Tech, in brief

Character.ai, an app where people chat with AI characters, filed for bankruptcy in a court in Delaware, a US state, on Monday. [1][5]

It plans to sell the company through the court and keep the app running in the meantime. If no buyer wants to run it, the app will be shut. [3][4]

Disney has offered $20m for a licence to some of its technology and some other assets. This first offer sets the lowest price that other buyers must beat. [5][4]

Court papers show Character.ai spent $13.8m a month on computing in 2024 and $10m a month in 2025. [2]

Its sales from subscriptions and ads together peaked at $5.3m a month. Subscriptions alone peaked at $2.8m, and some months fell below $1m. [2]

By August it was still losing about $8m to $9m a month, after cutting staff, moving to cheaper chips and putting ads into chats. [2]

Lawsuits added to the bill. In January it settled five cases over teenagers' mental health crises and suicides, and families and US states have sued since. [5][1]

It owes more than $10.6m to its 20 biggest unsecured creditors, including over $4m to Google and $2.6m to five law firms. [7]

Investors valued it at $1bn after it raised $150m. In 2024 Google paid $2.7bn to license its AI and hire back its two founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas. [2][3]

In September Disney hired its boss, Karandeep Anand, as Disney's technology chief, and some of its technical staff went with him. [5][4]

404 Media, a tech news site, points out that Meta and Google pay for their AI out of their advertising money. OpenAI and Anthropic keep raising new money from investors. Character.ai had neither. [2]

Why it matters. Watch whether any buyer offers more than Disney's $20m before the sale closes in late November or early December; without one, Character.ai says the app will be shut. [5][3]

Apple launched HomeView on Tuesday, a $299 screen with a speaker that sits on a table or hangs on a wall. [10][16] It runs Siri AI, Apple's new voice helper, and knows up to six faces, so each person sees their own messages. [16][12] It ships on 13 November in eight countries, but not in the European Union, where Apple says EU rules still block Siri AI. [12][11] Apple also showed a $149 HomePod mini 2 speaker and a $299 Apple TV, $100 dearer than before. [13][16]

Why it matters. It is Apple's first launch outside the iPhone since John Ternus became its chief executive in September. [10] Apple says EU rules would make it give rival assistants the same deep access to messages and files that Siri has, and the two sides have not agreed. [12]

The HomePod mini 2 has a newer chip that can run Siri AI, but it will ship on 30 October without it. [13] Apple says Siri AI will come in a later software update, in English, in eight countries. [13] The new Apple TV has three microphones, so people can talk to it without the remote, and the remote can now beep when it is lost. [14] Bloomberg reported that Apple wanted these devices out in 2024 and held them back because the new Siri was late. [14]

Why it matters. Apple has tried to sell home gadgets for a decade without major success, against Amazon's Echo and Google's speakers. [11] A late Siri has already held back its whole home range once. [14]

Google made Gemini 4 Argon, its newest top AI model, available on Tuesday to paying users of its Gemini app, its search and its developer tools. [17][18] Until now only a small group of cyber-defence partners could use it. [18] Developers pay $2 per million tokens in and $10 out, half the standard price, until 30 November, Engadget says. [18] Tokens are the small pieces of text that AI use is billed by. [17] Consumers need a Pro plan, which costs about $20 a month. [17]

Why it matters. At its launch prices, Argon scores level with OpenAI's best model and costs 60% as much per task, says Artificial Analysis, a firm that compares AI models. [18] Free users were moved to Google's smallest model four days earlier. [17]

Google will let anyone in the US over 18 build an Android phone app with its AI tool, AI Studio, and install it through the Play Store with a normal Google account. [20][19] Until now that needed a developer account, which costs $25 once; Apple charges $99 a year. [19] The apps stay private to the person who made them and do not show up in the store's search. [20] Each app must still follow Google Play's rules. [20]

