9 October 2026

Amazon unveils Alexa tablets with full Android and Google Play - the Fire name disappears after 15 years

Amazon introduced three Alexa tablets: the Tablet 8 from $229.99, the Tablet 11 from $329.99 and the Tablet 12 Pro from $499.99. All have an aluminum body, full Android with the Google Play Store and built-in Alexa+, which can see what's on the screen on request. The 12 Pro has a 12-inch 120 Hz screen, and the version from $549.99 has a Nanomatte screen with a texture etched into the glass using a photolithography process developed with Corning, designed to cut glare without losing sharpness and color. Sales started on October 8, with shipping in the US, Canada and Mexico from October 14, and the tablets will be available in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the UK from October 19.

Amazon ↗ The Verge ↗

From recent days

Mistral Large 4 ranks highest in the Artificial Analysis index among models from outside the US and China - but five Chinese open models rank higher

Mistral released a public preview of Mistral Large 4, a trillion-parameter model (52 billion active) trained from scratch on 3,800 Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips in the company's European data centers; open weights are due by the end of October. According to independent firm Artificial Analysis, the model scored 38 points on its intelligence index, the same as GPT-6 Luna, and ranks highest among models from outside the US and China, but at least five Chinese open models score more, and an index task costs $1.13 with it, compared with $0.25 with GLM-5.3-Flash, Tom's Hardware reports. Large 4's strongest result is 82 percent on the CyberGym-E2E-AA test, the highest of all models; according to Mistral, Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra score close to zero there because they refuse to perform the task.

Mistral ↗ Tom's Hardware ↗

Breach of Pentagon personnel database exposed data of 2.76 million living service members and civilian employees

Unauthorized parties had access from October 2025 to July 2026 to the Defense Manpower Data Center system, the Pentagon's main personnel database, and through it to data on 2.76 million living and 294,000 deceased people, ABC News reports, citing a Defense Department official. The exposed information includes Social Security numbers and descriptions of positions held by service members and civilian employees. The Pentagon says it patched the flaw immediately after discovering it and that there is no evidence the data has been misused.

ABC News ↗ Tom's Hardware ↗

Anthropic launches Claude Frontier Academy - $100 million to train 10,000 AI deployment engineers

Anthropic launched Claude Frontier Academy and committed $100 million to training 10,000 engineers who deploy Claude in companies by the end of 2027. The program starts with a several-day in-person course that ends with a practical exam. Then, for 12 weeks, the participant leads a Claude deployment in their own organization. Participants must be nominated by their employer, and the first cohorts include engineers from Accenture, Deloitte, McKinsey, Morgan Stanley and Novo Nordisk, among others.

Anthropic ↗

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