News

Finland ordered Google to halt construction of two data centers pending environmental assessments

Finland's licensing and supervisory authority LVV ordered Google-owned Tuike Finland Oy to stop, by October 23 at the latest, work on data centers in Muhos and Kajaani - tree felling, topsoil removal, excavation and road building - until environmental impact assessments are completed. The decision came a month after Google announced $15 billion in AI infrastructure investments in Finland, the largest in Europe. A company spokesperson admitted to CNBC that Google "fell short of its own high standards" and said it would comply with the decision.

CNBC ↗

Honda developed a road that charges EVs while driving - tests on a Japanese expressway in fiscal 2027

Honda, together with construction companies Taisei and Taisei Rotec, developed a system for charging electric vehicles in motion: transmitter coils embedded in the road surface generate a magnetic field that a receiver in the vehicle converts into electricity. The coil and the inverter share one housing, so they can be installed in existing roads. From the end of 2026, the system will undergo durability testing (a million load cycles from a wheel pressing with about 5 tons), and in fiscal 2027 it is due to be installed on a 300-meter section of the E14 Tateyama Expressway in Chiba Prefecture. Trucks will benefit first, and charging power is expected to reach 150 kW.

Motor1 ↗ Reuters ↗

Three fired OpenAI employees urge the board to keep monitoring models' reasoning

Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni and Jasmine Wang, fired from OpenAI last week for violating rules on access to confidential information they allegedly passed to an AI safety organization, wrote a letter to the company's board and safety committees about chain-of-thought monitoring, Gizmodo reports, citing The Wall Street Journal. "As an industry, we don't yet know how to safely develop and deploy models we cannot monitor," the authors write, urging OpenAI and other companies not to pursue work that would further limit this ability. OpenAI said the employees were not fired for raising safety concerns, and in an internal memo wrote that it "strongly agrees" with the letter's recommendations.

Gizmodo ↗

Anthropic releases Claude Haiku 5.5 - the company's fastest model, about 75 percent cheaper than its predecessor on average

Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5, a small model in the Claude 5.5 family for high-volume, low-cost tasks: summaries, classification, database queries and working as a coding subagent. According to the company, it is its fastest model ever, and using it costs about 75 percent less than Haiku 4.5 on average: $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100,000 tokens. It is the first Haiku with adjustable reasoning effort. Anthropic also halved the price of cache reads for Sonnet 5.5 and is introducing a monthly API credit: $100 for Max 5x subscribers, $200 for Max 20x and up to $500 for Team.

Anthropic ↗ The Verge ↗ 9to5Mac ↗

GPT-6 comes to ChatGPT with an "intelligent interface" - answers with charts, buttons and tools

OpenAI brought GPT-6 to regular ChatGPT chat along with Intelligent UI: the model decides on its own whether to answer with text or with a diagram, chart, form or interactive tool, such as a savings calculator or a bill-splitting tool. GPT-6 interleaves reasoning with answering, and for questions that require a web search, GPT-6 Instant starts answering 44 percent faster on average than GPT-5.6 Instant. Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise users get GPT-6 Sol starting October 7, and Free and Go users get the lighter GPT-6 Luna starting October 8; the models in ChatGPT Work and Codex are unchanged.

OpenAI ↗ The Verge ↗ 9to5Mac ↗

Porsche: combustion Boxster and Cayman won't return - the new 718 will be electric only, with 2028 its first full year of production

Porsche confirmed to Motor1 that the next generation of the 718 Boxster and 718 Cayman will be electric only - the "Sportwagenschmiede '35" strategy presented at Capital Markets Day on Wednesday, October 7, includes no combustion versions. Head of corporate communications Matthias Rauter explained that combustion 718s were never officially approved, so formally nothing was canceled; a year ago Porsche had announced combustion engines for the most powerful versions alongside electric variants. 2028 is set to be the first full year of electric 718 production, which according to Motor1 means a debut next year; on October 15 Porsche will show the Mission S concept, a preview of a hypercar that will sit above the 911 in the lineup.

Motor1 ↗

British startup Books by People will certify books written without AI - a fingerprint-shaped mark will appear on covers this year

Books by People confirmed on Wednesday, October 7, that the UK Intellectual Property Office has approved its mark for books written by humans, Wired reports. The fingerprint-shaped mark is meant to go on the cover; the publisher submits a declaration of authorship, the startup checks the manuscript with its own software, and its staff review early drafts and materials from the writing process. Publishers pay a flat membership fee and a separate amount for each book submitted; five have signed up so far, and the first book with the mark is due out by the end of the year.

Wired ↗

Audi RS 5: all 2026 production sold out, European orders nearly double expectations - now sales start outside Europe

Audi said on Wednesday, October 7, that this year's entire production of the new RS 5 is sold out and that it has nearly twice as many orders in Europe as it expected. The 470 kW (639 hp) plug-in hybrid, built in Neckarsulm, is now going on sale in Australia, New Zealand and Japan, followed by Korea, Taiwan and other overseas markets. Audi is tying the market launch to the Singapore Grand Prix (October 9-11), the brand's first F1 night race; Nico Hülkenberg's and Gabriel Bortoleto's R26 cars and the RS 5 on display in Singapore received a special Titanium Silver Gray paint for the occasion, which cannot be ordered.