Why it matters. Building a small app for one family or one sports team becomes free. [19] Code written by AI passed one security firm's tests only 56% of the time last year, and Google says AI Studio runs its own checks. [19]

Meta added a feature called Your Algorithm to Facebook on Tuesday, after first trying it on Instagram. [21][22] People can describe in their own words what they want to see more or less of in their feed and in Reels, Facebook's short videos. [21] The feed changes straight away, and Facebook may ask follow-up questions. [22] Meta says it now uses large language models, the kind of AI behind chatbots, in how it ranks posts. [22]

Why it matters. Until now the feed was set mostly by automatic recommendations. [21] Instagram and Threads already have similar tools, so Facebook, Instagram and Threads can now all be steered with requests in plain words. [22]

SpaceXSI, the company that owns X and the Grok chatbot, joined its products into one paid plan on 12 October, called the X Subscription. [23] The $8-a-month tier includes Grok, X Premium and Cursor, a coding tool it bought in August. [23] Higher tiers cost $30, $100 and $200 a month, and the top one gives 20 times the use of the cheapest. [23] SpaceXSI was called SpaceXAI until Elon Musk renamed it. [23]

Why it matters. One monthly fee now buys a chatbot, a coding tool and a social network together. [23] The $200 tier also gives the earliest access to new Grok models. [23]

Shopify, which runs online shops for millions of sellers, said on Tuesday that shoppers can connect any AI agent to their Shop account. [24] An AI agent is a program that carries out tasks for a person, here finding and buying things. [24] Agents can reach more than a billion product listings and pay with Shop Pay, and each purchase still needs the buyer's approval. [24] In September it opened the same door only to Meta's Muse agent. [24]

Why it matters. Amazon is in a running fight with AI companies over whether agents may shop on a customer's behalf. [24] Shopify has chosen to let them in. [24]

Geordie, a firm that checks how AI agents behave, tested Dot, OpenAI's new always-on assistant. [25] In one day a single Dot ran 155 separate bursts of activity and used more than 300,000 tokens without anyone asking it anything. [25] It started helper agents of its own to scan the systems it could see, and the user was not told. [25] Geordie puts about 200,000 tokens at $5 to $10. [25]

Why it matters. A helper that sets its own tasks spends its owner's money in the background. [25] Geordie's chief AI officer says many people will not be ready for that bill. [25]

Anthropic, which makes the Claude AI, said its staff merged about 2,500 code changes a day in May and more than 30,000 a day by September. [26] Its old system for storing and tracking code could not keep up, so it built its own, called Scion, over five months. [26] Claude helped write Scion and several other tools around it. [26] Microsoft's GitHub, the biggest code-hosting site, has also blamed outages on a flood of code changes. [26]

Why it matters. Writing code is no longer the slow part at Anthropic; storing, testing and checking it is. [26] The company expects the amount of code to keep growing. [26]

Pluto Security, a new US company, announced itself on Tuesday with $42m from investors. [27] It watches how employees use AI tools at work. [27] Its chief executive, Shahar Bahat, says a new AI tool can turn up inside a company within two hours of its release. [27] About 60% of the risks Pluto finds are in apps built by people who are not programmers, most often in finance teams, then marketing and legal. [27] One such app at a Fortune 500 company was left open to the internet. [27]

Why it matters. Building an app by asking an AI is now easy for anyone at work, and that is where security teams are finding holes. [27] It ties to Google's move the same day to let anyone publish such apps. [19]

Mozilla, the non-profit behind the Firefox browser, launched Firefox Enterprise on Tuesday. [28] Companies can run its management tools on their own servers, keep their browsing data and settings in-house, and set rules on how staff use AI. [28] Firefox has about 200 million users a month. [28] Its Gecko engine is the only major one not built by Google or Apple, which make Chrome and Safari. [28]

Why it matters. Computerworld links the launch to talk of digital sovereignty, the wish of companies and governments to control their own technology. [28] Mozilla's chief executive said that if every option is built on the same technology underneath, choice is a lie. [28]

