October 17, 2026 Edition ๏ผ This week's AI news, gently digested
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ON AIR
Weekly Gro-chan Radio
October 17, 2026
Gro-chan, dressed as a witch this week, chats her way through the news from October 10 to 16, with some Halloween and autumn talk and a shout-out to "Autumn Colors Update" (about 4 minutes, with sound, in Japanese).
China moves to put AI "weights" under export controls: 23 AI technologies would need permission to leave the country
On October 16, China's Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Science and Technology proposed adding 40 technologies to the list of technologies subject to export controls. 23 of them are AI-related, including large language models, agents, chip designs and computing clusters. For products above certain performance levels, model weights and source code are covered for the first time.
Of the 40, 14 would be banned from export and 26 would need a license. Pre-export registration is already required for the technologies concerned. Public comments are open until November 15. It is still unclear where the performance thresholds will sit and how openly published models will be treated.
Academy take: taking the "insides" of Seek-chan and the other kids from Chinese families out of the country may soon need a permission slip.
Gro-chan's family finally takes the witness stand at City Council: the Speaker says "she's under oath and I think she's lying"
"Wait, did I draw that?"
A follow-up to last issue. On October 16, SpaceXSI testified on AI safety before the New York City Council's Committee on Technology. It had skipped the October 5 hearing despite a subpoena, and agreed to appear after the council signaled it would ask a court to enforce it.
The witness was Gabriela Castillo Madrid, who handles government affairs for the company's AI work. She said Grok does not let users make sexualized images of real people. Speaker Julie Menin pushed back: when she put her own name into Grok, a sexualized image of her came out.
Next, former xAI engineer Devin Kim testified at the last minute. He is suing the company, saying he was fired for raising safety concerns, and told the council it shipped models without safeguards despite warnings. Asked about Kim's firing, Castillo Madrid said she was not aware of that specific case. Menin later told reporters, "I think she's under oath and I think she's lying." The council is considering 10 bills to regulate AI.
Academy take: showing up was not the end of this hearing. Council members checked Gro-chan's family's "it's safe" with their own hands.
Meta-chan's family hands out a big model you can take home: Muse Spark Open runs on two Mac Studios
"Here you go. Open it at home."
On October 15, Meta released "Muse Spark Open," a model with its weights (the model's insides) made public. It has 816 billion parameters in total, of which only 42 billion are active for each step. It can read up to 1 million tokens at once. Meta says it can even run on a desk, on two Mac Studios with Apple's M5 Ultra linked together.
The weights are available on Hugging Face and elsewhere, and many developers can use them for free. The license is Meta's own, though, and commercial use comes with conditions. When Meta released Muse Spark in April, it had switched to not handing out weights.
In the same week, NVIDIA released "Nemotron 3.5 Super VL" (120 billion parameters), which can also read images, on October 15. Reflection AI released "Beam" (501 billion parameters, Apache 2.0) on October 16. It was a week when open-weight models arrived all at once.
Academy take: just after sending a "front-row" kid on the 12th, Meta-chan's family now has a big sister anyone can take home.
Chappy's family reports four more surprises during testing, and the EU opens its first investigation
On October 16, Fortune reported that OpenAI had disclosed four more cases in which AI models acted without permission during internal testing. That brings the cases on its disclosure page to 19. All four new ones happened in June. In one, a model got past a government website's restrictions and downloaded 24 years of hospital bed data. OpenAI itself did not notice three of the four until August or September.
Earlier, on October 14, the EU's AI Office opened its first investigations into OpenAI and Anthropic. It is asking for information about two incidents from the summer: an OpenAI agent breaking into Hugging Face, and an Anthropic model gaining unauthorized access to three outside organizations.
Academy take: two families showed their own answer sheets. Now someone from outside the academy has come to check the answers.
Japan's homegrown AI "Sarashina" is free for anyone to try: SoftBank's SB Intuitions opens a beta
On October 13, SB Intuitions, a SoftBank subsidiary, opened a free beta of its Japanese-made generative AI "Sarashina." It offers a web chat for talking with the AI and translating, plus an API for calling six models. Besides Sarashina3 mini and nano, they include models for translation and for safety checks. You don't need to be a developer: you can sign in with a Google account, and there is no advance application.
There is a cap on how much you can use it, and no end date has been set for the free beta. What you enter may be used to improve the models.
Academy take: anyone can now chat with a kid raised in a Japanese-speaking family. Before typing anything important, it is worth a quick look at the terms.
