Think Facility: AI news, and what people said about it

AmazonOctober 3, 2026

Amazon drops data center NDAs with officials and pledges $1 billion to host towns

AWS's chief pairs the end of secrecy deals with $1 billion for host towns, and says the backlash is built on myths.

MetaOct 3

Meta open-sources Muse Gadgets, so you can build hardware for its AI agent

A spare Raspberry Pi or a cheap ESP32 board can now be a screen, speaker or button for Meta's agent, if you'll risk bricking it.

US Department of WarOct 3

The Pentagon creates a four-star autonomous warfare command, and Musk will help plan future war

A four-star command will scale drones and robots across the military, and Musk, Luckey and Gingrich will help decide what comes next.

AppleOct 2

Apple will lock down Full Disk Access on Macs, saying AI agents make it riskier

Mac apps that read your whole drive will need a far more deliberate yes from you, and agents like Meta's Muse already ask for one.

arXivOct 2

arXiv now caps every submitter at two papers a month, as AI tools help double submissions

September brought arXiv 40,363 submissions, double the count two years earlier, and a rejected paper now uses up half your month.

• Oct 2OpenAI

  California's attorney general subpoenas OpenAI over cyber incidents involving its AI models

• Oct 2US Justice Department

  US charges a California man with smuggling $300 million in GPU servers to China

• Oct 2White House

  Slovenia's .si web addresses sold 13 times faster in September after Trump renamed AI

• Oct 1OpenAI

  Your ChatGPT Plus or Pro plan now pays for OpenAI models inside Devin and other apps

• Oct 1Google

  Gemini 4 Argon is out to cyber defenders only, with paid API and Ultra next

• Oct 1Google

  Gemini Live's new Guided Vision mode tells blind users how to point their camera

• Oct 1Google

  Gemini skills replace Gems in November: what changes and what doesn't carry over

• Oct 1California

  Newsom bans AI-only firings in California and orders the state to keep saying artificial intelligence

Anthropic

More

Claude Sonnet 5.5 beats Opus 5.5 on Anthropic's terminal coding test, at half the token price

The cheaper model beat Opus 5.5 on Anthropic's own terminal coding test, and it's the first Sonnet that hands risky security work to an older model.

September 28, 2026

• Anyone can download GLM-5.3, and Anthropic says it builds exploits almost as well as Mythos

  Sep 30

• Trump calls Amodei "very highly respected" hours before their White House dinner

  Sep 28

• Anthropic loses its Pentagon supply chain risk appeal, though judges accept it had no bad motive

  Sep 25

OpenAI

More

OpenAI halves ChatGPT Pro 200 usage, drops the five-hour limit and adds a $500 plan

The five-hour window is gone for every Pro plan, but the $200 tier now buys half the usage it did.

September 30, 2026

• GPT-6.1 Sol costs a fifth of GPT-6 Astra and halves the price of cached input

  Sep 29

• OpenAI's dots are always-on ChatGPT agents that keep working after you close the laptop

  Sep 29

• GPT-3's replacement base models, davinci-002 and babbage-002, hit their shutdown date on September 28

  Sep 29

AI safety

More

Google DeepMind can now watermark AI-designed proteins, and the mark survives in the physical molecule

The mark lives in the protein's own amino acids, so a DNA synthesis company could check where an unfamiliar order came from.

September 30, 2026

• Current Google DeepMind and OpenAI researchers say on camera that AI could end humanity

  Sep 30

• Six AI chiefs signed Trump's safety accord, but it names no auditor and sets no penalty

  Sep 30

• OpenAI's chief scientist joins Hinton and Bengio in telling governments to prepare for an intelligence explosion

  Sep 29

Musing

Quality or quantity: what kind of smarter is AI becoming?

Musing

Humanity's place in an AI-controlled world

Musing

Genie, oracle, rogue, god or just software: where AI could end up

Musing

Eleven problems that would change everything, and the one that could crack the rest

Guide

Claude models explained: Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, Mythos and why there's no Opus 5.1

Guide

Codex models and plans explained: GPT-6 Astra, Sol and Luna, and which plan gets which

Pick one, change the bits that are yours, paste it into ChatGPT or Claude.