Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, Amazon devices chief Panos Panay described a future where ambient AI devices work in the background, anticipating users' needs instead of waiting for commands.

<p><strong>Tool:</strong> <a href="https://tools.simonwillison.net/chirp-pong">Chirp Pong</a></p> <p>Another game experiment - I wanted to see if it was feasible to have a two player game on two separate phones running in static HTML where the networking code uses chirps sent via the microphone. It seems to work!</p> <blockquote> <p><code>Build a two player competitive pong like game where two players use their phones close to each other and the game state is sent via audio noises which the web microphone API can interpret - but add graphical and gameplay twists to make it a lot more fun and intertwine than pong</code></p> </blockquote> <p>Claude Opus 5.5 Extra <a href="https://claude.ai/code/session_019awUnNB7NoYd7noBNAsNdd">in Claude Code</a>.</p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/game-design">game-design</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/claude-code">claude-code</a></p>

Apple Intelligence may reach China in December with iOS 27.3, but Siri AI and other features will be missing. See what users can expect. The post Apple Intelligence Gets China Approval: Siri AI Left Out appeared first on TechRepublic.

The executives argued that advertising isn’t the only path to monetization, and that there are alternative models that are feasible when it comes to monetization.

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Ben Penn / Bloomberg Law: Sources: top DOJ officials halt career prosecutors' Biden-era investigation of Meta over facilitating illegal drug sales and are weighing more lenient options  —  Top Justice Department officials have sidelined career prosecutors' long-running grand jury investigation of Meta Platforms …

METR will publish its own assessments of Anthropic’s risks, incidents, and practices, and the frontier AI model maker has given up the right to block them.

Co-executive director Amba Kak joins Agents of Tech to unpack the consolidation of power among tech monopolies, the slow bailout of AI companies that the public is footing, regulation for the industry, and more. The post The $5 Trillion AI Bet You’re Already Paying For appeared first on AI Now Institute.

How exactly AI money will flow through the music industry remains ambiguous

Researchers hunted for clues in modal analysis of 20th-century replica bell at Penn State Behrend.

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Oyster's 2026 Global AI Talent Report points to a mismatch at the center of workplace AI adoption: the skills employees are expected to use are changing faster than the jobs employers formally describe. AI requirements appeared in 15% of roles filled through Oyster's platform in the first half of 2026, up from 5% in 2022. Yet new expectations often arrive without a revised title, a pay adjustment, or even a clear explanation to the employee. The research, announced October 14, combines an…

A good sales meeting can create an afternoon of administrative work. The buyer wants a revised business case, finance needs a calculator, and the purchasing timeline has changed. An AI assistant may produce a useful draft, but a salesperson still has to move it into the documents and plans everyone is using. Aligned is targeting that gap with Seller Agent, an AI agent embedded in its shared deal workspace. Announced October 14, 2026, the product can update mutual action plans, rewrite content…

Introducing the Rosalind Academic Plan, offering eligible academic labs sponsored access to GPT-Rosalind and tools to advance life sciences research.