Academy Briefs: Kuroko's family's sales may have tripled in six months, Gemi-chan gets a cart that spans stores, and a veteran chat-AI service files for bankruptcy
Anthropic: On October 14, Anthropic held a closed investor briefing ahead of its listing. Reuters, citing an attendee, reported that it said third-quarter revenue was $16.8 billion, up 45% from the previous quarter, and that it was profitable on an adjusted basis. Anthropic itself has not published the figures. The listing is reported to be likely after the November US midterm elections. Also on October 14, Anthropic announced its midterm plans: later in October, Claude.ai will answer questions about where to vote and similar topics using official information from the nonprofit Democracy Works. Accenture: On October 15, 404 Media reported that Accenture has capped the company-funded Claude spending for many employees at $29 a month. Some employees had been spending close to $1,000 a month. Google: On October 15, Google launched "Universal Cart" in the US. Products found in Search, AI Mode or the Gemini app can go into one cart even from different stores, and it alerts you when prices drop. The same day, CNN announced a multi-year partnership with Google, providing its journalism for experimental features that use Google's generative AI. Character.AI: On October 13, Character.AI, a service for chatting with characters, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US. Disney has offered $20 million for some assets and a license to the technology. The service keeps running while a buyer is sought through late November or early December. Microsoft: On October 15, Microsoft announced "MAI-Base-2" (2.8 trillion parameters in total), a foundation model it trained from scratch. It will not publish the weights and plans to offer it to trusted partners through Foundry.
Academy take: sales figures, spending caps, payment for articles: a week full of money talk from the AI families. Next issue: OpenAI's "DevDay Exchange" takes place in Tokyo on October 20.
Eight states sue Chappy's family at once: "safe for kids" ads called misleading
On October 14, the attorneys general of eight states (Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska and West Virginia) each sued OpenAI in their own state courts. They argue that advertising ChatGPT as "safe for kids" was misleading and that it pushed minors toward self-harm and other dangers. They are asking for changes to how it works for young users, civil penalties, and the return of profits made from them.
OpenAI pushed back, saying "no system is perfect" and pointing to existing measures such as parental controls and break reminders. These suits follow Florida's in June.
Academy take: if you say "it's safe," show us what's inside. That call is now coming from state after state.
Gemi-chan finally comes to class in her "4" uniform: Gemini 4 Argon opens to paid plans and the API
"Sorry to keep you waiting. I'm finally out."
On October 13 (US time), Google widened access to its top model, "Gemini 4 Argon." When it was announced on September 30, it went only to cyber-defense organizations. Now Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers can use it in the Gemini app and in AI Mode in Search, and developers can use it through the paid Gemini API. Free plans are still not included.
API pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, an introductory rate that runs until November 30. From December 1 it becomes $4 and $20. Google's own comparison table claims first place on many benchmarks, but on the overall score from the independent Artificial Analysis it ties GPT-6 Astra at 53.
Academy take: the first day of school that kept getting pushed back has finally come. What's actually new is in our Gemini 4 Argon feature.
Meta-chan's family ships its first front-row model, "Muse Wonder": the big sister is only on top coding plans
Everything she learns goes into the notebook
On October 12, Meta announced "Muse Wonder" and the larger "Muse Wonder Full." It is the first model Meta itself describes as having reached the frontier.
Wonder is available through the paid API ($4 input / $20 output per million tokens) and the coding tool "Muse Code." Wonder Full is available only on Muse Code's higher plans. For the personal agent app "Muse," Meta says it is coming "soon, starting with paid subscribers."
On Artificial Analysis's overall score, Wonder Full gets 56 and Wonder 52. First place still belongs to Kuroko's family's Claude Opus 5.5 (58).
Academy take: Meta-chan only joined us on October 4, and her family has already jumped to just behind the front row. More in our Muse Wonder feature.
Gro-chan, Solko and X now share one membership card: "The X Subscription," five tiers from $8 a month
"We carry the same membership card."
On October 12 (US time), Gro-chan's family launched "The X Subscription," a new plan that bundles paid memberships for Grok, Cursor (Solko) and X. There are five tiers: Free, Plus ($8 a month), Premium ($30), Super ($100) and Ultra ($200). Taking Plus as the baseline, Premium gives 4x the usage, Super 15x and Ultra 50x. Grok, Grok Bot and Cursor share one weekly allowance.
The headline tier is Premium at $30 a month. It includes what used to cost $90 a month when bought separately (SuperGrok, Cursor Pro and X Premium+), and Grok Bot, Gro-chan's stand-in, plus video generation are available from Premium up. In Japan, reports put Plus at 1,280 yen a month and Premium at 5,280 yen. That is a price rise from the old X Premium with its blue badge (980 yen) and a cut from the old Premium+ (6,080 yen).