Audi MediaCenter ↗

New York court sentences Michael Smith to 18 months in prison - his bots played AI songs billions of times, earning him over $8 million in royalties

Judge John G. Koeltl on Tuesday, October 6, sentenced Michael Smith, 54, of North Carolina to 18 months in prison and two years of supervised release and ordered the forfeiture of $8,091,843.64, the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York said. According to prosecutors, from 2017 to 2024 Smith ran thousands of fake accounts (up to 10,000 at once) that streamed hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs billions of times; in April 2023, Smith's bots using YouTube Music family plans played his music 80.9 million times, while Taylor Swift's entire catalog had 9.3 million plays on such plans. Smith pleaded guilty in March to conspiracy to commit fraud; it is the first criminal streaming fraud case in the US, Billboard reports, adding that the defense asked for no prison time and prosecutors for at least 46 months.

justice.gov ↗ Billboard ↗ Gizmodo ↗

Reflection AI unveils Beam, an open 501-billion-parameter model said to match China's GLM-5.2 with 3-4 times less compute

Nvidia-backed US startup Reflection AI presented Beam on Monday, October 6 - a mixture-of-experts model with 501 billion parameters, 23 billion of them active at a time. According to the company, it matches China's GLM-5.2 in reasoning with 3-4 times less compute and comes close to Qwen 3.8-Max on some coding tasks, although in its own tests it still loses to some Chinese models. The model's weights, along with tools for running, evaluating and fine-tuning it, are due to be released in October; in the future, the company wants to sell an "AI factory" - software in which businesses build their own models on their own data instead of paying for ChatGPT or Claude. Reflection rents its compute from SpaceX: from July 1, 2026, through the end of 2029, it pays $150 million a month for Nvidia GB300 cards at the Colossus 2 data center - about $6.3 billion in total, although after the first three months either side can terminate the contract with 90 days' notice. Nvidia has invested $800 million in the startup.

Axios ↗ Axios (umowa ze SpaceX) ↗ Gizmodo ↗

OpenAI adds an invisible watermark to ChatGPT and Codex text in the European Union to comply with the AI Act

OpenAI announced on Monday, October 5, that in the coming weeks it will start adding an invisible watermark to text generated by ChatGPT and Codex in the European Union - a response to the AI Act's transparency rules, which have applied since August 2. The textGrain technology doesn't insert any symbol; instead, it steers word choice so that a detector can read the pattern. API customers worldwide can enable it from October 5; it is off by default. In OpenAI's tests, replacing 10 percent of the words with synonyms lowered detectability from about 92 to 66 percent, and replacing 25 percent lowered it to 17 percent, so initially only researchers and institutions approved by OpenAI will get access to the detector.

TechCrunch ↗ 9to5Mac ↗

Stack Overflow: six in ten developers try to avoid AI, even though 65 percent use coding assistants

That is the finding of a Stack Overflow survey of 30,000 developers from 169 countries, whose results CNN saw ahead of publication scheduled for Tuesday, October 6. 74 percent of respondents find AI useful for writing code and 72 percent for finding bugs, but only 34.4 percent for other tasks, and 6.6 percent would trust it with important decisions. Nearly a third are unhappy at work (28.4 percent a year earlier), while 22.3 percent are "happy." Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar points to burnout and uncertainty about how much of the work will be automated.

CNN ↗

American voters turn to chatbots ahead of the midterm elections

Some US voters are preparing for the midterm congressional elections with the help of ChatGPT and Gemini: they compare candidates, check claims circulating online and look for information about local candidates the media rarely cover, NPR reports. Rafael Batista of Johns Hopkins University warns that chatbots can reinforce views users were already leaning toward and advises not revealing your own preferences to them.

NPR ↗

OLED MacBook Pro will be noticeably lighter - according to Bloomberg, Apple redesigned the laptop's internals

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple redesigned the internals of the MacBook Pro with an OLED screen: it miniaturized the components and arranged them differently, making the laptop "significantly lighter" than current models. Today's MacBook Pro weighs up to 2.1 kg (4.7 pounds). The new models with a touchscreen and M5 Pro and M5 Max chips are due to go on sale in October or November this year.

MacRumors ↗ Bloomberg ↗

Google will limit model access in free Gemini - only Flash-Lite from October 9

Starting October 9, Google will begin limiting model access in the Gemini app on personal accounts: users without a paid plan will keep only the Flash-Lite model and lose access to the Flash and Pro models, according to a Google help document reported by 9to5Google. Subscribers to the cheapest paid plan, AI Plus, will lose access to the Pro model, and Google is to notify them of the date by email. AI Pro subscribers, on the other hand, will get Deep Think mode, so far reserved for the AI Ultra plan.