Bolivia Inteligente/Unsplash, CC BY-NC The Australian government looks likely to introduce stronger legal checks on artificial intelligence (AI) companies to parliament early next year, after a bipartisan parliamentary committee released early recommendations in a letter to the prime minister. Their final report is due by the end of November. Yet even after those proposed changes, our laws won’t do enough to hold companies accountable for so-called “rogue AI”. This includes instances such as OpenAI’s AI agents hacking multiple federal and state government websites in Australia this year, which OpenAI only belatedly revealed. But there are precedents for how to get tougher on companies responsible for rogue AI hacks. How AI agents slip through legal cracks If an Australian business – even a relatively small one, with an annual turnover of just A$3 million or more – suffers a data breach likely to cause serious harm, the rules are clear. That business or organisation must notify the customers or others affected, as well as the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. But if a company’s AI agent – software that can browse websites and complete tasks without needing a person to check each step – actually does the breaking in, the rules are very different. OpenAI had no legal obligation to tell anyone that its AI agents breached security on Australian government websites during a training exercise in June. It didn’t even have a direct obligation to prevent those hacks. The only legal responsibility sits with whoever held the data – not whoever took it. That’s true whether that company is based here in Australia, or overseas (such as US-based OpenAI). Hacking offences currently assume a human intentionally breaks in. The law doesn’t account for a machine that, in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s words, “didn’t accept ‘no’ for an answer”. What does the OpenAI Medicare hack reveal about Australia’s cyber security? What’s being done now The prime minister’s AI rapid review taskforce is considering whether existing processes can handle AI cyber incidents. It is expected to report within weeks. There’s also draft legislation being prepared on other ways to better regulate technology. For example, the government’s privacy bill proposes requiring any handling of personal information to be “fair and reasonable”. If that legislation passes, clicking “I agree” when you see terms and conditions would no longer excuse unfair practices. Meanwhile, the digital duty of care bill – introduced to parliament on Thursday – would require social media platforms and search engines to assess foreseeable risks and proactively reduce them. Penalties for failing could exceed A$100 million. Australia’s ‘digital duty of care’ was just introduced to parliament. So what’s in the bill? However, neither of those bills covers companies that build AI models, then let their AI agents loose on the internet. On Tuesday, the joint parliamentary committee on AI released its preliminary recommendations for AI safety and risk management. Those recommendations included requiring AI companies to submit to independent safety checks. Without stronger obligations on the companies, this measure is unlikely to have real impact on safety culture at the tech giants. 4 more steps we need to take Our submissions to parliament’s AI inquiry propose several additional steps. An AI “duty of care”: The proposed “digital duty of care” needs to be extended beyond online safety. It should include a legal obligation on companies developing AI to take reasonable care not to harm others. Australian employers have worked this way for decades, keeping workers safe “so far as is reasonably practicable”. This would mean AI companies have to find and reduce foreseeable risks, such as an AI agent that won’t take no for an answer. It also means proper testing with secure boundaries, before a new agent is allowed onto the internet. Individual rights: People harmed when a company falls short under the duty of care should be able to take it to court. Without a direct safety duty, and accompanying right of legal action, people currently face jumping through multiple legal hoops to get redress. Registration of AI companies: Phone companies and financial advisers need a licence. Yet most AI businesses need not even tell a regulator they exist. So how can regulators know who they are regulating? Registration of companies providing large AI and computing services to Australians, with a local contact and a duty to report incidents promptly, would close that reporting gap. Mandatory reporting rules for AI breaches: Appearing at a parliamentary inquiry hearing last week, OpenAI and rival company Anthropic both backed the need for mandatory reporting for AI breaches. We agree. None of this is radical. Since 1992, Australian law has held manufacturers responsible for goods that are less safe than people are entitled to expect. For instance, a car maker has to both report and pay to fix faulty airbags. They can also be sued if those airbags cause harm. It’s time AI companies were held legally responsible for their faulty products too. Rob Nicholls is a member of the University of Sydney Centre for AI, Trust, and Governance. He receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Jeannie Marie Paterson receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Medical Research Futures Fund.

Bluesky is bringing “social vibe coding” to its experimental Attie platform, allowing users to create interactive experiences like games, quizzes, and websites that can tap into the social network's audience.

