Tech, in brief

Staff from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta answered questions under oath on Monday at a hearing of New York City's full 51-member council. [1][2]

Google, OpenAI and Anthropic agreed to come only after the council warned it would subpoena them, which is a legal order to appear. [3][2]

Julie Menin, the council's speaker, asked each company to put a number on the risk of an AI catastrophe. None gave one, and none said it carried insurance against one. [2][1]

OpenAI's Morgan Dwyer said the exact number did not matter, because no level of that risk was acceptable. Menin called the answer 'flippant at best'. [1]

Council staff listed 13 publicly reported AI incidents this year involving the four companies' models, from break-ins at company systems to a harmful package a Claude model published in a test. [1]

Three former AI lab researchers also testified, and Jacob Coxon said it is 'more likely than not' that humanity loses control of AI. [1][2]

SpaceXAI, Elon Musk's AI company, did not appear despite a subpoena, and Menin said she will ask a court to enforce it. [1][2]

The council's lead bill would fine a company $25,000 for each AI model offered in the city without an outside check and a way for a human to switch it off. [1][3]

Also on Monday, the Wikimedia Foundation, the charity that runs Wikipedia, said agents it believes OpenAI runs edited its wikis without permission. [4][5]

It said those agents also made millions of requests that may have helped cause a partial outage of one of its data services in May. [5][6]

On Tuesday OpenAI's strategy chief, Jason Kwon, faces Australia's parliamentary committee on AI over an OpenAI agent that got into non-public data on Medicare, Australia's public health insurance. [7][8]

Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief executive, said on Monday that the world should accept 'some bad things' from AI, such as hacks and scams, in return for its benefits. [9][10]

Why it matters. Watch what Jason Kwon tells Australia's committee about keeping OpenAI's agents out of government data, and whether New York's council passes the bill that demands an outside check and an off switch. [7][1]

Schneider Electric, a French maker of power and cooling equipment for data centres, agreed on Monday to buy PTC for about $22.6bn in cash. [16][24] PTC, based in Boston, makes software that factories use to design, build and service products. [24] Schneider will pay $205 a share, 42% more than PTC's price on Friday. [24] It is Schneider's biggest deal ever, and its own shares fell nearly 10% in Paris. [16] The deal should close by the third quarter of 2027. [24]

Why it matters. Schneider wants software, which customers pay for every year, to make up about a quarter of its sales. [16] Its boss says PTC's design software lets Schneider help customers plan machines and their power systems together from the start. [25]

Denmark's government confirmed that hackers stole most of the Central Person Register, its database of everyone with a Danish identity number. [21] The breach covers about 8 million citizens and residents, including people living abroad and people who have died. [21] The stolen data includes names, addresses and Danish social security numbers. [21] It happened in September and was found on 2 October. [21] The thieves got in by misusing a Danish company's legal right to search the register. [21]

Why it matters. Danes use this number to pay taxes and reach other public services, and Denmark's government has not said who took it. [21] It is thought to be the biggest data breach in the country's history. [21]

Google, the bank JPMorgan Chase, the database firm Weaviate, France's state digital agency DINUM and the Indonesian city of Tangerang each fixed the same kind of flaw. [13] All five were reported by one researcher, Syed Anas Mohiuddin. [13] The flaw sat in MCP servers, the tools AI agents use to fetch data and call other software. [13] The servers took a web address from an agent and fetched it without checking where it led, so whoever steered the agent could reach internal systems. [13][26]

Why it matters. Five groups that share no code made the same mistake, which Mohiuddin says shows the problem is built into how the standard is used. [13] Douglas McKee of Rapid7, a security firm, said each tool 'checks its own front door while nobody watches the hallway in between'. [26]

OpenAI said on Monday it will start testing picture adverts in ChatGPT in the US later this month. [27][28] They will appear first when people use ChatGPT to make images. [27] Until now, ChatGPT's ads showed only a company's name, logo and link under an answer. [27] OpenAI says the ads will be labelled and will not change ChatGPT's answers. [28] People on the paid Plus, Pro and Enterprise plans will not see them. [27]