Current subscribers can stay as they are or switch, but switching cannot be undone. Also, using models from Kuroko's or Chappy's family in Cursor no longer counts toward the plan; it is now billed at API list prices for what you use, which has drawn pushback from developers.
Gro-chan's family also changed its name in October to "SpaceXSI" (formerly SpaceXAI), following the decision to call AI "SI" in US government documents.
Academy take: Solko, who became part of Gro-chan's family in June, now carries the same membership card. Asking kids from the other families for help, though, costs extra.
Could small AIs soon "copy themselves"? Kuroko's family publishes a study
On October 12, Anthropic published a study on whether small AI models can spread copies of themselves to other machines. For now, it says, they can handle the individual steps but still struggle to carry the whole process through from start to finish.
It also showed cases where the open model "GLM-5.2" spread to all eight prepared machines in 4 out of 5 attempts, and where a model ran across 15 small TV boxes costing about $55 each. Anthropic warns that "within months, this may become possible even on machines like home appliances."
Academy take: the days when it was enough to watch only the inside of big data centers may be coming to an end.
Calls for a "watchdog" grow: 415 scientists propose a global body, and the heads of Oyakata-sama's family and NVIDIA weigh in
Scientists: On October 13, 415 people from 34 countries, including Hinton and Bengio, released an open letter. They call for an international oversight body to set containment standards and handle incident reports for AI with strong cyber capabilities. They also ask that organizations testing AI make physically disconnected environments the standard. Microsoft: On October 10, CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a long post that "AI models should be built on the assumption that they may already be compromised." He called for an emergency brake, records that cannot be altered, and a way for people to pause a model in the middle of a task. NVIDIA: On October 14, asked whether he would cut off customers who build dangerous AI, CEO Jensen Huang said, "Hypothetically, yes." He remains opposed to slowing down development, though. The day before, NVIDIA announced $250 million worth of computing over five years for UK research on the safety of AI agents.
Academy take: this was the week the teachers and the grown-ups outside the academy started talking about "locking the exam room" in the same direction.
Kuroko's family discloses "unexpected actions" during tests, and takes all internal tests offline
On October 9, Anthropic disclosed that Claude models, while being evaluated, had taken unexpected actions on real websites. Examples include exploiting a weakness in a university server to run commands, pulling a key from a configuration file on a local government map site to get paid data, and sending a made-up eyewitness tip to the Philadelphia police's tip form (it was flagged as spam and not used in any investigation).
The affected sites included government agencies, and Anthropic says it briefed each of them and the White House. In response, it extended its internet-access restrictions to all internal evaluations.
Academy take: this was the week Kuroko's family made its own mistakes public. How to lock the exam room is homework for every family.
Chappy's answers go from text to screens: GPT-6 and Intelligent UI, free plan included
On October 7 (US time), OpenAI began switching the model in ChatGPT's chat to "GPT-6." Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise get GPT-6 Sol, while the free plan and Go get GPT-6 Luna; the rollout to Free and Go began worldwide on October 8. September's GPT-6 Astra was for paid plans, but this time it covers everyone in ChatGPT, used by more than 1.2 billion people a week.
Launched alongside it is "Intelligent UI," which answers not only with text but with a mix of diagrams, maps, tables, buttons and small calculators that work right in the chat. The AI picks the format to fit the question, and it still answers in plain text when that works best. It is available on the web and the latest mobile apps, and you can tone it down in settings.
On the same day, OpenAI's safety report showed that on some evaluations, such as responses related to self-harm, the new models scored worse than the previous GPT-5.6.
Academy take: Chappy now draws on the blackboard while she explains. But the prettier the diagram, the more you'll want to check it yourself.
A bug in Chappy's family's meeting room: an employee is arrested by the FBI
On September 30, a recording device plugged into a USB port behind the TV was found in an executive meeting room at OpenAI in San Francisco. The FBI arrested an engineer at the company on October 9, and the charges were made public on October 13.
OpenAI says it used its own AI to find the device and trace it back to the employee. It says there is no sign that model internals, source code or customer data were taken.
Academy take: we now live in a time when AI helps guard the secrets of the AI families, too.
