All AI news

AIManus, the developer of the Manus AI agent, has raised more than $500 million led by Boyu Capital, with Tencent also investing. Bloomberg had reported a $4 billion valuation, roughly double Meta's reported offer last December, which Chinese regulators blocked in April. The funding comes days after Manus 2.0 added a new harness, Cloud Computer, and Cue, which lets agents use email accounts and digital wallets.

AICoreWeave is positioning its AI cloud around an open development loop, connecting training, inference and evaluation through its newly announced CoreWeave Forge platform. Chief marketing officer Jean English said the company wants production learnings to improve models and agents and that the loop should work across different models, frameworks and clouds. She argued that competitive differentiation extends beyond GPUs to partner tooling, infrastructure and APIs.

AIThe California State Athletic Commission sent Rek a cease-and-desist letter over a September 18 match in which a human piloting a humanoid robot fought Frankie LaPenna. The letter, posted to X by Rek CEO Cix Liv on September 30, demands that Rek stop promoting any contest involving a human in California without commission approval. Rek's next planned match, on Friday, will pit two armed robots against each other.

AIThree OpenAI safety researchers, Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni, were fired after OpenAI said they mishandled sensitive information by sharing it with an outside AI safety organization. In an open letter, they deny the claims, argue the dismissals will deter employees from raising safety concerns, and call on OpenAI to keep its public commitments on third-party safety auditing. OpenAI says the firings followed an investigation into a pattern of misconduct and denies they were retaliation for safety concerns.

Why it matters: The article sets the researchers' account of their dismissal against OpenAI's stated reasons, showing how internal safety disputes can become public and affect employee willingness to raise concerns.

AIDecagon Labs has launched Chord, a new speech model, and Modal says it was trained and served on its platform. Modal reports low time-to-first-audio even during large swings in concurrency. Decagon says post-training preserved pace and voice naturalness and raised resolution rates in every deployment.

AIBryce Vincent Gowryluk, 16, had to be rescued by North Shore Rescue after following route directions from the AI chatbot Claude that took him to the base of the Widowmaker Arete, a 1,700-foot wall in British Columbia. He had asked Claude to plan a route from Grouse Mountain to Crown Mountain and back, and he was ill-equipped for the rock climbing the wall requires. Rescue manager Paul Markey warned hikers not to rely blindly on AI for route planning.

AILettering artist Jessica Hische designed the M logo for Meta's new AI assistant Muse, a two-day freelance sprint she says paid about $12,500. She said she took the job to cover payroll for her Oakland shops, and the decision drew heavy criticism from fellow designers on Threads.

AIThe Alzheimer's Translation Challenge, led by Primamente and AlzData with NVIDIA, Hugging Face, Nebius, Talisman Therapeutics, Ultima Genomics, Cellanome, Prime Intellect, and Boltz, is now open for registration. The competition starts in spring 2027, according to the post.

AIParticipants will use a dataset to build AI models, evaluated through a series of evals ranging from general benchmarks to more complex tasks. Top teams will be shortlisted and have their experimental hypotheses tested in Prima Mente's wet lab.

AIFired OpenAI safety researchers published the full letter they sent to the company's board. The author, quoted in a linked post, believes they were dismissed for prioritizing safety over OpenAI's near-term corporate interests.

AIAnthropic has updated Claude's usage policy for the first time in over a year, banning sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward Claude. The company says ordinary frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, and model testing are not covered, and that the rule applies only in extreme cases. Violations can lead to warnings, throttling, restriction, suspension, or termination of access.

AIMicrosoft will replace per-user OneDrive allowances on Microsoft 365 Family and Premium plans with a shared 2 TB storage pool, down from 6 TB across six accounts. Heavy users could face bills that double or triple, since each extra 1 TB adds $10 a month, while family members will be able to share a single AI usage allowance. New and upgraded subscriptions get shared storage starting Oct. 8, 2026, and existing subscribers move at their first renewal on or after May 2, 2027.

AIThe U.S. Department of Labor said it suspended Microsoft and Adobe from its Permanent Labor Certification program, citing multiple active federal investigations. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling also said no new applications will be accepted for Cognizant, Infosys, Capgemini, Tata, Wipro and HCL. Microsoft said the vast majority of its U.S. employees are Americans and that 80% of its roughly 6,000 H-1B petitions last fiscal year were to extend or change the status of existing employees.

AIArena has secured a $200M Series B, with Lightspeed doubling down on its investment. The company is also launching the Alignment Index, which measures how closely AI behavior aligns with human values in real-world settings. Arena reports annualized revenue above $100M since its Series A, with millions of people helping evaluate frontier models through real-world use.

AIOpenAI is rolling out GPT-6.1 Sol Ultrafast, which generates tokens up to 8x faster than Sol Standard. On the API it costs $12 per 1M input tokens and $60 per 1M output tokens, and the main post says it is just 1.2x the cost of Astra.

AIArena, the crowdsourced AI model leaderboard that started as a UC Berkeley research project, raised a $200 million Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures. The company said it reached $100 million in annualized run-rate revenue in June, up from $30 million when it raised its $150 million Series A in January at a $1.7 billion post-money valuation.

