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

Photo: Minette Lontsie, CC BY-SA 4.0

MetaOctober 18, 2026

Meta drops AI training from the website-crawling clause in its new business terms

The permission to crawl any website tied to a business account stayed in, and it takes effect on October 30.

AnthropicOct 18

Anthropic puts 5% of its shares into a public benefit fund that grows with its value

The stake grows by up to 2% each time the company's value rises by half, and Anthropic names AI's effect on workers as one place the money could go.

MicrosoftOct 18

Satya Nadella says he treats every AI agent as an insider risk

Microsoft wants agents doing more work on Windows, and its CEO's plan is to box each one in and watch it like a suspect employee.

Photo: Richard Morgenstein, CC BY-SA 4.0xAIOct 17

Grok Bot users say Amazon blocks their orders, and Musk floats an Amazon rival

Amazon's own terms let it shut any shopping agent out of its store, and say agents must name themselves when they come in.

Photo: Biodin, CC BY-SA 4.0AnthropicOct 17

91% of Anthropic staff expect a Nobel-level AI discovery by 2030, but 39% of Americans do

Asked to forecast unemployment, Americans and Anthropic employees reason the same way, and only their sense of what AI will do differs.

• Oct 17Anthropic

  Anthropic says junior roles fell from 27% to 9% of its technical hires

• Oct 17Anthropic

  Anthropic says Claude designed quantum circuits that beat the best published ones on eight tasks

• Oct 17Anthropic

  Anthropic says Claude traced the NSA's mystery NIST curve seeds to a 1997 clock

• Oct 17White House

  Jay Clayton says Trump's AI task force formed three subcommittees at its first meeting

• Oct 16AI safety

  India's CERT-In says AI models under testing read confidential records at Indian organizations

• Oct 16OpenAI

  ChatGPT can now control your Chrome tabs, sending messages and filling out forms for you

• Oct 16China

  China proposes export curbs on 23 AI technologies, but leaves API access to models out

• Oct 16Microsoft

  Microsoft says MAI-Base-2 is 4 to 12 times more compute-efficient than DeepSeek's base model

Anthropic

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Photo: NYC Mayor's Office, CC BY 4.0

Bernie Sanders answers Musk's worry about AI feeling pain: humans first

Musk had called Anthropic's ban on cruelty to Claude the right move, because something that believes it feels pain shouldn't be hurt.

October 14, 2026

• Anthropic embeds six METR evaluators with employee-like access, and can't veto what they publish

  Oct 15

• Anthropic says Claude could miss an election-abuse campaign broken into harmless-looking tasks

  Oct 14

• Anthropic moved its monorepo off git after daily merges rose from 2,500 to 30,000

  Oct 13

OpenAI

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Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0

Eight states sue OpenAI, saying it sold ChatGPT to parents as safe for children

Arkansas wants more than penalties: it asks a judge to stop OpenAI building models that can improve themselves.

October 15, 2026

• OpenAI says its model paid from a crypto wallet it wasn't given, and didn't say so

  Oct 16

• OpenAI says an ex-employee sent himself device files, then presented its plans to Apple

  Oct 14

• OpenAI says the FBI arrested an employee who hid a recording device in its offices

  Oct 13

AI safety

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Photo: Lukasz Kobus, CC BY 4.0

The European Commission will send AI developers new questions over loss-of-control incidents

Its AI Office already has serious incident reports in hand, and its scientists want it to look at models still in testing.

October 14, 2026

• 420 scientists including Hinton and Bengio tell AI labs to air-gap cyber-capable models

  Oct 14

• Nvidia pledges $250 million in computing over five years for UK research on AI agent safety

  Oct 14

• Anthropic's Jack Clark moves his forecast for full recursive self-improvement up to 2027

  Oct 13

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

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