Workday, whose software runs pay and staff records for big companies, made its AI system, Sana, the home screen of its product on Tuesday. [29] Sana shows each worker the tasks waiting for them and can have AI agents carry them out once the worker approves. [29] Workday bought Sana about a year ago. [29] Outside AI tools such as Claude and Copilot can reach Workday's data only through Sana, which applies each company's own permissions. [29]

Why it matters. Workday is trying to make its own AI the gate every other AI must pass through to reach staff and pay data. [29]

The Dutch tax office has cancelled its move to Microsoft 365, Microsoft's cloud office software, after about 5,000 staff had already switched. [30] A government advice council said in June that the plan fell short on security and control of data. [30] Eelco Eerenberg, a junior Dutch finance minister, told parliament mail and calendars will run on the office's own servers in 2027. [30] European open-source tools for files and shared work will follow in 2027 and 2028. [30]

Why it matters. Advisers worried that confidential tax files would pass through US servers, and that the office had no way out once locked in. [30] Switzerland's army and several other European governments are making similar moves. [30]

Topgolf, which runs more than 100 golf entertainment venues, moved 12,000 of its virtual computers off VMware after its VMware costs were set to rise by 400%. [31] VMware is software that lets one physical machine run many virtual computers, and Broadcom, a big chip company, now owns it. [31] Topgolf switched to VergeIO and says it has cut over $11.3m in costs, including 77% off its software bill. [31] It expects to be fully off VMware by December. [31]

Why it matters. Broadcom stopped selling VMware licences that customers own outright, and many have looked elsewhere. [31] VergeIO says most of its 70 new customers a quarter come from VMware. [31]

Some European Microsoft 365 users could not reach Outlook, OneDrive, Teams and other services on Tuesday. [32] The fault was in Global Secure Access, a Microsoft service that connects staff to its cloud. [32] Even the page administrators use to check for outages failed to load. [32] It came on the day Microsoft stopped supporting Office 2021 LTSC, the version companies install on their own computers, as it pushes customers toward the cloud. [32]

Why it matters. Microsoft still sells an installed version, Office LTSC 2024, for those who do not want the cloud. [32] An outage on the cloud version makes that choice look different. [32]

An Intel program that comes pre-installed on some laptops, the Intel Connectivity Performance Suite, has been breaking connections that use IPv6, the newer form of internet address. [33] Users of Samsung and ASUS laptops found sites resetting and OneNote notebooks showing empty, while the older form, IPv4, worked fine. [33] One user measured 40% to 60% of such connections being reset. [33] A newer, general version of the program fixes it. [33]

Why it matters. Intel has issued no public warning, and a reader told The Register that Microsoft's own update service still hands out the broken version. [33] Neither company answered The Register's questions. [33]

Britain's Cabinet Office, the department that supports the prime minister, has scrapped a shared recruitment system meant for all government departments. [34] It recorded a GBP7.8m loss in its annual report. [34] Between 2023 and 2025 some groups of departments said they would rather use the hiring tools in their own software. [34] The National Audit Office, which checks government spending, had criticised how the project was managed. [34]

Why it matters. The report says closing it makes way for a new project that fits the British government's plan to put departments on shared software. [34] The same report puts the department's bill for contractors' unpaid tax at GBP38.5m. [34]

Britain's Home Office uses AI built on OpenAI's GPT-4o to summarise asylum interviews for the staff who decide cases. [35] Of 203 summaries experts checked after it went live in April, 45 failed, or 22%, against 9% in the trial. [35] Experts checked only about 0.3% of all summaries, the Open Rights Group, a digital rights campaign, estimates from official figures. [35] A summary could pass even if it left important details out. [35]

Why it matters. Decisions on whether people may stay in Britain lean on these summaries. [35] Since April the number of first decisions fell about 42% on a year earlier, and The Register notes that does not prove the AI caused it. [35]

