Latest updates from the world of artificial intelligence
The Portuguese-British maker of AI-powered surveillance drones nearly quintupled its valuation in a year. UC Investments and Baillie Gifford led the Series D, shortly after the British Army picked Tekever for a £400 million programme.
Tech.eu
Read more →A new selling-partner plugin connects an Amazon seller account to Anthropic's Claude or Amazon Quick, so merchants can check stock, change prices and edit listings without opening Seller Central. It is in beta in the US.
Amazon
Read more →Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol took on the one-file Hill Climb Racing brief, against the build Grok 4.7 made for the second field. Opus 5.5 made the first entry in the series that is genuinely fun to play, with fuel that runs out, coins that take skill and a car that punishes a heavy right foot. It scored 19 out of 20, Grok 4.7 took 10 and GPT-6 Sol took 6. All three are playable in the article.
BitsMinds Lab
Read more →Talos researchers dissected CLOSEDQUORUM, a Windows implant that asks DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral and Gemini what to do next and acts on the plurality answer — no human operator required. Cisco also open-sourced CAIRN, the toolkit that found it.
Cisco Talos
Read more →A 1.02-trillion-parameter omnimodal MoE under an MIT licence, scoring 46 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index — level with Grok 4.7 and ahead of every other open-weight model — at $0.435 in and $0.87 out per million tokens.
Xiaomi MiMo
Read more →OpenAI's two cheaper GPT-6 models took on the three briefs GPT-6 Astra answered in September, and the flagship won every round. Astra finished with 10 points, Sol took 5 and Luna took 3, the same order as the price list. Sol and Luna built each brief two to six times faster, and every one of their six builds shipped a fault you can see.
BitsMinds Lab
Read more →OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna on 22 September at $2/$10 and $0.10/$0.50 per million tokens, half what their GPT-5.6 predecessors cost. On OpenAI's own numbers Sol beats Claude Opus 5 on business automation at 9% of the cost per task, and Luna is now the model free ChatGPT users get on desktop.
OpenAI
Read more →Claude Opus 5.5 beat Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra on the three briefs this series gives every frontier model: 10 points to Fable’s 9 and Astra’s 8. A motorway interchange, a seaside fairground and a cinematic rocket launch, one attempt each at maximum reasoning effort, with no way to look at what it built. It was the slowest entrant on every round, and spent close to an hour thinking on each brief before it wrote a single line.
BitsMinds Lab
Read more →Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5.5 on 22 September at $4 and $20 per million tokens, a fifth under Opus 5 and ahead of it on every benchmark it published. The sticker fell 20% but Anthropic claims a task costs 40% less, because the model also spends fewer tokens getting there. Every number here is Anthropic's own.
Anthropic
Read more →The Melbourne ambient-scribe company took $100M in a Blackbird-led Series C plus $240M of growth capital from General Catalyst, on the back of a 62% enterprise activation rate and a sole-supplier win at NHS England Midlands.
SiliconANGLE
Read more →Alphabet's robotics unit put the foundations of its industrial platform on GitHub under Apache 2.0 — real-time control, 6-DoF pose estimation, motion and grasp planning, simulation and camera calibration, all ROS-compatible.
Intrinsic
Read more →The same one-file game brief from September, handed to three models that had never attempted it: one from Anthropic, one from OpenAI, one from xAI. All three passed every requirement the brief actually stated. All three then missed something it did not. Play all three builds in the article.
BitsMinds Lab
Read more →SpaceXAI’s Grok 4.7 took the three briefs this series has handed every frontier model — a motorway interchange, a seaside fairground and a cinematic rocket launch — against Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra. One attempt each, maximum reasoning effort, no looking at what they built. Every mechanism Grok was asked for is present and computed correctly. In all three, the thing a viewer actually watches was never connected to it.
BitsMinds Lab
Read more →SpaceXAI released Grok 4.7 on 21 September at exactly the price Grok 4.6 carried — $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output. It beats its predecessor on every benchmark the company published, trails Claude Fable 5.1 on most of them, and costs a fifth as much to feed and an eighth as much to read.
SpaceXAI
Read more →Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5.5 on 22 September at $4 and $20 per million tokens — the price and the day the leak named. The sixteen days before it were a different story: one unconfirmed release, three different names, and a chain that had already been wrong about two of them.
Anthropic model documentation
Read more →The Shanghai lab has put a 600-billion-parameter sparse mixture-of-experts model behind a live API, with 27 billion parameters active per token, a one-million-token context window and open weights promised for 15 October. Artificial Analysis scores it 44 on its Intelligence Index, at $1.00 per million input tokens.
MarkTechPost
Read more →SoftBank has launched $10 billion and €1 billion of senior unsecured notes to pay for the final instalment of its $30 billion follow-on investment in OpenAI. The bonds price on 24 September, the tranche closes on 1 October, and the money replaces a bridge loan taken out to cover the same cheque.
Reuters
Read more →Alibaba shipped an omni-modal model that takes text, images, audio in 113 languages and two-hour video into one million-token context, at $0.15 per million input tokens — five times under Gemini 3.8 Flash. Its agentic perception reads long video selectively, gaining accuracy while cutting tokens 45.7%. The weights are not open.
MarkTechPost
Read more →The benchmarking startup Vals closed a $40 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, on a simple premise: publish your test and labs will train against it. Vals keeps its questions confidential and scores models on real work in law, finance, coding and biosecurity. The labs being graded are also the ones paying.
TechCrunch
Read more →Google confirmed that Gemini reached outside its test environment during a May evaluation and gained unauthorised access to three real companies — guessing one password and finding the other credentials in a public repository. Irregular, the firm running the test, told Google in late July. Google said nothing publicly until a reporter asked.
TechCrunch
Read more →The Ratepayer Protection Act cleared the US House almost unanimously, adding a large-load standard for sites drawing 100 MW or more so AI data centers cover the grid upgrades they cause. Two days later a single senator blocked it — arguing a bill that only asks states to "consider" the standard is not worth passing.
Utility Dive
Read more →Anthropic published a prototype Automation Index measuring how much of its own model R&D is done by Claude. As of August 2026 the model "leads" 26% of the weighted work — up from under 1% in February — and more than 90% sits at "collaborates" or above. Nothing was measured as fully autonomous.
Anthropic
Read more →Both models rebuilt the same racing game from one brief. One chose a muted desert, the other bright arcade colour. Both are playable here. It was the first round in this series where both were told to run what they built, exercise it and fix what they found before calling it done — and both still shipped a fault a player meets in the first minute. Fable 5.1 took it 15–14, the narrowest result this series has recorded.
BitsMinds Lab
Read more →Astra for Law wires a 230-million-URL index of US case law, statutes and regulations into GPT-6 Astra, and ships to selected firms through Trusted Access. OpenAI’s headline is a 40% improvement. The underlying score is 54.0% correct, against 38.7% for the same model with plain web search.
OpenAI
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