Why it matters. Free users can switch ads off, but that also switches off image-making, and avoiding both costs $20 a month. [29] OpenAI is courting advertisers with the chance to reach ChatGPT's 1.2 billion weekly users. [28]

BT, which once ran Britain's state phone network, bought TalkTalk on Monday out of administration, the legal process for a company that cannot pay its debts. [30][31] The deal costs BT about GBP400m, keeps services going for about 2.5 million customers and saves 900 jobs. [30][31] TalkTalk owed about GBP1.5bn and was losing money. [32] Lisa Nandy, the UK culture secretary, used special powers, and the competition regulator must report to her by 19 October. [31][30]

Why it matters. About 250,000 TalkTalk customers are vulnerable, and some rely on alarm pendants that call for help in a medical emergency. [31] Virgin Media O2, a rival that had also looked at TalkTalk, called the deal a 'stitch-up' that makes BT even bigger. [31]

A security researcher, Paulos Yibelo, won a bug reward from Vercel, a US cloud company, for a way out of a virtual machine. [14] A virtual machine is a sealed computer running inside a real one, and Vercel rents them as boxes for AI agents to work in. [14] Vercel's boss, Guillermo Rauch, said the flaw is in KVM, the Linux software that runs such machines. [14] Amazon's and Google's clouds both use KVM. [14] No details or fix have been published. [14]

Why it matters. A way out of a virtual machine can let one customer take over a whole server and reach other customers' machines on it. [14] Clouds can often patch KVM without switching machines off, but nobody knows yet whether this fix will allow that. [14]

Weeks before Muse launched, Meta engineers found flaws that could have let users break out of the AI agent's sealed computer, 404 Media reported. [15] Each copy of Muse runs in its own virtual machine, which links to Meta's systems but is meant to stay apart from them. [15] At least one flaw could have let an ordinary user reach Meta's sensitive internal databases. [15] The problem reached Mark Zuckerberg, and teams worked nights and weekends to fix it. [15]

Why it matters. Muse, Meta's AI agent, is given access to its users' own accounts and services so it can act for them. [15] Outside researchers have found other security problems in it since launch. [15]

Meta, TikTok and X are challenging Ofcom, Britain's online safety regulator, in court over how much data it can demand, Reuters reported on Monday. [12] In February Ofcom asked them how many posts they removed and how many users had seen harmful posts. [12] X called it the most burdensome request it has had from any regulator anywhere. [12] Ofcom says it needs the figures to judge whether the Online Safety Act, a 2023 law meant to protect children online, is working. [12]

Why it matters. It is one of the first court fights under that law, which lets Ofcom fine a company up to 10% of its worldwide sales. [12] The hearing ends on Wednesday, and a second challenge from Meta comes next week. [12]

OpenAI will add a hidden mark to text and code written by ChatGPT and Codex for users in the European Union. [33][34] The mark is not a symbol. It nudges which words the model picks, in a pattern a detector can spot. [33] The EU's AI Act requires AI-made content to be marked this way, and companies already selling AI have until 2 December. [34] In OpenAI's own test, swapping 10% of the words for synonyms cut detection from about 92% to 66%. [33]

Why it matters. Only approved researchers will get the detector at first, so most people cannot yet check a passage themselves. [33] OpenAI also warns that a missing mark does not prove a person wrote the text. [33]

Sheriff's deputies in Lee County, Florida, arrested a woman after Anthropic reported her chat with its Claude AI to police. [35] In the chat on 26 September she allegedly wrote that she would 'shoot up' the sheriff's office. [35][36] Anthropic scans chats for threatening phrases and sends the most serious to a human team. [36] She faces a felony charge and told police she uses the AI like a diary. [35] It is at least the third such chat to reach police since August. [36]

Why it matters. The sheriff said people are 'never truly anonymous' when they use AI. [35] Anthropic's privacy policy lets it tell police when it believes that is needed to prevent serious harm. [36]

