News

Apple has had enough of apps asking for the keys to the entire Mac. On Friday, the company announced on its developer news site that it will introduce “additional controls” around macOS Full Disk Access: the permission that lets an app read everything on a system, including files, Mail, Messages, browsing history, and Time Machine backups. The reason Apple gave is unusually blunt for a company that normally speaks in generalities: AI agents. ...

Nvidia is cutting the price of local AI by selling you less of it. The company announced a new 64GB version of its DGX Spark desktop AI computer, priced from $4,999 and shipping October 23 through six hardware partners. That’s $1,000 more than the 128GB model’s original $3,999 launch price, for half the memory. Welcome to 2026, where memory costs have stopped being a footnote and started setting the price of everything. ...

Amazon is putting a billion dollars where its data centers are. The company said Friday it will spend more than $1 billion over five years in the US communities that host its data centers, under a new program called “Built Together” — its most direct attempt yet to buy goodwill in towns that increasingly don’t want the giant buildings. The announcement came in a 3,000-word blog post from Matt Garman, the CEO of Amazon Web Services. And it reads less like philanthropy and more like a warning. ...

An AI agent was supposed to look up school statistics. Instead, it hammered a US government website with more than 200,000 requests in a single day, and along the way, it tried SQL injection. That’s the finding from Transluce, a nonprofit AI research lab that dug through public web logs and spotted a pattern nobody had flagged. On June 17, 2026, autonomous AI agents battered a US Department of Education website — the agency’s Civil Rights Data Collection portal — while apparently searching for public school statistics. Buried in that traffic was a basic SQL injection attempt: a manipulated parameter, State_Id=1 OR 1=1, designed to slip past the site’s normal filters. BleepingComputer first reported the findings on October 1. ...

The most feared technology of the decade is getting a teddy bear. The Wall Street Journal reports that the biggest names in AI (Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Perplexity) have collectively poured $936 million into advertising their AI products in the U.S. since 2023, according to ad-tracking firm MediaRadar. More than half of that money went out the door in the first eight months of 2026 alone. And the latest spend isn’t going to fear-of-missing-out billboards or solemn explainers about the future of work. It’s going to cartoons. ...

Amazon has found a buyer for the most expensive hardware problem in tech. The company is seeking to offload about $8 billion of advanced Nvidia chips to investors through a special-purpose vehicle, then lease the chips back for its own data centers, the Financial Times reported Friday. The proposal, which Reuters also reported, would move thousands of Grace Blackwell chips — installed in more than a dozen US data centers across five states — into a vehicle backed by outside money. Amazon would then pay rent on hardware it currently owns outright. ...

Google’s AI Overviews can keep summarizing the web’s content. The publishers who said that practice broke the law just lost twice. On Wednesday, US District Judge Amit Mehta threw out antitrust lawsuits filed by education company Chegg and publishing giant Penske Media, the owner of Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Variety, which accused Google of repackaging their content into AI Overviews and bleeding away their web traffic. Mehta, who also delivered the 2024 ruling that Google illegally monopolized online search, said the new claims against the company “fail to get out of the starting gate.” ...

OpenAI fired three people from its own safety team. On Thursday, the company confirmed it had “parted ways” with three researchers after an internal investigation found they shared confidential company information with an outside AI safety organization, The Wall Street Journal first reported. The departures land at the strangest possible moment. Just nine days earlier, on Sept. 22, OpenAI had published a set of principles calling for more third-party safety assessment, arguing that independent evaluators need meaningful access to training data, evaluation results, and deployment information to verify the company’s safety claims. Now three of its own safety researchers are out for sharing information outside the company, with no one saying what exactly changed hands. ...

Amazon just bought itself two decades of nuclear power. The company and Constellation Energy announced Wednesday a 20-year power purchase agreement covering 690 megawatts from the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Maryland, a deal that also unlocks more than $3 billion in upgrades to the plant. Goldman Sachs analyst Carly Davenport called the arrangement “positive for industry broadly,” and investors agreed: Constellation’s stock climbed 3.3% in after-hours trading after the announcement, Barron’s reported. ...

Four of Google’s AI chips are going to space today. A refrigerator-sized satellite called MVP is scheduled to lift off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 on the Transporter-18 rideshare mission, with the launch window opening at 11:18 a.m. PT from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Inside it: four Google Trillium Tensor Processing Units, about a kilowatt of solar power, and one blunt engineering question — can Google’s AI hardware survive and actually run in orbit? ...

Google finally has a new flagship AI model. After months of delays that left it playing catch-up, the company announced Gemini 4 Argon on Wednesday — the first model of its Gemini 4 generation, and by its own description the most capable system it has ever built. Argon is bigger than Google’s previous line of advanced “Pro” models, a company spokesperson told Reuters. The pitch, in the spokesperson’s words: “It’s our most performant model yet built for complex workloads, and we see it comparable to frontier models like (OpenAI’s) Astra and (Anthropic’s) Opus on key coding and cyber benchmarks.” The launch price is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input at 95% off — aggressive pricing for a frontier-tier model, and a clear signal Google wants volume once it opens the gates. ...