AIOpenAI has reportedly told investors its annualized revenue is approaching $50 billion, about $20 billion below a previously reported $70 billion figure. The Financial Times reports the earlier number came from investor attempts to compare OpenAI with Anthropic, which counts cloud partners' sales differently. OpenAI's IPO has reportedly been pushed to early 2027.

AIThe Association of Historical Mathematicians (AHM) has called for a boycott of OpenAI after the company released more than 700 AI-generated proof files at once. Fields Medalist Terence Tao, who chairs the group, argues that AI solving open problems autonomously reduces seminars, collaborations, and fertile research directions, and that the field should shift its measure of progress toward explanation and community-building.

Why it matters: The article links the AHM boycott call to Tao's argument that AI-driven proof volume is changing how mathematicians measure progress and whether solutions remain useful.

AITrump disclosed more than 500 securities transactions in August, including a purchase of up to $25 million in Meta stock and up to $5 million in SpaceX senior unsecured notes. The filing, which reports trades in value ranges, shows total activity of roughly $74.3 million to $273.3 million according to a CNBC analysis. The SpaceX notes were bought two days before Trump signed a national space transportation policy, and the White House says the portfolio is independently managed.

AIAnthropic updated its usage policy on October 8, 2026, codifying bans on election interference, weapons software, and surveillance. It also expressly forbids prolonged verbal abuse of Claude, applying only to extreme cases of repeated cruelty with no discernible purpose.

AISpaceXAI has joined the Omacom Foundation as a Founding Corporate Patron, providing $1,500,000 in Grok tokens for Omarchy's maintenance and development. The main post says the company is glad to support the Omarchy team.

AIOpenAI released hundreds of claimed solutions to hard math problems but did not fully meet guidelines from the Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence. Only 10 of 719 manuscripts included chain-of-thought releases, and just 42% of proofs were formalized. A Cambridge and King's College paper found discrepancies between a natural language proof and its Lean code for a Navier-Stokes-derived problem.

AIAutomation Anywhere Inc. announced an agreement to acquire Boost.ai Inc., a conversational voice AI company, from Nordic Capital, to extend its autonomous enterprise platform into customer experience. Boost.ai supports more than 36 languages, serves hundreds of customers in regulated industries and Europe, and maintains more than 650 deployments and about 600 live AI agents. The deal follows Automation Anywhere's late 2025 acquisition of Aisera Inc.

AIUSA Today Co. and several of its local newspapers are suing OpenAI, alleging the company copied "hundreds of thousands" of articles to train its AI models without permission. The publisher seeks damages of more than $250 million in a filing on Thursday. OpenAI did not immediately respond to The Verge's request for comment.

AISpaceXAI joins the Omacom Foundation, which oversees the Omarchy Linux distro, as a Founding Corporate Patron and donates $1.5 million in Grok tokens. According to David Heinemeier Hansson's blog post, the tokens will primarily accelerate development, review code, and patch bugs. The article notes Hansson's recent anti-immigration blog posts, and that 1Password and Cloudflare have also faced criticism for contributing to Omarchy.

AIFirmus Grid Ltd., a Nvidia-backed data center company, abandoned one of Australia's biggest-ever initial public offerings after failing to attract global investors wary of frothy AI valuations. The source provides no further details on offering size or valuation.

AICursor says it is excited to support open-source software alongside SpaceXAI, and it plans to bring more projects on board soon. Background from DHH indicates SpaceXAI joined the Omacom Foundation as a Founding Corporate Patron, contributing $1,500,000 in @grok tokens for maintaining and developing Omarchy.

AILightspeed Venture Partners co-leaders Ravi Mhatre and Bejul Somaia halted partner schedules in April 2023 for a seven-hour meeting on how to respond to AI. The firm had missed early stakes in OpenAI, ElevenLabs and Hugging Face, and was poised to back Anthropic.

AIArena announced a $200 million Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation, alongside a new Alignment Index that measures whether AI agents behave safely, truthfully, and within the bounds of user requests. The company has surpassed $100 million in annualized revenue, facilitated 350 million sessions and 62 million votes, and led by Felicis and PXD from the seed and Series A stages. Arena positions the index as a way to assess trustworthiness as AI systems increasingly take real actions.

AICalifornia Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 947, the "No Robo Bosses Act," which bars employers from fully outsourcing disciplinary and termination decisions to automated decision systems. Employers must verify AI outputs and give employees a description of the reasons, including the data used, and the law takes effect July 1, 2027.

AIThe AI industry's boom is pushing San Francisco rents sharply higher, with the average one-bedroom now costing $4,400, up more than 25% from last year and nearly three times the national average. Eviction notices citywide are up 44% compared with last year, and advocates say landlords are using Ellis Act evictions, renovictions and "self-eviction" tactics to exploit the market. Mayor Daniel Lurie declared a "rent emergency" in September, proposing eviction legal aid and caps on rent increases for newly vacant rent-controlled units.

AIAnthropic is revising its usage policy for the first time in over a year, adding bans on sustained abusive or cruel behavior toward Claude and on deceptive election and propaganda campaigns. The update also expands weapons restrictions, tightens surveillance bans, and requires a qualified operator able to stop equipment when Claude controls autonomous physical hardware. Terminating conversations remains the primary enforcement mechanism, and the company did not say whether user bans would follow.