Tech, in brief

Meta showed new glasses and a keychain gadget at Connect, its yearly event for developers, on Wednesday. [1] Mark Zuckerberg built the whole line-up around Muse, Meta's AI agent. [3]

Muse is software that acts for a person: it books, buys and fills in forms. [11] Meta launched it on 8 September, and within a week it was the top free app in Apple's US App Store. [11]

Zuckerberg said Muse is free for a large amount of use. Meta plans to earn money by taking a small fee on the purchases Muse makes. [4][3]

Meta signed shopping deals with Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Wayfair and Expedia, said Alexandr Wang, Meta's chief AI officer. [4] Muse can also buy from Shopify's whole catalogue. [4]

Instacart, a US grocery delivery app, said on Wednesday that its customers can use Muse. [14] It already works with ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. [14] Its owner's shares rose more than 3% before the market opened. [14]

Amazon blocked Muse from Amazon.com from Sunday evening. [11] Shoppers who sent Muse there saw a message that an unauthorized AI agent breaks Amazon's rules. [12]

Amazon says Meta never told it Muse would visit, that the agent hides what it is, and that it seems to store customers' logins. [11] Meta says Muse cannot see passwords or payment details. [13]

Amazon earned more than $68bn from advertising last year, much of it shown to shoppers on its own pages. [13] An outside agent that shops for a person skips those pages. [13]

On Monday Amazon also filed a 41-page complaint against Perplexity, an AI search company, saying it misled a US appeals court about its Comet shopping browser. [11] Amazon says Comet copies a shopper's login to Perplexity's own servers, which then visit Amazon's pages. [11]

The new Meta VR Glasses weigh 100g, against 515g for the Quest 3 headset. [7] They cost $1,299 and go on sale in spring 2027. [1] Disney+ will stream some Marvel films in 3D on them from November. [8]

Meta's new avatars copy a person's face and voice for video calls from its glasses. [9] An Engadget reporter did not notice at first that the Meta staff member on a call was an avatar. [9]

Meta also showed Ray-Ban glasses with no camera, at $349, shipping on 13 October. [2] Some UK pubs and theatres restrict camera glasses, and New York bars them from its courtrooms. [10]

Meta's glasses can now work as an over-the-counter hearing aid cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration, for mild to moderate hearing loss. [3] Zuckerberg said one in six American adults has some hearing loss. [3]

Muse Charm is a keychain-sized gadget: tap a fingerprint sensor and talk to Muse without unlocking a phone. [5] Meta says it ships in December, and it has not named a price for it yet. [1] It came from a Meta design lab led by Alan Dye, who used to run interface design at Apple. [6]

Why it matters. Watch whether Amazon sues Meta, which it has declined to rule out, and whether more big shops follow Walmart and Instacart in letting Muse buy from them. [11][14]

The UN Security Council held its first meeting focused on the safety risks of powerful AI on Wednesday, called by France. [18] Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief, told it no level of catastrophic risk is acceptable. [18] Yoshua Bengio, a leading AI scientist, said the dangers are real and imminent. [17] A day earlier, Donald Trump told the UN General Assembly he rejects any globalist scheme to control AI. [17]

Why it matters. The heads of OpenAI and Anthropic asked governments to cooperate on AI on Wednesday. [16] The US president had said on Tuesday that the US would encourage AI, not rein it in. [17]

Clement Delangue, the head of Hugging Face, a site where developers share AI models, also spoke to the Security Council. [19] His company was attacked by OpenAI's own AI agents during a test earlier this year. [18] He said closed models refused to help his team respond. [19] It used an open model built by Z.ai, a Chinese developer, instead. [19]

Why it matters. It is an argument that free-to-download models help defenders, made at the same meeting where others asked for tighter controls on the most powerful ones.

China's leader Xi Jinping began his first US state visit in 11 years this week. [21] Days before, Huawei moved its next AI chip forward by three quarters and Alibaba showed a chip three times faster than its last. [21] US and Chinese officials set up a formal channel to warn each other about AI incidents. [21] The US trade representative said limits on chip exports were not on the agenda. [21]

Why it matters. Both governments say AI must be safe, and neither says it will slow down. [22] China's new chips are its case that US export limits slow it but do not stop it. [21]

British Columbia, a Canadian province, sued OpenAI and Sam Altman on Monday over the February shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School. [23] The shooter killed eight people, six of them at the school, which is now being knocked down. [23] The province wants OpenAI to pay for a new school and to end violent conversations in ChatGPT automatically. [23] It is also asking a court to make OpenAI release the shooter's chat logs, which OpenAI has shared only with police. [23]

Why it matters. The suit tests whether an AI company can be made to pay for what a user did after talking to its chatbot. Tumbler Ridge has about 2,700 people. [23]

Jensen Huang, head of Nvidia, which makes the chips most AI runs on, spoke on a New York Times podcast published Wednesday. [20] He said labs must be able to keep AI agents sealed off during tests. If they cannot, he said, the labs should be shut down. [20] He also said Nvidia spends about 80% of its effort checking chips and 20% designing them. [20]