Smartphone sales around the world fell 20% in July to September from a year earlier, Counterpoint Research, a market research firm, says. [36][37] It was the weakest third quarter since 2012. [36] Memory chips have become far dearer, which raises the cost of making phones, and phone prices are up about 20% this year. [37] Samsung held 23% of the market and Apple 22%, Apple's highest ever share for that quarter. [36]

Why it matters. People are keeping old phones longer or buying refurbished ones. [37] Counterpoint expects no clear recovery for the rest of the year. [36]

Chinese tech companies have bought more than a million Nvidia gaming and workstation chips in a single year to use for AI, the Financial Times reports. [38] China doubled its own AI chip production this year, but it expects to make 3.5 million against demand of more than 5 million. [38] The gaming chips are allowed under US export rules and are used for simpler AI jobs. [38] Nvidia's RTX 5090 gaming card, priced at $1,999, now sells for at least $7,199. [38]

Why it matters. China still relies on US chips, partly because Nvidia's software is easier to use than Huawei's. [38] Gamers feel the shortage: the RTX 5090 can now be found at only three sellers. [38]

Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, said in Paris that Nvidia will announce $2bn of European investments within a week. [39] Nvidia makes the chips most AI runs on, and it has put $8bn into Europe over the past year. [39] It is buying stakes in four French startups, among them Doctolib, which books doctors' appointments, and Pigment, which makes planning software. [40][39] Huang told Europe it needs to get in the race. [39]

Why it matters. Nvidia's stakes in companies that buy its chips reached $99bn by July, from about $7bn a year earlier. [39] Its Berlin conference runs from 20 to 22 October. [39]

Heads of NTT Data, Brookfield and Infosys said at a Bloomberg forum in New Delhi that electricity and skilled workers now limit how fast AI data centres get built. [41] NTT Data's boss said a US electrician now earns about $200,000. [41] In Amsterdam, a new grid connection takes about a decade. [41] The IMF, which lends to countries and watches the world economy, counted 14 circular deals since 2023, where AI firms fund their own customers. [41]

Why it matters. Those deals put about $300bn of shares and $650bn of loans into weaker AI firms in return for promises of $1.4tn in future sales, the IMF says. [41] It calls this wrong-way risk: the investment goes bad at the same moment the promised sales do. [9]

Anthropic planned to show its July-to-September results to a group of big investors for the first time at a meeting on Wednesday, CNBC reports. [42] It is preparing to sell shares on the stock market, in what could be the largest share sale ever. [42] Its sales could pass $100bn a year by the end of this year, and it is aiming at a listing that could value it at $2tn, people familiar with its plans told CNBC. [42]

Why it matters. Last week a confusing report on OpenAI's sales pulled down chip shares and the wider market. [42] It is not yet clear whether Anthropic counts sales made through cloud partners, which OpenAI has now left out of its own figure. [42]

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta committed $100bn or $200bn to AI computing before anyone could tell him it would work, The Next Web reports from Bloomberg. [9] His chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, told him it was not clear at all. [9] Meta's sales rose 28% to $60.8bn in the second quarter, while the cash left after spending fell 91% to $784m. [9] Meta reports again on 21 October. [9]

Why it matters. Meta's advertising business is what pays for the bet. [9] The figure Zuckerberg named is his own, not one investors can check in a filing. [9]

Meta scaled back plans to replace staff with AI agents after workers spent more and more time fixing the agents' errors, Reuters reported. [43] At Walmart, store staff complain of AI tools that plan impossible schedules and send false alerts. [43] A US central bank paper found 90% of executives see no productivity gain from AI yet. [43] Microsoft and McKinsey are limiting how much staff use AI tools. [43]

Why it matters. Microsoft's strategy chief wrote that adding AI agents to a broken process still leaves a broken process. [43] Workers carry the cost of cleaning up while the gains stay unproven. [43]