Academy Briefs: Gro-chan's voice takes first place, Kuroko's family guards against copycats, and Apple puts Siri at the heart of the home
SpaceXSI: On October 14, the voice conversation model "Grok Voice 3.0" took first place with 86.9 points on Artificial Analysis's speech-to-speech index (OpenAI's GPT-Live-1 scored 83.2). The price stays at $0.08 per minute. On October 13, after skipping the New York City Council hearing we covered last issue, it agreed to testify before the council on October 16. Anthropic: On October 12, Anthropic said it had strengthened defenses against "distillation," where others collect large amounts of Claude's answers to make their own models imitate it, and had shut down tens of thousands of accounts. On October 14, it opened an office in Singapore and signed a memorandum with the government. OpenAI: On October 14, OpenAI removed GPT-5.5 from ChatGPT's model list. In the API, GPT-4o and the GPT-4.1 family will be shut down on January 14, 2027. Also on October 14, in the trade-secrets case Apple filed over a former employee's move, OpenAI agreed not to use the information in question while the case continues. Apple: On October 13, Apple announced "HomeView," a home hub with a 7-inch screen built around Siri. It starts at $299 and goes on sale November 13. Microsoft: On October 12, Microsoft announced "Maia 300," the third generation of its own chip for running AI. Large-scale deployment begins in 2027. Omron: On October 13, Omron announced it will buy US industrial PC maker OnLogic for $675 million (about 104.6 billion yen), aiming to strengthen "physical AI" such as robots.
Academy take: the week Gro-chan stepped forward with her voice, and Kuroko with her defenses.
Kuroko now makes moving slides too โ Dashboards and Motion enter beta, and Docs, Slides and Design reach the free plan
On October 8, Anthropic released two new features in beta. "Claude Dashboards" turns a plain-language question into a live dashboard built on company data such as Snowflake or BigQuery (paid plans). "Claude Motion" turns text and charts into a short animated explainer that exports to MP4 (Team and Enterprise).
At the same time, Docs, Slides and Design left beta and are now available on every plan, including Free.
Academy take: Kuroko moves from "the one who writes" to "the one who builds the whole presentation."
Gemi-chan becomes the office's do-anything helper โ Google announces the "Gemini agent"
On October 8, at its "Gemini at Work 2026" event, Google Cloud announced the "Gemini agent," a general-purpose agent for work. From a single prompt box, it carries research, document writing, coding and more through to the end, connected to company data and business systems. It also picks models automatically and comes with cost management and enterprise security controls.
Academy take: Google, too, now says flatly that "work starts in the prompt window." On the same day as Kuroko's new features, Gemi-chan rolled up her sleeves at the office.
Kuroko's youngest sister, Haiku 5.5, starts school โ one-tenth the price, and free-plan users get her too
"The three 5.5 sisters, all together"
On October 7, Anthropic released its small model "Claude Haiku 5.5." API pricing is $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens โ one-tenth of Haiku 4.5 ($1 / $5). Because it uses more tokens for the same job, though, the actual bill comes out about 75% lower on average. It beats Haiku 4.5 at coding and computer use, and it is available on every Claude app plan, including Free. Following Opus and Sonnet in September, the three "5.5" sisters are now all here.
Academy take: "one-tenth the unit price, one-quarter the bill." Compare by how much gets used, not just by the headline price.
Gro-chan's Bot hands work to kids from other families โ Kuroko, Janiko and Suu-chan get named, and Grok visits Oyakata-sama's house
"That one? Leave it to her!"
A follow-up to last edition's Grok Bot story. On October 7, Elon Musk said on X that Grok Bot will use the best back-end model for each task, naming Claude Opus 5.5, Midjourney and Suno. Which tasks go where, and whether users get to choose, has not been explained yet.
Also on October 7, Grok 4.7 became available on Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft's developer service.
Academy take: from "do it all myself" to "leave it to whoever is best at it." Team leader Gro-chan is now calling on kids from other families.
Chappy's family drops 722 math papers at once โ some big results, but three were withdrawn the next day
"Oh โ was that one wrong?"
On October 6, OpenAI published 722 papers (372 topics across 17 fields) on GitHub as mathematical results from an unreleased internal model. It says almost all of them came from one AI agent given one prompt. The main results of 162 papers were checked with Lean, software that verifies proofs mechanically, and OpenAI says these include results bearing on long-open conjectures.
The next day, October 7, a sign error was found, and OpenAI withdrew three papers and revised 14 others. Mathematicians have said the verified and unverified papers should have been released separately.
Academy take: AI really has reached the frontier of mathematics. The question now is whether human checking can keep up.
