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2026-10-28 Wired AI

Anthropic Says It Will Revolutionize Biology—Some Day

Anthropic, whose CEO Dario Amodei wrote in August that AI would cure most human diseases within 5 to 10 years, told investors in Monday's IPO filing that any drug candidates may never generate revenue. The filing admits that handling hazardous materials and operating lab equipment lies outside its historical experience as a software and research organization. It also softened its September claim about a Crispr-like enzyme found by Claude to one that might have the potential to be developed into a gene-editing tool.

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2026-10-28 Wired AI

UK Home Office May Face Investigation Over Use of OpenAI Tech

A UK government watchdog, the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, is considering an investigation into the Home Office's use of generative AI to process asylum claims, WIRED reports. The department uses two tools built on OpenAI's 2023 GPT-4 and Microsoft Foundry to summarize interview records and country information, and estimated a saving of about an hour per case in the pilot. The digital rights group Open Rights Group found the share of summaries judged unfit for use is significantly higher than the published 9 percent error rate, and that the policy search tool has no quality control.

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2026-10-28 The Verge AI

Researchers are getting tired of OpenAI gatekeeping its breakthroughs

OpenAI announced on Monday breakthroughs on three major unsolved problems in mathematics, computer science and physics, but researchers objected to OpenAI choosing who gets to see the results first. It released the AI-written output for the math result, will assemble an external group to explain the computer science one, and has not released the physics result at all, deferring to outside experts. AGMAI, an advisory group on mathematics and AI, had advised against handpicking early readers a day before the announcement, and afterward urged OpenAI to publish the physics outputs without delay.

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2026-10-27 The Verge AI

Anthropic is burning gas to feed the AI boom

Anthropic's IPO filing says some of its planned data centers rely on electricity from on-site natural gas turbines. The same filing warns that rising global temperatures will push up the cost of electricity and the water used to cool servers. It acknowledges that competition from hyperscalers for gas and pipeline capacity could drive up gas prices, and that failing to secure supply could force it to delay or abandon data center projects. Anthropic announced a $50 billion plan last year to expand data centers in Texas and New York.

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2026-10-27 Google AI Blog

Our newest AI Quest: Mapping the human brain

Google Research and the Stanford Accelerator for Learning launched "Polar Peaks," a game in which students ages 11 to 14 use AI to map the human brain. It is the third quest in the AI Quests series. With in-game mentors, students scan and map neurons to find the cause of a character's memory loss. Along the way they clean data and test models, learning firsthand that AI requires careful human oversight and critical thinking.

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2026-10-26 TechCrunch AI

AI delivers ‘zero financial payoff’ to most companies, Apollo economist says

Torsten Slok, chief economist at the private equity firm Apollo Global Management, published a note saying AI has delivered "zero financial payoff" to US companies outside tech. Profit margins and revenue per worker in the "S&P 493," the S&P 500 without Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla, look flat, with no sign that AI is improving productivity. Slok doubts non-tech firms can turn cheap AI into higher revenue and margins. He argues business intelligence is mostly judgment, and that AI does not grasp accountability, trust, or ethical trade-offs.

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2026-10-26 The Verge AI

r/opensource just banned AI, non-English speakers, and more

The moderators of Reddit's r/opensource posted new rules on Saturday evening opening with: "If your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI, it's not welcome." Submitted projects must also be at least a year old, actively maintained, and have multiple contributors. The rules effectively bar non-English speakers, saying mods cannot distinguish AI-written from AI-translated text. The comments erupted, and a rival subreddit, r/trueopensource, was created.

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2026-10-25 TechCrunch AI

Forced to pick, Grok’s AI model chooses Republicans. OpenAI’s picks Democrats.

Asked to pick one candidate in US midterm races, SpaceXAI's Grok 4.7 chose the Republican in 92% of its answers, while OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol chose the Democrat in 97%. Convovo, a research studio led by Cornell professor Tapan Parikh, put the question to both models through their developer APIs for nearly 500 races. The two models agreed less than 10% of the time. With web search turned off in a 30-race rerun, GPT still picked the Democrat in 24 races, while Grok declined to answer in 27.

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2026-10-25 The Decoder

AI makes junior patent attorneys instantly better but may quietly stunt their professional growth

Junior patent attorneys who used AI wrote better patent documents right away, but gained nothing in a review test taken without AI three months later. A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper reports a three-month randomized trial with 133 patent attorneys at eleven intellectual property law firms. Two-thirds got InFlow, an unreleased AI assistant from Google Labs. In drafting patent claims, the AI group led at both 10 and 90 days, and attorneys with under seven years of experience gained far more than seniors.

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2026-10-23 Google DeepMind Blog

Beyond tree cover: mapping the world’s forest types

Google DeepMind and Google Research, with the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), released Forest Typology (ForTy) 2020, a global map that classifies every 10-by-10-meter patch of land into one of six types. Unlike maps that only show whether trees are present, it separates primary forest, naturally regenerating forest, planted forest, plantation forest, tree crops such as oil palm, rubber and cocoa, and other land. An early yearly time series covering 2017 to 2025 is included. Validated against more than 9,000 randomly chosen sites, it identified the correct forest type 90% of the time and forest versus non-forest 95% of the time.

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