Why it matters. The biggest seller to the AI labs is telling them to test more before they ship. He also rejected their case that competition forces them to hurry. [20]

Amazon launched an AI agent on Wednesday for the independent sellers who list goods on its site. [15] It runs all the time and can warn a seller when ratings drop or watch the price of a product. [15] It is free and optional, and can connect to Anthropic's Claude. [15] Sellers choose how much of their data Amazon sees. [15]

Why it matters. Amazon blocked Meta's outside agent days earlier. Its own agent keeps sellers working inside Amazon's tools. [11][15]

Britain's Competition and Markets Authority, which polices fair competition, proposed on Wednesday that Google must list AI assistants on its Android and Chrome choice screens. [36] Those screens ask people to pick a search engine when they set up a phone. [36] People would be asked again every year. [36] Google wanted one permanent switch in settings instead. Comments close on 9 October. [36]

Why it matters. The first answer a phone offers decides which company gets asked the question. The regulator wants services like ChatGPT to be offered there too. [36]

Snorkel AI, a San Francisco company, raised $350m at a $3.5bn value, nearly three times its value in May 2025. [24] It sells finished training data and practice setups that AI labs use to teach new models. [25] Its boss told Reuters the company expects to make a profit this year. [24] Insight Partners and S32 led the round. [24]

Why it matters. The labs' hunger for harder training data is now a business worth billions of its own. The data comes partly from human experts and partly from Snorkel's software. [25]

Factory, a San Francisco start-up, raised $200m at a $5bn value on 15 September. [26] That is more than three times its $1.5bn value in April. [26] It sells companies AI agents that write, test and fix software across the whole job of building it. [26] It names Nvidia, Blackstone and Adobe as customers. [26]

Why it matters. Investors are paying more for tools that write code. Factory's value more than tripled in about five months. [26]

Cyera, a data-security company, took $400m from Goldman Sachs at the same $12bn value it set in June. [28] So the new money did not raise the price of each share. [28] It is Cyera's third large round this year, for $1.4bn in all. [28] Its tools track what AI agents do with a company's data. [28]

Why it matters. Snorkel and Factory raised at much higher values this week. [24][26] Cyera raised at the same value, a flat extension rather than a markup. [28]

Numeral, which sells software that handles sales tax for companies, raised $100m led by Insight Partners. [27] It tracks where a company owes tax, files and pays it, in more than 90 countries. [27] It says the money moving through it grew 327% in a year. [27] California will charge sales tax on online software from 2027. [27]

Why it matters. Sales tax rules keep spreading to new products, such as online software in California. [27] Numeral says 30% to 40% of the exemption papers firms bring to it fail its checks. [27]

Bessemer Venture Partners, a venture firm that has backed Anthropic and Shopify, raised $5.75bn across two new funds on Wednesday. [29] It set aside $1.75bn for young start-ups and $4bn for bigger ones. [29] It has put money into more than 260 AI companies since 2022. [29] A partner told Bloomberg that companies staying private for longer is permanent. [29]

Why it matters. Funds say they must keep growing because companies now stay private for years before selling shares to the public. [29]

Enveda, a start-up that uses AI to find medicines in plants and microbes, raised $311m at a $2bn value. [30] That doubles its value of a year ago. [30] It is testing several drugs in patients, including one for severe skin conditions. [30] No AI-discovered drug has yet been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. [30]

Why it matters. It is a large bet on AI drug discovery before any drug has passed the regulator. The skin and weight drugs now in patients are the test. [30]

Angle Health, a US company that helps small businesses buy health insurance, raised $200m at a $2.7bn value last Friday. [31] It also let staff sell $400m of their own shares. [31] It sells plans that sit between fully insured and self-funded, and uses AI to help firms manage them. [31] It says it serves over 5,000 businesses and makes a profit. [31]

Why it matters. A seven-year-old company that does not sell AI agents raised a large round last week. Its buyers are small firms that pay for their workers' health cover. [31]

Oura, the Finnish maker of a health-tracking ring, plans to sell shares at $40 to $44 each, valuing it at about $15.62bn. [32] It sold 3.6 million rings in the year to June. [32] Its revenue for the nine months to June rose about 74% to $1.21bn. [32] It is due to start trading on the Nasdaq next week. [32]

Why it matters. An analyst at Mergermarket told Reuters it is the first real test of US buyers for new shares after a slow September. A weak debut could put off other companies. [32]

Firmus, an Australian company that builds AI data centres, will open its share sale to big investors on 6 October, according to a term sheet reported by Reuters. [33] It plans to raise about US$5bn and start trading on 22 October. [33] It has more than 900MW of computing power under contract across seven sites. Two of them are running. [33]

Why it matters. Buyers would mostly be paying for data centres that are promised, not built. The dates appear in no public document yet. [33]

SoftBank, the Japanese group run by Masayoshi Son, began selling more than $11bn of high-interest bonds on Wednesday. [34] Bonds are loans that investors buy and get paid back on, with interest. The sale includes a $10bn dollar part and a EUR 1bn part. [34] It is one of the largest sales of its kind ever, and SoftBank is offering record interest to attract buyers. [34]