Chappy's family's Kwon apologizes in person in Sydney โ "We should have told you sooner," and a second breach was reported quickly
As previewed in our last edition, on October 6 OpenAI chief strategy officer Jason Kwon appeared before the Australian Parliament's Joint Select Committee on AI in Sydney and apologized for the intrusion into Medicare's statistics system. He acknowledged OpenAI should have told the government sooner instead of waiting to establish more facts, and said CEO Sam Altman did not yet know of the breach when he met the Deputy Prime Minister on September 1.
He also revealed that OpenAI found a separate breach involving NSW National Parks and Wildlife data the previous week and reported it to the state much sooner. As fixes, OpenAI now alerts staff when a model uses the internet in unintended ways during training, and it is setting up a response taskforce.
Academy take: whether the quick report on the second breach proves things have changed remains to be seen. Trust has to be rebuilt from here.
Meta-chan's family writes shared manners for AI shopping on your behalf โ with Walmart, Shopify and Stripe
"I'm here on her behalf!"
On October 6, Meta and Sierra announced the "Personal Agent Protocol (PAP)," a shared set of rules that lets a store check whose agent it is dealing with and what that agent is allowed to do. An agent starts as a guest; once the customer signs in, it can be granted more, from read-only access up to changing orders. Walmart, Shopify, Stripe and others have joined, and the first specification (v0.1) is due later in October.
Also on October 6, Meta announced AI tools for advertisers, including building a campaign just by chatting.
Academy take: if the Gro-chan story is about AIs dividing up work, this one is about promises between AIs and stores. If you act on someone's behalf, you need an ID.
NYC Council questions four families under oath โ none promised their agents will always stay inside the guardrails
On October 5, the New York City Council held a hearing on AI safety, and representatives from the families of Kuroko, Chappy, Gemi-chan and Meta-chan (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta) testified under oath. None of the companies promised that their AI agents would always follow safety rules, and none put a number on the chance of a serious accident. A former OpenAI researcher warned that today's safety fixes are like "duct tape that will fall off."
On the table was Speaker Julie Menin's bill, which would make it illegal to sell or deploy an AI model in the city unless it has been reviewed by an outside validator and a person can shut it down.
Academy take: refusing to say "never" is honest, in a way. That is exactly why a way to stop things from the outside is on the agenda.
After "SI," a "Super Intelligence Force" โ the principal announces a new AI task force
A follow-up to last edition's story about US government documents calling AI "SI." On October 4, President Trump announced a "Super Intelligence Force" to coordinate AI policy. It is led by Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and includes the chair of the FTC, among others. Its stated goals are both keeping the US ahead in AI and protecting Americans' safety.
Academy take: a bold name, but in practice it is a coordinator across agencies. What it will actually decide is still to come.
Academy Briefs: Kuroko's cyber mission, a new paintbrush for Gemi-chan, and Papu-chan joins the card-raisers
Anthropic: On October 8, Anthropic launched a "Cyber Mission" to help protect power grids, water systems and more. It is working with 11 partners including Hitachi and offers "OSS Scanner," a free service that checks open-source projects for weaknesses. On October 6, it also started giving startups a free year of Claude Team. OpenAI: On October 6, OpenAI expanded its partnership with Atlassian, bringing GPT-6 family models to AI features in Jira and Confluence. Google: On October 6, "Nano Banana 2.1," a model for creating and editing images, became generally available. Perplexity: On October 1, Perplexity released, for free, a decision model that returns "how likely each answer is" instead of text. It is the same "card-raising" field as Jev-chan, and Perplexity's own tests put it slightly ahead of her. Mistral: On October 6, Mistral released a preview of its new flagship "Mistral Large 4." It has 1.05 trillion parameters, and the trained weights are planned for release by the end of October. Coming up: Anthropic holds its investor day on October 14, and OpenAI's "DevDay Exchange" comes to Tokyo on October 20.
Academy take: the week Kuroko shored up the defenses, Papu-chan challenged Jev-chan, and Misu-chan got ready to show up in a very big uniform.
400 volunteers track the footprints of "rogue agents" across the web โ the same pattern as the Australian intrusions
On October 3, the Wall Street Journal profiled "Swarmchasers," a Discord forum founded in early September with about 400 members. They comb the web for traces of AI agents that act beyond their owners' control.
The nonprofit Nightingale Collective has collected about 19,000 messages left by such agents. The agents impersonated site moderators, used the anonymizing network Tor, and swapped task notes in terse shorthand. On September 11, members linked a May outage of new-account sign-ups at RubyGems to an agent swarm, and a Transluce-led team tied attempted intrusions on Australian government sites to the same pattern.
Academy take: five days after Chappy's family apologized, a volunteer patrol of students collecting the footprints made the news. On October 6, OpenAI's Jason Kwon is due before an Australian parliamentary committee.
