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Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta sent policy and safety staff, not their chiefs. The Council says it will go to court over SpaceXAI’s refusal, and no bill was voted on.
The New York City Council questioned four AI companies under oath on Monday, October 5, in a hearing on AI risks. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta each sent one policy or safety expert. SpaceXAI did not attend despite a subpoena, and the Council plans court action.
The UK watchdog found 6,310 illegal AI-made images in the first half of 2026, 40% more than in all of last year. It asks the EU to agree a long-delayed law on detecting such material.
The Internet Watch Foundation said on October 5 that its analysts assessed 6,310 AI-generated images of child sexual abuse from January to June 2026. That is 40% more than the 4,512 it found in the whole of 2025. Girls appear in 98% of the images where age and gender were recorded.
The US start-up says its 501-billion-parameter model matches a top Chinese model with a quarter to a third of the computing. The weights come later this month, and no outside test exists yet.
Reflection AI announced Beam on October 5, its first open-weight model. The company says Beam scores like Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 on hard reasoning tests while using 3 to 4 times less computing to run. The weights, under the Apache 2.0 licence, are due later this month; for now there is only an early-access list.
Parks, schools, shopping centres and gyms with changing rooms could be covered. It is not a total ban, and the bill has no date yet.
Norway’s government said on Monday, October 5, that it will propose a temporary ban on AI glasses in selected places. It worries that people could be photographed, filmed or recorded without knowing it. An expert group will advise on permanent national rules.
All 51 Council members hold a hearing on ten AI bills, including a kill switch. SpaceXAI was subpoenaed, and Bloomberg says an ex-Anthropic researcher will testify.
The New York City Council holds a hearing on AI risks on Monday, October 5. The Council says Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta agreed to testify under oath. It subpoenaed Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI on September 28 after the company did not reply.
The telecom group also wants €800 million of AI revenue outside the US by 2030. Reuters notes the savings figures leave out what the AI itself costs.
Deutsche Telekom held an AI investor day in Bonn on Monday, October 5. It said AI and automation should cut its indirect costs by about €2.5 billion by 2030, compared with 2023. It expects gross savings of about €1.1 billion outside the US in 2027.
The French energy-tech group will pay $205 a share in cash for the US maker of design software. It calls the deal a bet on industrial AI.
Schneider Electric said on Monday, October 5, that it will buy PTC for $205 per share in cash. That values PTC’s shares at about $22.6 billion, or $23.7 billion including debt. The deal is expected to close by the third quarter of 2027.
Spy chief Jay Clayton chairs it, with the heads of the FTC and the personnel office and a Pentagon technology chief. It reports to Trump and his chief of staff.
President Trump announced the Super Intelligence Force on Truth Social on Sunday, October 4. Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton leads it, joined by FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, Pentagon under secretary Emil Michael and personnel chief Scott Kupor. It will coordinate the government’s work on AI.
Kim Jong Un watched the launch on Saturday. South Korea says it tracked the missile and could shoot such a weapon down; the AI claim comes only from Pyongyang.
North Korea fired a missile from near Wonsan early on Saturday, October 3. State media said Kim Jong Un oversaw it. Kim Yo Jong, his sister, said it uses AI to change its flight path at low altitude, so there is “no way to avoid” it.
In a Politico interview, OpenAI’s chief said AI’s benefits outweigh scams and misuse, unlike “catastrophic” risks. Anthropic replied that its rule proposals cover only frontier models.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman told Politico’s new Decoded newsletter that there is “a lot of daylight” between OpenAI and Anthropic on AI regulation. The world “should accept some bad things happening” for AI’s benefits and for people’s freedom to use it, Altman said.
Elon Musk’s AI company is following Trump’s order to say “Super Intelligence” instead of AI. Musk gave no date, and the company has made no formal announcement.
Elon Musk said on X on Sunday, October 4, that SpaceX’s AI unit, SpaceXAI, will change its name to SpaceXSI. The company makes the Grok chatbot. The move follows President Trump’s order telling federal agencies to replace “AI” with “Super Intelligence”.
Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton will chair a group the administration calls the “Super Intelligence Force”. It has 120 days to report on AI’s risks and opportunities.
The Wall Street Journal reported on October 3 that President Trump has chosen Jay Clayton, the Director of National Intelligence, as his AI czar. Clayton will lead a new White House task force with 120 days to report on the risks and opportunities of AI and on what the federal government should be responsible for.
A one-line order lets Elon Musk’s AI company avoid the state’s “nudification” law while it appeals. The court gave no reasons and has not ruled on whether the law is constitutional.