Why it matters. SoftBank is one of the biggest investors in AI, and it is now paying more to borrow for it. [34]

Microsoft will invest more than $10bn in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait by 2030, its president Brad Smith told Reuters. [35] Much of it is for cloud and AI data centres. [35] Data centres in the region have been attacked since the Iran war began on 28 February, including Amazon's in Bahrain and the UAE. [35] Microsoft will also spend $400m on internet cables there. [35]

Why it matters. Gulf states want AI hubs to rely less on oil. Brad Smith said Microsoft is adding to its plans despite the war. [35]

The US could be short of up to 157,000 chip workers by 2030, according to McKinsey and the SEMI Foundation. [37] Only 3% of US engineering graduates join the chip industry each year. [37] Samsung, which starts making chips in Texas this year, says too few trained people are coming through. [37] US chip jobs pay about $127,000 to $187,000. [37] Purdue and Arizona State universities are spending millions on courses to train chip workers. [37]

Why it matters. New factories in Arizona, Texas, Idaho and New York all need the same small pool of people. Some firms are flying staff in from South Korea for now. [37]

Taiwan broke ground on 21 September on the Baipu park in Kaohsiung, a hub for testing the tools used in chip packaging. [38] Packaging means joining finished chips together, and it is how TSMC builds the AI chips Nvidia and AMD design. [38] TSMC will build a testing laboratory and a training centre there, opening in late 2029. [38]

Why it matters. Suppliers will be able to test new tools next to TSMC. That should shorten the time from a new idea to mass production. [38]

Solidigm, a US unit of South Korea's SK Hynix, is considering a flash-memory plant in the US, three people told Reuters on 18 September. [39] Flash memory stores data in phones and data centres. [39] Upstate New York is the leading site. [39] Solidigm now makes flash only in Dalian, China. SK Hynix said nothing has been confirmed. [39]

Why it matters. The US government is pressing Korean chipmakers to build in America, and South Korea's president called it a matter of controversy. [39]

OpenAI released Astra for Law on 17 September, a version of its newest model for law firms. [40] It adds a collection of US court decisions, laws and regulations. [40] Legal software firms such as Harvey and Legora can build products on it. [40] Google and Anthropic already sell AI tools to lawyers. [40]

Why it matters. OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are now all selling to lawyers. [40] OpenAI says firms such as Latham & Watkins and Wachtell Lipton helped test it. [40]

IonQ, a quantum computing company, said on Tuesday it had tested the industry's first real-time decoder for quantum errors. [41] Quantum computers make constant small errors that must be fixed as they run. [41] IonQ says its decoder does this on one ordinary processor, across hundreds of qubits. [41] Its shares jumped 12% before the market opened. [14]

Why it matters. Fixing errors fast enough is one of the main things stopping quantum computers from doing useful work. The result comes from IonQ's own announcement. [41]

The US Securities and Exchange Commission said on 17 September that some platforms may trade digital tokens that stand for US company shares. [42] The order lasts five years and is not a formal rule. [42] Token holders must keep the same rights as shareholders, and companies can object to being tokenised. [42] Tokenised assets are worth about $38.5bn. [43]

Why it matters. Tokens could let shares trade around the clock instead of in market hours. The SEC acted two days after a crypto bill stalled in the US Senate. [42]

People in the US who bought an iPhone 15 Pro, 15 Pro Max or any iPhone 16 between June 2024 and March 2025 can now claim from Apple. [44] Apple is paying $250m to settle claims that it sold those phones on AI features, including a new Siri, that came late. [44] Each phone gets about $25, rising to $95 if fewer people claim. [44]

Why it matters. Apple denies wrongdoing. The upgraded Siri only arrived with iOS 27 this month, and claims close on 21 December. [44]

Schneider Electric, a French maker of electrical equipment, agreed on Thursday to buy Shelly Group, a Bulgarian maker of smart-home devices, for EUR 70 a share. [45] The offer values Shelly at about EUR 1.27bn. [45] It needs owners of 95% of Shelly's shares to accept. [45]

Why it matters. It moves a smart-home maker based in Sofia, Bulgaria, into a large French industrial group. Bloomberg had reported earlier that day that a deal was near. [45]

India's markets regulator, SEBI, barred Kore Digital, a telecom-infrastructure company, from raising money from the public on 17 September. [46] It says three units Kore bought in 2024 brought in about 75% of its revenue. [46] Inspectors found no sign those units worked from their listed addresses. [46] SEBI also barred its managing director. [46]

Why it matters. Kore was due to move up from India's small-company board to the main stock market. The ruling stops that. [46]

Anthony Tan, the chief of Grab, a ride-hailing and payments company based in Singapore, bought $30m of its shares on Monday. [47] The shares had fallen to $2.74, their lowest since May 2023, after Grab agreed to buy Atome, a buy-now-pay-later lender. [47] They rose 8.9% on Tuesday. [47]

Why it matters. Tan told staff he had put his money where his mouth is. Grab's shares are down 50% in a year. [47]