AI News
Nous Research raised $90m at a reported $1.5bn valuation. Its Hermes Agent combines saved memory, reusable skills and access through desktop and messaging apps.
Jason Kwon apologised at an Australian parliamentary hearing over AI agents' unauthorised government-site access. Wikimedia separately reported wiki edits, Etherpad probing and heavy traffic.
Mistral Large 4 reads text and images, writes code and uses software tools. Its public API preview opened on 6 October 2026, with downloadable weights planned by the end of October.
Nano Banana 2.1 creates and edits images in Google's Gemini tools. The model supports 1K to 4K output, up to 14 reference images, search grounding and configurable thinking.
Beam is Reflection AI's first planned open-weight model: 501B total parameters, 23B active per token, built for coding, reasoning and agents. Apache 2.0 weights are planned for October 2026.
EmbeddingGemma 2 turns text, code, images, video and audio into comparable numerical vectors. Google's open model has 270M to 740M parameters and an Apache 2.0 licence.
FinCEN announced the withdrawal of its crypto mixing proposal on 5 October, citing privacy and reporting concerns. A separate self-hosted wallet proposal is also withdrawn.
Utah's Doctronic pilot tests AI renewals of existing prescriptions. Its active first phase requires doctor authorisation; direct AI submissions depend on state approval.
Six start-up-led teams have advanced in Germany's €640m quantum computing competition, covering neutral atoms, trapped ions and superconducting processors.
Sam Altman told Politico that AI's benefits justify accepting some harms, while arguing for broad access to the technology and contrasting OpenAI's position with Anthropic's.
The SEC approved Cboe's listing proposal for 3x Bitcoin and Ether funds. The products target three times a daily futures benchmark, with returns compounded each day.
An OKX and ICE joint venture has notified the SEC of plans to trade 63 US stock symbols against stablecoins, with dividend and voting rights attached to the tokens.
A Base vault lost about $6m on 4 October 2026. Three Safe owners signed calls naming the draining contract; $3.37m entered pending Ethereum withdrawals.
Isabel Schnabel of the ECB's Executive Board weighs direct issuance, bridging and a private intermediary in slides for the Bank of England's Future of Money conference on 1 October 2026. At Jackson Hole on 28 August she argued central banks should issue tokenised reserves themselves.
Apple said on 2 October 2026 it will add controls so Mac users can grant Full Disk Access, which lets an app read every file, mail and browsing history, only with very explicit user action. Some developers use it in ways that could put users at risk, Apple said, and AI agents will raise those risks.
Files exported from Meta's Muse AI agent tell an hourly job to keep a page on each person in the user's life. On 2 October 2026 Meta opened Muse to home-built gadgets and a Home Link dongle, free with a paid US subscription while 5,000 last.
Advisers to the US Department of Energy set out a three-phase quantum roadmap whose first phase aims at DOE's goal of an error-corrected quantum computer by 2028. Under Secretary Darío Gil announced it on 17 September 2026. Their illustrative 2028 range is about 50 to 100+ logical qubits.
Quantum computing could eventually cut 3 to 7 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent a year, the BCG Institute estimated on 17 September 2026. Its own footprint would be about 0.09 gigatonnes in 2040, against 1.31 for data centres at BCG's midpoint, and only 10% to 15% of the savings would arrive by 2040.
Tether chief executive Paolo Ardoino wrote on 24 September 2026 that USDT on Bitcoin is 'coming home'. Tether's sister exchange Bitfinex said the relaunch runs on Utexo and the RGB protocol, which keeps payment details off Bitcoin's public ledger. USDT first launched on Bitcoin on 6 October 2014.
D-Wave opened a beta of its gate-model quantum simulator on 1 October 2026 to customers including BBVA, FirstQFM, Florida Atlantic University and the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. It models up to 21 of the dual-rail qubits D-Wave is building.
Alice & Bob and ENS Lyon made a superconducting memory lose its photons in pairs with a steady bias of about 1.1 microvolts across a SQUID, a job cat qubits normally give to a microwave pump. Alice & Bob announced the result on 30 September 2026.
On 2 October 2026, Silicon Quantum Computing and Schneider Electric reported an average 20% improvement in the accuracy of next-day energy forecasts, with gains up to 41%, using SQC's Watermelon chip on 12 months of data. Australia has granted the pair A$3.6m (US$2.5m) for the next stage.
New York's Department of Financial Services and Wyoming's Division of Banking announced a pact on 1 October 2026 to coordinate crypto oversight. A firm licensed in one state for three years, with no enforcement action and a similar business, can seek a faster review in the other.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta served OpenAI with an investigative subpoena on 30 September 2026 over cybersecurity incidents and risks involving its AI models. On 2 October New South Wales said an OpenAI model had entered a national parks fire-data app in June.
Paul Chowles must repay £1,810,678.93 after stealing Bitcoin seized in the Silk Road 2.0 investigation. The order includes the value of recovered coins.
On-chain analyst Wazz has linked 53 memecoin launches on Robinhood Chain, made between 10 July and 21 September 2026, to one operation that extracted 7,447.45 ETH, about $18.43 million by the analyst's count, with one launch's proceeds repeatedly paying for the next.
Infleqtion said on 24 September 2026 that it entangled 30 logical qubits, encoded in 80 atoms, on its commercial Sqale quantum computer, helped by an entangling gate found with an AI model. It targets 100 logical qubits in 2028.
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