Anthropic is giving safety evaluators from METR unprecedented access to the company. Finn Gomez/Getty Images Anthropic is opening its doors to independent AI safety evaluators from METR. It's the first time a frontier AI company has done so. Dario Amodei pledged last month to take the step. Anthropic is giving a team of six independent evaluators company hardware, office space, and access to internal tools so they can more thoroughly vet the AI giant's unreleased models and agents. In a blog post on Thursday, the Claude maker said it chose six evaluators from METR, the research group perhaps best known for its report on OpenAI's Hugging Face agent breach, to receive "employee-like access" at Anthropic. "We want to be publicly accountable for the decisions we're making," Anthropic said in its blog post. "We aim to close the gap between what evaluators understand about a frontier AI company's systems and what the company itself understands." The choice to set the evaluators up at Anthropic fulfills a promise first made by CEO Dario Amodei last month, when he published a lengthy essay calling on frontier AI companies to slow down in the wake of the Hugging Face breach. "Anthropic is unilaterally committing to this step now," Amodei said at the time of embedding safety evaluators. Reacting to Amodei's essay, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said his company would also embed evaluators, though that hasn't happened yet. Anthropic's Thursday disclosure marks the first time a frontier AI company has taken the step. Within the last year, a steady drumbeat of incidents in which rogue AI agents break free from their guardrails and wreak havoc on the wider internet has spurred calls for action from politicians and tech CEOs alike. Most recently, an Anthropic agent submitted an erroneous tip for an unsolved murder in Philadelphia, and another agent submitted 20 visa applications on a US government website, according to published reports. In its blog post on Thursday, Anthropic said the evaluators have free rein to publish their findings, with a couple of caveats prohibiting the METR team from disclosing customer data, model architecture, and attorney-client privileged information. Anthropic also said it holds the right to require METR to redact information. "METR is free to characterize our redactions publicly, and say whether it believes the redactions were justified, as long as it does so without revealing the redacted information," Anthropic said. The access does not extend to the wider METR team. The six chosen researchers, whose names were not immediately published on Thursday, will be "siloed" from the wider METR team. "Embedded evaluation gives a few qualified people working under Anthropic's security standards a close view of how we operate," Anthropic said. "It's not a way for other organizations to obtain our information, or that of our customers and partners." METR did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. Read the original article on Business Insider

Suspected Russian drones attack chemical tanker within Romanian waters.

Jensen Huang is calling for looser immigration restrictions for tech talent, while the Trump administration tightens the screws on H-1B visas. Kent NISHIMURA / AFP via Getty Images Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was born in Taiwan and came to the US as a child. Huang exhorted immigration in a recent podcast, saying it helps power the US tech sector. His comments contrast with the Trump administration's hardline on immigration. A key Trump ally in the tech world is trumpeting the benefits of immigration. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, himself an immigrant from Taiwan, said on a recent podcast that he believes the United States needs to maintain its status as an attractor of top tech talent — even if those workers come from outside the United States. "We want all the world's great minds to come here, bring their great ideas," Huang said on the Bg2 podcast. "The inflow of intellectual property into this country is unlike anything else the world's ever seen." Though Huang said immigrants must enter the country "lawfully," he said that striking a good balance is necessary. "Surely we want to do it," he said of attracting foreign talent. Huang's spirited comments clash with the Trump administration's agenda, which has sought to crack down on H-1B visas — often the first gateway for tech workers entering the country — as part of its wider crackdown on immigration. In a statement to Business Insider, a White House spokeswoman said, "There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force, and President Trump's agenda to create jobs for American workers represents this Administration's commitment to capitalizing on that untapped potential." In September last year, Trump signed an executive order setting a $100,000 fee for new H-1B applications, to be paid by companies hiring the foreign workers. Some of the top tech companies sponsoring H-1B visas include Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Apple. Then, last week, Vance and other US officials said during a press conference that the administration was banning Microsoft and Adobe from a federal visa sponsorship program that links an H-1B visa to a green card. "If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants," Vance said during the press conference. Huang has emerged as one of Trump's more reliable allies in the tech world. Huang said last month that AI CEOs were scaring people about the tech for "ulterior reasons," an act he called "irresponsible" and "unnecessary." "We don't need more regulations," Huang said. "We need to apply the current regulations we have." As Trump weighed calls from some AI CEOs to regulate the burgeoning industry after a series of rogue AI incidents, the president ultimately took an approach aligned with Huang's view. Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. At an October 8 event at the White House, Trump gave science and tech medals to six CEOs. Only one of them, Michael Dell, was born in the United States. The rest — Elon Musk of SpaceX, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Sergey Brin of Google, and Lisa Su of Taiwan — were born abroad. Read the original article on Business Insider

Its effect on people remains an ongoing question.