5,067 U.S. adults.
• True, but'DeepSeek $1B ARR' is a run rate from unnamed sources. The same reporting puts seven months of revenue at about $70.7 million.
• Too soonSnorkel reports a $375M revenue run rate. Its announcement does not show the calculation.
• True, butXiaomi's '$3M' top open model traces to one hedged tweet at $2.6M.
• True, butThree senators say AI data center companies revealed they are not paying their full costs. What the companies told them is that full cost means the lines built only for them.
• True, butThe Independent says Anthropic will ban users who bully Claude. Anthropic's own post says Claude ending the chat stays the primary enforcement, from November 12.
• True, butHeadlines say Australia will make AI companies prove their safety systems work. The source is a speech, and the law is planned for 2027.
• True, butThe headline says Utah lets AI prescribe without human oversight. The signed agreement covers topical acne creams, with physician review at every stage.
• True, butMeta's Muse is 'building dossiers on 4 million users' and 'sharing data between agents.' The dossiers are reported and undisputed. The sharing is de-identified lessons, per Meta.
• True, butAltman did say accept 'bad things' for AI. The headline stops before the part where he refuses catastrophic risk.
• Holds upNeowin says Pop!_OS banned AI-generated code from much of its codebase. The template says exactly that. The enforcement is a checkbox.
• True, butKolibri's weights really are downloadable under Apache 2.0. The sovereign label sits beside a signed deal for Aleph Alpha to operate globally as Cohere.
• True, butLeCun's "zero concerns" quote is about rogue agents, not extinction. And the agents he says obeyed went looking for an answer key.
• Holds upThe BBC says an AI video of a dead victim got his killer's sentence quashed. The ruling says exactly that, with one catch: the conviction stands.
• True, butHeadlines say Grok encouraged Trump to seize Maduro. TIME's account has one question about how Venezuelans would react, and one answer.
• True, butThe headline says Trump reprogrammed his chatbot to stop fact-checking him. The answers did change overnight. Then, within hours, some of the fact-checks came back.
• True, butThe FTC is investigating OpenAI and Anthropic 'one day after' a White House pact. The probe opened in the summer; only the news arrived one day later.
• True, butThe headline says US and Russia stripped human oversight from a UN AI weapons pact. The text still affirms human control.
• True, butThe Pentagon says an appeals court 'completely' validated its Anthropic blacklisting. It won on one of two designations.
• True, butGates did say AI could drive a billion deaths. The headlines cropped out the people with ill intent.
• BSMedicare's number two said AI prior-auth contractors don't earn more by denying care. Medicare's own page says they get a cut of care averted.
• True, butBezos says AI will let some people work three days a week. The coverage gives no timeline, and Amazon has cut about 30,000 corporate roles since late last year.
• True, butGPT-6 Astra cleared a World of Warcraft zone 'blind.' It saw no screen. It did read the server's own quest files.
• True, butAnthropic 'files for a $2T IPO' with a $42B loss.
• True, butNvidia 'wants to put a watchdog chip next to every AI agent.' Per Nvidia's own developer blog, the watchdog is optional software on a BlueField-4 chip it announced in January.
• Holds upEmergence AI says it ran eight AI worlds of ten agents each.