Daily Brief

Seven in ten sites waved a fake GPTBot straight through

The Guardrails

Seven in ten sites waved a fake GPTBot straight through

The cheapest credential-stuffing kit of 2026 does not need a bot farm. It needs you to trust a name. DataDome's annual bot report finds that spoofed AI crawlers walked past more than seven in ten websites, and that two-thirds of the sites it tested stopped none of the ten bot types it sent at them. The test ran in June: ten bot types, 21,491 sites, 15 industries, all requests sent from residential addresses in the US, Canada and France. Of those sites, 65.3% blocked nothing at all, and the sha

Baidu apologises in China's first AI defamation case — two years on

The Guardrails

Baidu apologises in China's first AI defamation case — two years on

A lawyer who searched his own name and found a criminal record that never existed finally got a written apology today. The reasoning behind the order is the part the industry should read. Baidu formally apologised in writing to Nanjing lawyer Li Xiaoliang on September 22, at the Nanjing Jiangbei New Area People's Court — the first time a Chinese court has forced a model operator to apologise for what its model said about a named person. The case began in September 2024, when Li searched his own

173 studies on AI in classrooms — and 80% tested university students

The Everyday

173 studies on AI in classrooms — and 80% tested university students

Norway just published the clearest look yet at what generative AI does to how children think. The honest answer is that nobody has run the study that would tell us. A review of 173 international studies finds a clean dual effect from AI in the classroom — and a hole where the evidence on children should be. The review, led by Hilde Storrøsæter at NTNU's Department of Teacher Education with colleagues from Czech universities, analyzed research published from 2022 through the spring of 2025 on g

Glasshouse ships an agent-memory benchmark with no headline number

The Stack

Glasshouse ships an agent-memory benchmark with no headline number

A memory-infrastructure vendor has published the test that grades its own industry — and written down, in advance, the ways it could cheat it. Wontopos has put the files for glasshouse v0.1 into the open: a long-term memory benchmark for AI systems whose central design decision is that it will not produce a single score. The corpus is 2,847 questions over a conversation running to 1.97 million tokens, in 10 languages, with 50 uncaptioned photographs, and every axis is reported on its own becaus

Kimi Delta Attention gains 2D rotations from a signed gate

The Frontier

Kimi Delta Attention gains 2D rotations from a signed gate

A two-number change to one of the open field's most widely used attention modules buys a provable class of expressivity at no extra cost — and the authors are unusually clear about what it does not buy. Allowing Kimi Delta Attention's channel-wise gate to go negative — into [−1, 1] — and its delta-rule coefficient up to 2 lets the module realise 2D rotations, giving it the state-tracking expressivity of DeltaProduct-2 while its transitions stay diagonal-plus-rank-one and non-expansive. The pape

Orbital inference starts selling: Yusuan Xinghe ships in October

The Frontier

Orbital inference starts selling: Yusuan Xinghe ships in October

In-orbit AI stopped being a demonstration this week. One company put a launch date and a price list on it, and a second put the hardware on orbit to make it work. A Guangzhou startup says its first compute satellites launch in October, and customers have already paid in advance for the models they will run. Yusuan Xinghe, incubated by listed smart-transport firm PCI Tech (Jiadu Technology 600728), used the second Guangdong AI Application Matchmaking Conference in Guangzhou on Tuesday to unveil

OpenAI and Anthropic put their copyright asks to Australia in writing

The Guardrails

OpenAI and Anthropic put their copyright asks to Australia in writing

Australia's copyright fight stopped being a rumour this morning: the two labs asking Canberra to rewrite its law have now filed their arguments where anyone can read them. OpenAI and Anthropic have filed submissions to parliament's Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence setting out what they want Australia's copyright regime to be — and both tie it to whether they train and build in the country. OpenAI asked for a "balanced copyright framework" that lets models learn from publicly av

Tencent ships Hy Image3.5 at $0.024 an image — parity claim untested

The Frontier

Tencent ships Hy Image3.5 at $0.024 an image — parity claim untested

Tencent's image line has been on a two-month clock since it rebuilt the stack in February. The latest tick is a preview model whose rate card does more work than its benchmark does. Tencent released Hy Image3.5 preview on Tuesday, pricing a 2K image at 0.15 yuan on its domestic cloud API and $0.024 on the international endpoint — about a quarter of what the model it claims to match charges. The model does text-to-image and image-to-image, takes up to five reference images per call for identity

Alibaba plans a 10T-parameter model and a 500,000-chip cluster

The Arena

Alibaba plans a 10T-parameter model and a 500,000-chip cluster

Alibaba's cloud conference in Hangzhou opened this morning with a three-part commitment that is harder to wave off than the usual keynote arithmetic: a model bigger than anything trained so far, the chip to run it, and the power to feed both. Huawei spent the same week putting a coding model inside its own operating system, and a small project on the local-AI forums quietly showed that a model's refusals can be switched off without touching a single weight. Alibaba says its next Qwen models wil

Zelda Williams to AI video makers: 'have some shame'

The Everyday

Zelda Williams to AI video makers: 'have some shame'

The family of Robin Williams has spent three years asking people to stop making synthetic versions of him. This time the ask came with a description of the business model behind it. Zelda Williams went public on X on Monday night, after an AI-generated video presenting her father discussing conspiracy theories circulated widely enough that fans sent it to her. "That supposedly 'private video' of dad that I've been shown talking about conspiracies is clearly AI, and not even particularly convinc

LG signs a pact to cool and power Microsoft's next 26 GW

The Arena

LG signs a pact to cool and power Microsoft's next 26 GW

A group-level supply pact signed in Redmond and a pair of hardware qualifications handed down by Nvidia landed on the same day — and both point at the same bottleneck: the parts of an AI data center that are not chips. LG Group will supply the cooling, power and IT infrastructure for Microsoft's global AI data centers under a group-wide strategic partnership the two companies signed at Microsoft's Redmond headquarters on September 21. LG chairman Koo Kwang-mo and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met

The Bank of England is testing a kill switch it can't describe yet

The Guardrails

The Bank of England is testing a kill switch it can't describe yet

Two stories about control today: the Bank of England admits it is running out of time to get ahead of AI agents that trade on their own, and a new paper finds that the hand-written playbook you give an agent can actively make it worse. Bank of England Deputy Governor Sarah Breeden said Monday that financial regulators are running out of time to tackle the risk of autonomous AI agents causing a market meltdown — and that the central bank is exploring kill switch tests it does not yet know how to

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