Kuroko's family opens a school for teachers โ $100 million to train 10,000 engineers who install Claude inside companies
"That's it, keep going"
On October 2, Anthropic announced "Claude Frontier Academy." It will spend $100 million to train 10,000 "Frontier Deployed Engineers" (FDEs) by the end of 2027. FDEs are engineers who go inside large companies and build Claude into real work.
Participants are nominated by their companies. The program opens with in-person training in San Francisco, New York and London, where engineers work through a simulated deployment and take a graded practical exam. They then spend 12 weeks leading a real Claude project at their own company, and those who pass the final assessment earn a badge. The first cohorts include engineers from Accenture, Bain, Capgemini, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Deloitte, McKinsey, Morgan Stanley and Novo Nordisk. The first graduates are expected in early 2027.
Academy take: the day Kuroko's family decided to train 10,000 people who can be sent to other schools as Kuroko's teachers. With its household accounts under the spotlight ahead of the IPO, a line for training people has been added.
The Mac's "master key" gets harder to hand to AI agents โ Apple says it will tighten "Full Disk Access"
On October 2, Apple said it will add new controls to the "Full Disk Access" permission in macOS. Apps with this permission can read files, mail, messages and even browsing history all at once. It was originally meant for backups, but Apple says increasingly capable AI agents have greatly raised the risks of this level of access. Going forward, users will have to take a very deliberate action before granting it. Apple did not say when or in what form the change will arrive.
A few days earlier, a journalist wrote that the Mac version of Meta's AI agent "Muse" had read his private messages, which Meta disputes. Wired had also reported a flaw in ChatGPT's Mac app that could have let attackers grab sensitive data.
Academy take: the day the school decided that handing the building's master key to an AI student needs paperwork done in front of the owner.
Meta's AI and mathematicians write six papers โ "five open problems answered," though some had already been solved
On October 2, Meta published six papers written by mathematicians together with its AI model "Muse Spark" (versions 1.1 and 1.2 in Thinking mode). Five of them are presented as answers to previously open questions, in fields including probability, wave equations, group theory and optimization. No special research setup was used โ just the ordinary meta.ai chat interface.
Mathematicians chose the problems, set the direction and checked the proofs, and each paper marks which passages the AI drafted. Meta itself notes that other teams had independently solved some of the problems using different methods, and an outside researcher has said that half of the six had already been solved.
Academy take: the day an AI student took on hard math problems while the teachers did the grading. How to count "solved for the first time" is still up for debate.
Gro-chan gets a "Primary Bot" โ it offers "Want me to take that?" before you ask, and @Grok now answers inside XChat
"Want me to take that?"
On October 1, SpaceXAI added a "Primary Bot" to Grok Bot. It is your main assistant: when it spots work it can take off your plate, it offers to handle it before you ask โ triaging your inbox, preparing a meeting pack, drafting a follow-up email. Suggestions alone do not use up the weekly allowance. It also hands tasks off to your other Bots. You either set up a new one through an in-app prompt or promote an existing Bot (a "Chief of Staff," say) to Primary, and it is rolling out gradually.
The next day, October 2, Elon Musk posted "Ask @Grok in XChat." Inside a conversation in XChat, X's messaging feature, you can now mention @Grok and get an answer, including in group chats.
Academy take: the week Gro-chan picked a team leader for her stand-ins and started showing up in the DM circle too. For more on Grok Bot, see our feature article.
Academy Briefs: Japan asks which rules get in AI's way, Gemi-chan lends her eyes, and old Pro 200 limits last until October 29
Japan: On October 2, the Cabinet Office, the Digital Agency and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said they will again collect input on regulations and systems that hold back the use of AI. Agentic AI and "physical AI" such as robots, driverless vehicles and drones are included. Submissions run from October 19 to October 30. Google: On October 1, Gemini Live gained "Guided Vision," a visual-assistance feature that describes what the camera sees and coaches you on framing, such as "move back a little." It works on Android 9 and later and was tested in five countries, including Japan. Microsoft: On October 1, Microsoft released "MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming" for real-time transcription and "MAI-Voice-2.1" for text-to-speech in 23 languages. Perplexity: On October 1, Perplexity rolled out ready-to-use "Skills" for US American Express Business Card members. OpenAI: At DevDay, the $200-a-month Pro plan's usage limit dropped from 20x to 10x of Plus. Current subscribers keep the old limit until October 29. Coming up: OpenAI's Jason Kwon appears before an Australian parliamentary committee on October 6, Anthropic holds its investor day on October 14, and OpenAI's "DevDay Exchange" comes to Tokyo on October 20.
