• MCP for agent-to-agent comms may be the riskiest protocol you've never heard of
• Cable lobby to sue Trump FCC over repeal of national TV ownership cap
• Texas city demands $2M for public records on Flock usage
• Command-line tool quickly removes Apple Intelligence from macOS 27
• Controlling the brain with light earns a physiology Nobel
• Russian drones strike Ukraine’s data centers by exploiting air defense gaps
• F1 in Bahrain... in Malaysia: The race needed a software update to start
• Mass quarantine issued in Russia after unexplained death of plague researcher
• AI glasses face their first major government crackdown
• Explaining Hall-effect, TMR, and other new types of "mechanical" switches
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• Lions and cheetahs and chimps, oh my: A spotlight on Africa's diverse wildlife
• All hail electrification. But let’s talk about the hard part.
• Milt Windler, NASA flight director who helped save Apollo 13, dies at 94
• The dawn of the age of the exoskeleton
• Apple changes full-disk access permissions to curb abuse from AI agents
• Someone got Doom in an SQL database
• Amazon’s $1B plan to combat data center backlash draws more backlash
• Patient-zero drill put health facilities to the test—40% of them failed
• Lyft settles landmark driver misclassification lawsuit for $272.5M
| • Sources: AI inference-chip startup Etched is in early talks to raise funding at a $40B-$50B valuation, up from $21B in August (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)
• Analysis: Anthropic's subscriptions offer ~5x more API-equivalent value per month than OpenAI's for agentic workloads with Claude Opus 5.5 vs. GPT-6.1 Sol (SemiAnalysis)
• SpaceX stock closes up 7.6% after Morgan Stanley called SPCX "cheap", reaching its highest level since mid-June and returning Elon Musk to trillionaire status (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)
• TikTok debuts Shopping Assistant, a conversational AI agent that helps users find and buy products, and Buy Direct for one-click purchases from the For You feed (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
• NY-based Reflection unveils Beam, an open model it claims rivals GLM 5.2 on reasoning while using 3x-4x less compute and approaches Qwen3.8-Max on agentic tasks (Semafor)
• Sources: Meta and Microsoft are working to cut their employees' use of Claude; Meta employees using Claude Code have dropped to ~30K from ~60K earlier this year (The Information)
• Ghost, which makes a $3,499 computer designed for AI agents and includes an RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell GPU, emerges from stealth with an $11M seed led by a16z (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)
• Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon and representatives from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and Meta testified at a New York City Council hearing on AI safety (Bloomberg)
• The CFTC proposes a federal framework for crypto exchanges to offer retail customers leveraged and margined spot trading, without requiring congressional action (Jason Shubnell/The Block)
• An official says the DOD has stopped using Anthropic's tools; sources: Claude was in use as recently as last week, including in military operations against Iran (BBC)
• To comply with the EU AI Act, OpenAI plans to add text watermarking for ChatGPT and Codex users in the EU and an opt-in setting for API customers globally (OpenAI)
• In a first-of-its-kind pilot in the US, Nolla Health will use AI to diagnose and prescribe acne medications to Utah patients without direct human oversight (Annika Inampudi/Bloomberg)
• Meta, TikTok, and X challenge UK's Ofcom over the amount of info it is demanding under the Online Safety Act, saying it creates unprecedented regulatory burdens (Paul Sandle/Reuters)
• Valon, which makes software to help US mortgage companies cut red tape and costs, raised a $150M Series D from Ribbit, a16z, and others at a $2.3B valuation (Zoya Hasan/Forbes)
• Q&A with AI researchers Jacob Coxon, Daniel Kokotajlo, Alex Turner, and others on leaving AI labs, AGI's dangers, planned IPOs, AI safety, oversight, and more (New York Magazine)
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• Wikimedia links OpenAI agents to an outage and unauthorized activity
• Arc Raiders and The Finals are both getting TV and film adaptations
• OpenAI will add a digital watermark to text and code generated in the EU
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• Hyundai's all-electric hot hatch goes on sale in the UK, starting at around $25,000
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• Poland's antitrust regulator accuses Google of unfair market practices
• Wing and Walmart are bringing drone deliveries to Denver and Seattle in 2027
• Here's why it's important to keep your phone apps updated
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• OpenAI is testing more ads in ChatGPT
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