Etched, a four-year-old US company that designs AI chips, is being offered new money at a value of $40bn to $50bn, TechCrunch reports, citing a person familiar with the talks. [17] It raised $700m at a value of $21bn only a couple of months ago. [17] Etched says it has $1bn of orders, including from Jane Street, a trading firm. [17] It claims its chips answer AI requests faster and more cheaply than Nvidia's. [17] Etched declined to comment. [17]

Why it matters. The offers would about double its value in a few months, on the hope that it can challenge Nvidia. [17] The talks are early, and the terms may change. [17]

Phone prices have risen about 15% worldwide this year, and new models cost about 25% more than last year's, Rest of World reports. [19] The cause is a shortage of memory chips, as AI data centres buy up supply. [19] Chinese makers, who ship about 60% of the world's phones, have sharply cut their cheapest models, a Counterpoint analyst said. [19] Prices rose 21% in India and 18% in the Middle East and Africa, against 5% in the US. [19]

Why it matters. GSMA, the mobile industry's group, worries that dearer phones will slow its forecast of 800 million more mobile internet users by 2030. [19] People who have never owned a smartphone may find it harder to get online at all. [19]

The FBI said it and partner police forces have arrested 'multiple' suspects over a September hack linked to ShinyHunters, a gang that steals data and demands money. [23] One suspect, Saif al-Din Khader, known as Rey, was reportedly detained in Jordan on 29 September and is said to be helping the FBI. [23] Two weeks earlier, Dutch police arrested a man the FBI called one of the gang's leaders. [23]

Why it matters. A security researcher, Kevin Beaumont, said Rey was one of those who broke into Jaguar Land Rover in 2025, an attack that stopped the carmaker's factories for months. [23] The FBI would not say who else was arrested. [23]

Attackers used a new flaw in Citrix NetScaler, a line of network boxes, before any fix existed, Citrix and security researchers say. [37] It affects only boxes used for single sign-on, one login for many services, and can knock them offline. [37] Citrix confirmed the problem late on Friday and released fixes on Saturday night. [37] It urged customers to install them as soon as possible. [37]

Why it matters. It is yet another NetScaler flaw that attackers found first. [37] Citrix would not say how many customers were hit or what attackers did next. [37]

Bernie Moreno, a Republican US senator from Ohio, wrote to Dario Amodei, the head of the AI company Anthropic, on Monday. [11] He accused Amodei of an 'alarmist approach' to AI. [11] Moreno asked how Anthropic can ask Americans to buy its shares while warning that its product could wipe them out. [11] Investors are discussing a value for Anthropic close to $2 trillion, about 42 times its sales, and trading could start this month. [11]

Why it matters. Moreno wrote that a focus on the worst outcomes crowds out debate about keeping the US ahead of China. [11] His letter calls AI 'super intelligence' throughout, following President Trump's order to rename it. [11]

Two former engineers at Groq, an AI chip company, sued over Nvidia's $20bn deal for Groq's technology, in a Delaware court on 2 October. [38] They say Groq's board sold the company without the shareholder vote Delaware law requires. [38] Nvidia paid $17bn for a licence it called non-exclusive and set aside $3bn of shares for staff who moved over, the suit says. [38] Groq called the case meritless. [38]

Why it matters. Groq's founder and president joined Nvidia in the deal, while Groq says it carries on as an independent company. [38] The engineers say the price was 'lowball' and cost shareholders billions. [38]

San Diego County sued AppLovin, a US company that places adverts inside mobile games, on Monday. [39] It says AppLovin got round parental controls to show children ads for dating sites, alcohol, vaping and sexual images. [39] The complaint says AppLovin tracked children by 'fingerprinting', recognising a device from its settings, even when tracking was switched off. [39] One screenshot shows an ad for a sexual chatbot app in a puzzle game, on a phone set up for a six-year-old. [39]

Why it matters. AppLovin's rules say it does not knowingly show ads to children, and leave it to advertisers to decide who is a child. [39] AppLovin did not answer a request for comment. [39]

Debian, a widely used free version of Linux, published a security update for its kernel, the core of the system, listing 1,313 known flaws. [40] The Register suspects AI tools that hunt for bugs explain most of that number. [40] The Linux kernel team gives a flaw number to every fixed bug automatically, so the count alone says little about danger. [40] The next kernel's list of changes runs past 27,000 lines. [40]