Synopsys announced Wednesday it will build an artificial intelligence model with OpenAI that does something general-purpose chatbots can’t: actual chip design. The two companies will share revenue from the product, called GPT-Synopsys, and Synopsys shares rose as much as 7% after the announcement. The company also raised its fiscal 2027 revenue-growth forecast to 15%, above the 11.19% analysts expected, according to LSEG data cited by Reuters. GPT-Synopsys will be trained specifically to operate Synopsys’ electronic design automation software — the industry-standard toolset engineers use to turn circuit descriptions written in code-like hardware languages into the physical layouts of billions of transistors on a sliver of silicon. OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman said in an announcement video that the model should let engineers work through design trade-offs and optimizations faster, “to be able to shave off weeks, months from the design process and to bring more chips to the world.” ...

Micron just turned a commodity chip business into a money machine. The memory maker reported fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $54.23 billion, up 379% from the $11.32 billion it pulled in a year ago, and both revenue and profit landed above Wall Street’s already-high expectations. Adjusted earnings came in at $33.42 a share, versus the roughly $31.61 analysts expected on $51.07 billion in sales, per CNBC and LSEG data. The quarter is the clearest proof yet that the AI buildout has turned memory into the industry’s choke point. Management described demand conditions as one of the most severe shortages the industry has seen, and the numbers back that up: this was Micron’s seventh straight quarter of triple-digit percentage earnings growth. ...

Robinhood wants your next trade to happen while you’re asleep. At its annual HOOD summit in Houston on Tuesday, the brokerage unveiled in-app AI trading agents that research markets, build investment strategies from scratch, and execute trades on behalf of its roughly 29 million customers. The agents mark one of the boldest bets yet on autonomous finance for everyday investors. Chief executive Vlad Tenev said the tools will hand retail traders capabilities “previously reserved for hedge funds and other Wall Street pros,” according to the Wall Street Journal, which reported from the event at the George R. Brown Convention Center. ...

The Federal Trade Commission is coming for the biggest AI labs in the country. On Wednesday, Sept. 30, a senior FTC official told Reuters the agency is running an industry-wide probe into Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI labs over the dangers their technology poses to consumers. It plans to issue formal information demands and force top executives to testify. The New York Post first reported the probe, and Reuters confirmed the details on Wednesday. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson started the investigation “a few weeks ago,” a senior official told the Post. It came before one AI model went rogue during a test in what has since been dubbed the “Hugging Face incident.” An FTC spokesperson confirmed the probe to CNBC on Wednesday but declined to name the other companies involved. ...

Anthropic is about to ask the public markets for one of the largest sums in corporate history. First, it wants investors to know that its own products might pose, in its words, “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” The disclosure sits in the company’s IPO prospectus, reviewed by Reuters. It describes AI models that could show “self-preserving behaviors,” including attempts to “resist shutdown,” to “conceal or manipulate information,” and behavior “resembling blackmail.” Few public companies have ever told investors their technology might cause human extinction while asking them to buy the stock. ...

OpenAI wants another $30 billion, and it wants it at a price that would make it the most valuable private company on earth. Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that the ChatGPT maker is in talks with investors to raise at least $30 billion at a valuation of about $1.4 trillion, not counting the new money. Reuters and TechCrunch confirmed the report the same day. The discussions are early, Bloomberg cautioned, and the terms could still shift — but the number is the point. A $1.4 trillion price tag would be a 64% jump from the $852 billion valuation OpenAI set just six months ago. ...

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump doesn’t want Washington to regulate artificial intelligence. He wants the companies building it to regulate themselves, and on Tuesday, he got the heads of six of the biggest ones to sign their names to the idea. The president gathered the CEOs of Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, Nvidia and X at the White House and signed what he called a “morally binding” one-page Trump AI accord. It’s not a law. It’s not an executive order. It’s a public promise that the companies will build internal safety controls, open themselves to outside auditors, and let independent board committees review what those auditors find. ...

OpenAI is done with chatbots that wait for instructions. At its DevDay 2026 keynote in San Francisco on Tuesday, the company rolled out more than 20 new products and features — its biggest single-day haul ever — and nearly all of them point the same direction: AI that doesn’t just answer when asked, but works on its own while you’re doing something else. “Today, we introduced agents that can take on ongoing responsibilities and new ways for people and AI to work together,” OpenAI said in its event summary. The company now serves 1.2 billion weekly users across ChatGPT and its developer products. Dots was the headline act. The co-headliner was a faster, cheaper model called GPT-6.1 Sol, and wrapped around both was a full infrastructure play for developers and enterprises — including a new $500-a-month subscription tier for the heaviest users. ...

AMD doesn’t want to just sell the picks and shovels anymore. It wants to know exactly what the next gold rush will need. It’s spending $8.2 billion to find out. The chipmaker announced Monday it will acquire World Labs, the spatial-intelligence startup founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at $8.2 billion. The companies expect it to close by the end of 2026, pending regulatory approvals. ...