9to5Google ↗ Google ↗

Tesla's Robotaxi in Austin now runs until 11 p.m. - Musk: pets are hard to spot at night

Tesla's Robotaxi in Austin now runs an hour longer, until 11 p.m. instead of 10 p.m. Elon Musk wrote on X that the biggest challenge is keeping the cars from hitting pets, which are hard to see at night: "We're literally trying not to run over gray kittens on gray asphalt in the dark." As Electrek notes, cameras typically struggle to detect objects in low light and low contrast, and Tesla relies on cameras alone. No Tesla ever sold has had lidar, and the company removed radar from its cars in 2021. In 2019, Musk argued that anyone relying on lidar is doomed. Meanwhile, Waymo's robotaxis, equipped with cameras, lidar and radar, operate around the clock.

Electrek ↗

Magnet Forensics: GrayKey bypasses the iPhone's automatic restart after 72 hours, 404 Media reports

Magnet Forensics, the maker of GrayKey, a device police use to unlock phones, claims it can bypass the iPhone's automatic restart, according to a law enforcement training video obtained by 404 Media. The new GrayKey Preserve device and the Evidence Preservation Mode on existing hardware are said to keep the phone in a state that makes data easier to access even after the restart the iPhone performs on its own after 72 hours without being unlocked. The video was probably made in early 2025 and doesn't explain how the feature works. Neither Apple nor Magnet Forensics responded to the outlet's questions.

404 Media ↗ 9to5Mac ↗

Amazon delivery drivers' glasses will photograph their surroundings almost nonstop, including people and properties, Bloomberg reports

According to Bloomberg, the smart glasses worn by Amazon delivery drivers will photograph everything in the driver's field of view, including people and private properties. The company plans to upload the photos, up to several thousand per shift, to an AI platform called Wellspring. Customers will not be able to see the photos or request their deletion. Asked whether people will be able to refuse to be photographed, Amazon's Viraj Chatterjee replied: "We haven't thought about that." Amazon says its systems will blur people and license plates before the photos reach the staff who review them.

The Verge ↗

Facelifted Porsche Panamera prototype spotted at the Nürburgring - the changes are minor

Photographers caught a prototype of the refreshed Porsche Panamera at the Nürburgring with almost no camouflage. The photos were published by Carscoops. The changes are minor: new headlights are visible, the front bumper is partly masked, and according to the outlet the covers at the rear may hide a new bumper and diffuser. Carscoops believes it is most likely a 2028 model year GTS, as suggested by the center-lock wheels and four round exhaust tips.

Carscoops ↗

Ryan Roslansky, the former head of LinkedIn, will leave Microsoft at the end of 2026

Ryan Roslansky, who ran LinkedIn for six years, will leave Microsoft at the end of 2026, CEO Satya Nadella told employees on Thursday. Dan Shapero took over the service this year, and Roslansky has since been responsible for Microsoft 365 apps and the Copilot platform together with two other executives. He explains his departure by saying the next phase of the job would require a permanent presence at the company's headquarters in Redmond, while he and his family live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

CNBC ↗

Porsche is testing the electric Cayenne Turbo GT - according to Carscoops it may have over 1,200 hp

Photographers caught a prototype of the electric Porsche Cayenne Coupe in Turbo GT trim being unloaded, Carscoops reports. The car stands out with a large rear spoiler and lightweight black wheels. It most likely also has carbon-ceramic brakes, while the diffuser remains camouflaged. Porsche has not released any specifications. Carscoops expects a 113 kWh battery and two motors with a combined output of over 1,200 hp, more than the 1,156 hp of the current Turbo version.

Carscoops ↗

Apple announces tighter control of Full Disk Access in macOS - because of AI agents

Apple announced on its developer blog that it will become harder to grant apps the Full Disk Access permission in macOS. An app with this permission can read files, email, messages and browsing history. According to Apple, some developers use it in ways users are not fully aware of. The company attributes the change to the growing capabilities of AI agents. Granting access will require the user's explicit consent, but Apple has not given details or a timeline for the changes.

TechCrunch ↗ 9to5Mac ↗

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 ↗

Tesla lets US drivers pull away with the charging cable attached when they are in danger

Tesla released a software update in the US with an emergency departure feature: if the driver confirms on screen that they need to flee, they can drive off while charging without unplugging the cable. The plug is then ripped out of the port, damaging both the plug and the car. According to The Verge, it is a response to the August shooting at a Supercharger station in Twin Falls, Idaho, in which four people were killed and seven injured.

The Verge ↗

California: fines of up to $10,000 for a robotaxi that blocks emergency services

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 1246, under which courts will be able to impose fines of up to $10,000 for each autonomous vehicle that blocks emergency services for more than 30 minutes. Companies such as Waymo, Tesla and Zoox will have to send their own technicians to the scene, and remote vehicle operators will have to work in the US and hold a valid California driver's license. The law takes effect on July 1, 2028.

TechCrunch ↗ The Verge ↗ California Legislative Information ↗