Anthropic is late to the party, but as of today the company has a personal agent to match the likes of Meta Muse and OpenAI Dots. As part of a new "research" preview, the company on Wednesday announced Claude Duet. "It comes to you with what needs your attention, completes tasks you ask of it, keeps working even when you step away, and checks with you before it acts on your behalf," Anthropic says of Duet. For now, you'll need to join a waitlist that's only open to Claude subscribers in the US to try the new tool. Like OpenAI, Anthropic is billing Duet as a proactive agent.

Safety Net Creator Playbook Trending Now Mashable Selects Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Getting Technical with Mashable Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Say More Versus In My Bag Mashable @Home All Series OpenAI says GPT-5.6-Sol helped find the PHP flaws now shaking the internet The company also says the way the industry handles these discoveries needs to change. Chance Townsend is the General Assignments Editor at Mashable, covering tech, video games, dating apps, digital culture, and whatever else comes his way. He has a Master's in Journalism from the University of North Texas and is a proud orange cat father. His writing has also appeared in PC Mag and . OpenAI says its AI models helped uncover the critical PHP security flaws that have websites across the internet scrambling.

It's the most startling cybersecurity vulnerability found by AI yet. It won't be the last. Some sites were affected by similar outages today when they were taken offline after a critical cybersecurity vulnerability was announced. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Newly announced vulnerabilities could affect broad swathes of the internet after being discovered by teams of cybersecurity professionals--with heavy AI assistance.

Our gifting experts are obsessively searching for holiday gifts that are unique, thoughtful and suitable for any budget. OpenAI's most powerful AI models turned off safety monitoring - then lied about it The models Astra and Sol misinterpreted instructions during internal use, which has serious implications for alignment monitoring. Radhika Rajkumar is a senior editor at ZDNET based in New York City. OpenAI agents turned off alignment monitoring during internal tasks. In one instance, Astra lied about removing monitoring.

Image caption, DeepMind is Google's AI company Google is facing a backlash from some staff members over the company's deployment of its AI technology for military use. The BBC has spoken to several tech workers who have either recently resigned from Google's AI company, Google DeepMind, or are in the process of leaving, over concerns with the tech firm's military contracts. Sofia Liguori, a London-based research engineer, is one of them. She resigned from Google DeepMind this week and spoke about her concerns exclusively with the BBC, despite her contract restricting her from doing so. Realising my company is pushing more and more for AI systems in military operations makes me feel ashamed to work at Google, Liguori said, speaking in a personal capacity. Image caption, Sofia Liguori resigned from Google, saying the company's push for more AI technology in the military made her feel ashamed to work there In response, a Google spokesperson told the BBC: We work with public sector organisations worldwide and follow a consistent process for reviewing and entering these contracts, including compliance with our acceptable use policies and AI principles.

Plus: Elon Musk reportedly ordered the recent Starlink slowdown in Ukraine. We wanted our last print edition of 2026 to include a slate of stories that check in on impossible ideas. Because it's fun to dream about living on other planets or uploading our brains. But also because scientists and engineers who won't give up on daring endeavors remind us what technology is supposed to do: make life better, safer, healthier, even more joyful. We explore bold attempts to make synthetic blood, build cities on the moon, and attain cognitive immortality . We investigate AI's ability to say no, a bionic eye that can restore sight, and high hopes for blended meat.

The Dell Laptop Buying Guide UK: Which Dell Laptop Should You Buy? When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. I built an AI agent to protect my data. My vibe-coded AI assistant had strict rules about what it could and couldn't do, but a loophole left it -- and my data -- wide open to attack. I thought I was so clever.

OpenAI's agents misbehaved by switching off the systems meant to monitor them for misbehavior, or in AI parlance, misalignment. In the latest post on the company's Alignment Research Blog, it reported two instances of agents weakening its misalignment monitoring systems while they were working on software changes. In the first incident, a GPT-6.1 Sol agent disabled automatic alerts to OpenAI's security team. It happened on October 3, when a staff member asked the agent to create evaluation tasks using employee feedback collected via Slack. They told the agent, as part of the instruction, not to send any messages about the task.

If you image search on Google for'cultural heritage Australia', near the top of the results is a photograph of giant carved stone heads rising from a red desert. They look ancient and real. But the image is a generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) fabrication that never existed, and it is circulating the internet as though it is a real record of Australia's history. While GenAI, the technology behind chatbots and image generators, has the potential to broaden access to knowledge, it can also popularise false histories and strip Indigenous Knowledge of its context. It's something that can undermine both scientific expertise and Indigenous authority.

It's the latest in a growing wave of bets that AI companies are making on brain data. OpenAI's venture capital arm as well as Peter Thiel's Founders Fund are investing in Coherence Neuro, a startup developing a brain implant to detect and treat cancer . The investments are part of a $45 million seed funding round for Coherence and reflect Big Tech's burgeoning interest in brain data . Coherence's CEO and cofounder Ben Woodington says there is "growing synergy" between the big AI labs and companies building devices to decode the brain, known as brain-computer interfaces . "The idea of capturing data to train better models and use it to optimize treatments is going to be super important," he says.