Meta gives all Muse and Meta AI users new models trained by its top model

The New Stack reports that starting Friday, everyone using Meta's Muse agent and Meta AI gets new, specialised versions of Meta's existing models. Meta trained them using Muse Wonder, its frontier model. The update also brings features called Active Memory and Active Focus to all Muse and Meta AI users.

Safety group METR says Anthropic's AI is now improving about twice as fast as a year ago

The AI safety research organisation METR published a report on Thursday after an 11-week investigation into how Anthropic uses AI to build more powerful AI. According to The Verge's account of the report, Anthropic's models are improving roughly twice as quickly as a year ago, with little sign of slowing down. The Verge says the findings are alarming some researchers.

Startup Ricursive Intelligence releases Ripple-65B, an open AI model aimed at coding

Ricursive Intelligence has published Ripple-65B Preview on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 license. It is a 65-billion-parameter model trained on 12 trillion tokens, and it can handle up to 1,048,576 tokens of context. The company says it scores 80.52 on the TerminalBench 2.1 coding test, ahead of much larger open models such as Meta's Muse Spark Open 816B (76.4) and Nvidia's Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B (56.4). It says a team of 1 to 5 people trained it, starting from an Olmo 3 baseline, and that it chose a simpler dense design over the mixture-of-experts design many other labs use.

Police tech firm Axon invests $1.2B in drone maker Skydio

Resilience Media reports that Axon has invested $1.2 billion in Skydio, a US maker of autonomous drones, at a pre-money valuation of $5.2 billion. Skydio's drones are used by public safety agencies, the US military and 32 allied nations. The deal gives Axon a minority stake and strengthens an exclusive public safety partnership between the two.

Data centre builder Crusoe sells its troubled Wyoming project to Google

Crusoe, a Denver-based data centre developer recently valued at $30.9 billion, confirmed it has sold an unfinished data centre project in southeastern Wyoming to Google. Google did not say what it paid, but it announced plans to invest $17 billion to develop the campus. Crusoe had tried and failed to sign Google as a customer for the site, and Google reportedly raised concerns about its cost and construction timeline. Crusoe is still building another data centre for Google near Amarillo, Texas.

Tablet shipments fall 23% to a near three-year low; Apple's iPad sales drop most

Research firm Omdia says global tablet shipments fell 23% year over year to 32 million units in the third quarter of 2026, the lowest level in nearly three years. Apple's iPad shipments fell 27.5% to about 11.58 million.

Huawei launches its first desktop PCs running its own HarmonyOS system

The South China Morning Post reports that Huawei has launched the Qinyun HM650 series, its first desktop computers running its own operating system, HarmonyOS. They are aimed at business and government users. Huawei says they use "100% domestically made" components.

Researchers find 800+ exposed copies of a Chinese AI hacking tool online

TechCrunch reports that security firm Censys found more than 800 publicly exposed copies of ARTEX, a Chinese-made, AI-powered, open-source tool for penetration testing, which means probing systems for weaknesses. The tool has been linked to several cyberattacks since July. The copies were open to the internet for anyone to access.

FT: US officials believe Nvidia's CEO had a relationship with an alleged Chinese recruit

The Financial Times, citing sources, reports that US officials believe Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had a romantic relationship with Alice Huang. Officials allege she was recruited by China's top spy agency, the MSS, to gather information on a US company. The FT says American intelligence had warned that the tech boss was involved with her.

GitHub's Copilot coding assistant now works inside Apple's Xcode and JetBrains Air

GitHub says Copilot now works in Xcode's built-in coding assistant, as a public preview starting with the Xcode 27.3 beta. It is also available in JetBrains Air, where developers can track several agent sessions and run tasks locally or in the cloud with an existing Copilot subscription. The same weekly update lets the Copilot app merge a pull request on its own once it's ready, adds a single settings dashboard to the Copilot command-line tool, and lets VS Code run scheduled tasks using cron expressions.

Everything else