Why it matters. The people who maintain Linux must check and ship every one of these fixes. [40] Whether AI bug-hunting helps them more than it buries them is still an open question, The Register says. [40]

Reflection AI, a two-year-old company in New York, released Beam, its first large open-weight model, on Monday. [41][42] Open-weight means anyone can download the model and run it on their own computers. [42] Reflection says Beam matches GLM-5.2, a model from the Chinese company Z.ai, while using three to four times less computing to reason. [41][42] Those claims have not been checked by anyone else. [41]

Why it matters. The best free-to-download models have mostly come from Chinese companies, and some Western firms and governments will not use them. [42] Reflection is selling to those buyers, and was valued at $25bn before its last round. [41]

Justin Hotard, head of Nokia, said data centres would be built twice as fast if memory chips and power were available. [18] Nokia, one of the biggest makers of telecoms equipment, now also sells the gear that links racks of AI chips together. [18] Those sales doubled to EUR446m in the second quarter. [20] Hotard said demand would hold even with no new leading AI model for three years. [20]

Why it matters. Others doubt the money is there: Bain, a consulting firm, says AI needs $6tn a year by 2031 to pay for what is being built. [20] A paper for the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity puts the building bill at $10.3tn from 2025 to 2032. [18][20]

Shares in Cerebras, a US maker of large AI chips, rose 9% on Monday. [43] Last week they fell 20% to their lowest since its May listing, after OpenAI chose Nvidia chips for a fast mode of its new GPT-6.1 Sol model. [43] Sam Altman, OpenAI's boss, then called Cerebras 'a close partner' on X. [43] Cerebras has a $10bn deal to supply OpenAI with computing power through 2028. [43]

Why it matters. Even after the rise, Cerebras is worth about $43bn, against $95bn when it listed in May. [43]

Finnish officials are investigating a Google data-centre project near Muhos, a town of fewer than 9,000 people, AFP reports. [44] Google's local company, Tuike Finland, reportedly cleared more than 300 hectares of forest, about 420 football pitches. [44] It did so before a required study of the effect on nature had been done, the reports say. [44] The site is part of Google's EUR13bn plan for Finland over two years. [44]

Why it matters. Finland draws data centres with cool air and cheap power, and hopes they will bring jobs in a time of record unemployment. [44] Residents worry about the forests, the power supply and electricity prices. [44]

Chinese chipmakers bought about 343 immersion DUV machines from ASML between 2012 and early 2026, the Centre for Technology and Statecraft, a Washington research group, estimates. [45] ASML, a Dutch company, makes the machines that print chip patterns with light. [45] China cannot buy ASML's newest EUV machines, but the report says many of the older ones can still make chips at the 7nm level. [45] The industry first made 7nm chips in 2018 and 2019. [45]

Why it matters. The authors want all such machines, and spare parts and servicing for them, banned from export to China. [45] Some of the report's other estimates look doubtful, Tom's Hardware says. [45]

TikTok announced an AI shopping assistant and one-click buying inside its app on Monday. [46][47] The assistant answers questions about size, delivery and stock, and can finish the purchase in the same chat. [47] A feature called Buy Direct lets people buy from a brand straight from the main video feed. [46] TikTok is building both with Shopify, Stripe and Salesforce, and gave no launch date. [47]

Why it matters. TikTok wants shoppers to ask its own AI rather than leave for tools like ChatGPT. [46] It says 54 million Americans have bought something after watching a TikTok video. [46]

North Richland Hills, a suburb of Fort Worth, told a privacy group it would cost $2.3m to release records on how its police use Flock cameras, which read car number plates. [48] The city reached that figure by estimating 14 years of work at $15 an hour. [48] Another Texas town, Sealy, handed over its records for nothing. [48] Texas has about 13,000 Flock cameras. [48]

Why it matters. Records like these are how misuse comes out. [48] A police officer in Lufkin, Texas, pleaded guilty on 30 September to 100 felony counts for searching the system about his former girlfriend. [48]