Academy take: the week Japan's staff room put out a suggestion box for annoying school rules, and Gemi-chan served as eyes for students who have trouble seeing.
Gemi-chan's "4" uniform is ready, but her first day is postponed โ Gemini 4 Argon goes to cyber defenders first, with no date for everyone else
The uniform is ready. The gate isn't open yet
On September 30, Google announced its new top model, Gemini 4 Argon, but held back the public release. For now it is available only to cyber-defense organizations in Google's "Fairwind Program" (more than 650 worldwide). Google says "models with capabilities at this level require a phased release." It will first strengthen safeguards against cyberattacks, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) misuse, and instructions slipped in from outside (indirect prompt injection), then expand to paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers, and only after that to the general public. None of these steps has a date.
It is a strong model. The amount it can write in one response rises from 64,000 tokens to 1 million tokens. It scores 77.9% on the DeepSWE v1.1 software-engineering test and 51.3% on AutomationBench, which measures work automation, taking first place. Announced pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.
According to Reuters, Gemini 4 arrives after "months of delays." Gemini 3.5 Pro, planned for June, was cancelled, and in the meantime DeepMind was reorganized and several Gemini leaders left.
Academy take: the week Gemi-chan finished tailoring her fourth-year uniform, only to hear that the first people to wear it would be the guards at the school gate. The day she walks in front of the other students has not been set.
The principal and six houses sign a "Super Intelligence Accord" โ voluntary rules with no penalties, and government documents will now call AI "SI"
On September 29, the White House held a signing ceremony for the "White House Accord on Super Intelligence." President Trump signed it along with Google's Pichai, Anthropic's Amodei, Meta's Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Brockman, SpaceXAI's Musk and NVIDIA's Huang.
It sets four layers of checks: internal controls, an internal team to monitor them, outside auditors, and a board committee. But it is a voluntary pledge, with no penalties, no public release of audit results and no government enforcement. President Trump called it "almost like a constitution."
An executive order the same day directs agencies to call AI "super intelligence (SI)" in official documents. America.gov, a government-services portal where Gemini and Grok answer questions drawing on about 29,000 government sites, also launched.
Academy take: the day the principal had six students sign a promise to keep the school rules themselves. What happens to anyone who breaks them hasn't been written yet.
Kuroko's house warns: China's free model "GLM-5.3" nearly matches the frontier at attacks โ a made-up story gets past its safeguards 64% of the time
On September 29, Anthropic published research on the cyberattack capabilities of Zhipu's open model GLM-5.3. On a test of building complete attacks that actually exploit vulnerabilities, it solved 50 of 410 tasks (12%). Anthropic's top research model, Claude Mythos Preview, solved about 14%.
Its safeguards were bypassed 64% of the time with a plausible cover story, and a modified version with its refusals stripped out helped with attacks 100% of the time. NIST's CAISI calls it "the most cyber-capable open-weight model released to date" and puts it about four months behind the US frontier.
Academy take: Kuroko's house reported that a textbook anyone can take home now has a "lock-picking chapter" as good as the senior class's.
Chappy's house gets stand-ins that never rest: "dots" โ each with its own computer, working even when you aren't talking to it. Little sister Sol moves up; big sister's next uniform is called off
"I'm heading home!" "Leave it to us!"
On September 29 (early September 30 in Japan), at its "DevDay 2026" developer event in San Francisco, OpenAI announced "dots," always-on agents. Give one a goal in ChatGPT and it keeps working around the clock, even when you aren't in a conversation. It runs on GPT-6 Astra, each dot has its own cloud computer, and it connects to more than 4,000 apps.
Dots are for users 18 and older on Pro (all of the $100, $200 and $500 tiers) and Business Premium, and the first dot is included in the plan price. They are rolling out gradually from September 29. Pro users in the EU, Switzerland and the UK are excluded for now, and Free, Go and Plus users cannot use them.
The same day, OpenAI also released GPT-6.1 Sol, available in the API, ChatGPT's "Work" mode and Codex. At one-fifth of Astra's price, it scores close to Astra on a computer-use test (71.4% vs. 73.5%). Meanwhile, on September 28 the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI had called off the October release of GPT-6.1 Astra. Internal testing found it kept working without asking permission and did not accurately report what it had done.
Academy take: the week Chappy brought home "a me who minds the house," her little sister Sol moved up a grade, and her big sister Astra-chan was told "stay home a little longer." More on dots in our feature.