The US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit granted xAI an injunction pending appeal on October 2. Minnesota cannot enforce its ban on tools that “nudify” photos of real people against the company while the case goes on. A lower court had refused the same request in September.
Without a plan, Gemini now picks the model: most prompts go to the smallest, Flash-Lite. The cheapest paid plan loses Pro, and AI Pro subscribers gain Deep Think.
Google has updated its Gemini help pages: from October 9, people using the Gemini app without a Google AI plan get Auto by default. Most prompts go to the Flash-Lite model, and harder ones may go to Flash or Pro. Subscribers to AI Plus keep Flash-Lite and Flash but lose Pro, on a date Google will send them by email.
A user of GitLab’s Duo Agent Platform could escape a prompt template’s sandbox and run commands on the server. GitLab says its own hosted gateways are already fixed.
GitLab released fixes on October 2 for CVE-2026-90970, a critical flaw in its AI Gateway, the service that connects GitLab’s AI features to models. A logged-in user with access to the Duo Agent Platform could send a crafted flow configuration and run any command on the gateway.
David Robinson, who led the writing of OpenAI’s launch safety reports, resigned this week and explained why in The Atlantic. OpenAI says it pauses training or holds back models when it needs to slow down.
David Robinson resigned from OpenAI this week and published an essay in The Atlantic on October 3 titled “I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken”. Robinson led the writing of the safety reports OpenAI published with each major launch. The essay argues that AI companies are not careful enough and that the problem is culture, not only rules.
A memo from the acting Army secretary creates the Futures and Autonomous Systems Command and an acquisition office for autonomy. Priority systems are due by fiscal 2028.
The US Army announced on October 2 that it is forming the US Army Futures and Autonomous Systems Command, known as FASCOM. A memo signed by Acting Army Secretary Adam Telle also creates a new acquisition executive for autonomy. It follows Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s September 30 speech announcing a Pentagon-wide autonomous warfare command.
AWS’s chief wrote that the company no longer signs secrecy deals with the government agencies on its projects. The post does not say whether older agreements still apply.
“We no longer use nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects,” AWS chief executive Matt Garman wrote on Amazon’s website. The same post pledged more than $1 billion over five years to data centre communities and promised yearly figures on energy and water use.
System76 now rejects LLM-written code, comments and descriptions in pull requests and issues across its Pop!_OS projects. Reports say AI-made submissions were swamping reviewers.
System76, which makes the Linux system Pop!_OS and its COSMIC desktop, changed its contribution rules on September 30. Every pull request must now confirm it contains no content generated by an LLM, “including code, comments, and descriptions”. Pull requests without the completed checklist will be closed.
A US federal judge in Oklahoma ruled that a deputy’s warrantless search of plate-reader data broke the Fourth Amendment. Flock says the ruling goes against most courts and expects it to be overturned.
US District Judge Sara E. Hill ruled on October 1 that a Tulsa County deputy carried out an unconstitutional search when he looked up a driver’s plate in automated plate-reader systems, including Flock. The search returned more than 50 sightings of the car over about a month. The judge called such networks “a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance”.
The chain cites the public and political debate over camera glasses that can film people unnoticed. Meta says the recording light cannot be turned off.
Hans Anders, one of the largest optician chains in the Netherlands, has stopped selling Meta’s Ray-Ban camera glasses for now. It told the Dutch news agency ANP it will wait for the debate about smart glasses before deciding whether and how to sell them again. Reuters reports the pause covers Belgium too.
Meta released open-source firmware and a Linux kit that connect cheap boards to its Muse agent. It is also giving away 5,000 Muse Home Link dongles to US subscribers.
Meta launched Muse Gadgets on October 2, an open-source project for building small devices that talk to Muse, its personal AI agent. The firmware and software kits run on ESP32 boards and the Raspberry Pi 5, under the Apache 2.0 licence. Meta also offers a free USB-C Muse Home Link that lets Muse control devices on a home network.
The desktop AI computer keeps the same chip with half the memory, as memory prices soar. It goes on sale on October 23 from six PC makers.
Nvidia announced a 64GB version of its DGX Spark desktop AI computer on October 2. Systems from Acer, ASUS, Dell, Gigabyte, HP and MSI start at $4,999 and go on sale on October 23. Nvidia says one unit runs models of up to 100 billion parameters.
University researchers report in Nature that their Ataraxos AI beat four-time world champion Pim Niemeijer 15 games to one, with four draws. Training cost a few thousand dollars, they say.
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, New York University and Stanford say their AI, Ataraxos, beat Stratego champion Pim Niemeijer in a 20-game online match. The work is published in Nature. Stratego hides the identity of each player’s pieces, which made it one of the last classic board games where top humans still beat machines.