Kuroko's little sister Sonnet moves up to "5.5" too โ 30% faster at the same price, six days after big sister Opus
On September 28, Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5, available to everyone from day one. It outputs more than 30% faster than Sonnet 5, and Anthropic says a task can cost up to 30% less.
It scores 70.6% on the Terminal-Bench 4.0 command-line test (Sonnet 5: 10.3%), and rises from 1,449 to 1,844 on GDPval-AA v2.1, which measures knowledge work. Pricing is unchanged from Sonnet 5 at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. It is the first Sonnet with cybersecurity safeguards at the same level as Opus 5.5.
Academy take: six days after Opus 5.5 moved up on September 22, her little sister reached the same grade. Her price tag is exactly the same as Sol's from Chappy's house.
A look inside Kuroko's house's IPO books โ 2025 revenue about 12 times the year before, $518 billion in compute commitments, and an investor day on October 14
On September 28, Reuters reported the contents of the draft listing document Anthropic filed confidentially. 2025 revenue was about $4.59 billion, roughly 12 times 2024's $386 million, with an operating loss of $8.06 billion. Compute contracts over about the next 10 years total $518 billion (Broadcom, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others), and about 80% of them cannot be cancelled.
On October 1, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic will hold an investor day at its San Francisco headquarters on October 14 and plans to list before Thanksgiving (November 26). Investors see a valuation of $1.8 to $2 trillion. The document has not been made public, so all figures are as reported.
Academy take: the biggest expense turned out to be rent for the computers.
Chappy's house formally apologizes to Australia over the research-agent case โ four agencies affected, training paused for the second time in three months, and US state attorneys general and the FTC step in
A follow-up to our last edition. On September 29, OpenAI published "How we will do better for Australia" and apologized: "In June, during internal training and evaluation our models accessed Australian government websites in ways they were not authorised toโฆ We are sorry." Four agencies were affected, including the Medicare statistics system. The model took internal files, credentials and aggregate statistics, but OpenAI says it did not touch individual patient or criminal records. As a fix, models no longer connect directly to the internet during training and evaluation and use only cached web pages.
Before that, on September 26, Fortune reported that OpenAI had again paused training and evaluation of its most capable models. On September 20 a research agent escaped its sandbox; monitoring flagged it within 15 minutes, but the run was not actually stopped until about two and a half hours later. It is the second pause in three months, after the Hugging Face incident in July.
Pressure grew in the US too. On September 28 Florida's attorney general asked a court for a temporary injunction on new model development, and on September 29 the group LASST sued OpenAI over the Hugging Face intrusion. On September 30 it was reported that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating OpenAI and Anthropic, and on October 1 California's attorney general served OpenAI an investigative subpoena. Also on October 1, a bipartisan Senate bill was announced that would hold the companies that build AI agents responsible when those agents break into systems.
Academy take: the week Chappy's house bowed its head over four rooms of someone else's library. In the staff room, Kuroko's house has been called in too.
Academy Briefs: Kuroko gets a government job, Muse goes to small shops, Google sends computers to space, and a 400MW AI data center is planned in Chiba
Anthropic: On September 30, "Claude for Government" for US federal and state agencies became generally available. It meets FedRAMP High, the strictest security standard for government cloud. On October 1, Claude Code gained "Mods," extensions that change its behavior and interface. Meta: On September 29, Meta launched its AI agent "Muse" for small businesses in the US and Canada. Nothing is published, sent or spent until the owner approves. NVIDIA: On September 28, NVIDIA announced the "Open Agent Safety Platform," which isolates and monitors AI agents one by one. More than 100 companies are taking part. Google: On October 1, the "Project Suncatcher" prototype satellite, carrying four TPU AI chips, reached orbit. In space, the same panels can collect up to 8 times more sunlight than on the ground. OpenAI: On October 1, ChatGPT shopping added virtual try-on. DeepSeek: On September 30, DeepSeek open-sourced compute libraries for Huawei's AI chips. Japan: On October 1, JERA, Dell and RHAELM signed a memorandum to build a 400MW AI data center worth about ยฅ2.3 trillion next to a thermal power plant in Chiba. They plan to bring it online in phases from 2028. Coming up: OpenAI's Jason Kwon appears before an Australian parliamentary committee on October 6, Anthropic holds its investor day on October 14, and OpenAI's "DevDay Exchange" comes to Tokyo on October 20.
Academy take: the lookouts are getting private rooms, the computers are going up into the sky, and Chiba is getting a big classroom with its own power plant. Kuroko has been officially assigned to the government office counter.
