Artificial Intelligence

About 400 scientists from 34 countries have signed an open letter, published Tuesday, asking for a new international body to oversee the most capable artificial intelligence systems. The signatories include Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two of the researchers who shared the 2018 Turing Award and helped shape modern deep learning. Their message is pointed: as AI models gain stronger cyber capabilities, voluntary promises by the companies building them are no longer enough.

Quantum computing company IonQ announced on Monday, October 12 that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Elisity, a Zero Trust cybersecurity firm, in an all-stock transaction valued at up to $1.3 billion. The deal includes up to $150 million in earnouts tied to how the Elisity business performs after closing, and it is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approval and other customary conditions.

Microsoft has made its biggest move yet to run its artificial intelligence services on hardware of its own design. On Monday the company unveiled Maia 300, the third generation of its custom AI chip, and said it plans to deploy potentially more than a million of them starting next year in multi-gigawatt installations. Chief Executive Satya Nadella described the rollout as the company's biggest bet yet on its own silicon, and Azure executive Scott Guthrie said Maia is intended to become the primary system for running AI inference across Microsoft's products and services.

Broadcom chief executive Hock Tan thinks the AI boom's new limiting factor is not silicon. Speaking at a panel in Singapore on Monday, Tan said capital — not wafer or memory shortages — will be the biggest constraint on AI development as the industry pushes forward. The company, he said, is working through its wafer and memory shortages. The harder problem, increasingly, is paying for what comes next.

China's AI labs are heading for public markets — and Moonshot AI just became the biggest test case.

Moonshot AI, the Beijing company behind the Kimi chatbot, has completed its final private funding round at a valuation of about $50 billion, according to Bloomberg, up from $31.5 billion this summer and roughly $4.8 billion at the start of the year. The company is now preparing an initial public offering in Hong Kong targeting the first quarter of 2027, which could raise up to $5 billion.

Who pays for the electricity that AI eats? Three senators just published their answer: you do — and Big Tech likes it that way.

On October 9, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen, and Richard Blumenthal released a 27-page report, Power and Profits: How the AI Data Center Boom Costs Households and Communities, the product of a nearly yearlong investigation into AI data centers' impact on communities. The inquiry began with information requests sent December 15, 2025, to seven companies: Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, CoreWeave, Digital Realty, and Equinix.

OpenAI's teen safety mode is getting a failing grade from one of the most trusted names in family tech.

Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute published an assessment on October 7 rating ChatGPT for Teens an "Unacceptable Risk" for children under 18. Researchers tested more than 4,000 prompts — covering suicidal ideation, self-harm, eating disorders, and other crisis scenarios — on accounts registered to 13- to 17-year-olds, both before and after the product's August 18 launch. The accounts were linked to parent accounts, as the product requires.

Jeff Bezos thinks AI could hand workers something no union has ever secured: a three-day workweek.

Waymo is borrowing money for the first time — a sign that robotaxis are growing up.

On October 8, the Alphabet self-driving unit announced it had closed a $5 billion term loan, marking its first debt financing. In a company blog post, CFO Steve Fieler said the capital would support the expansion of Waymo's fully autonomous ride-hailing service across the U.S. and internationally, calling the loan "an important step in our evolution into a scaling commercial enterprise."

The AI agent wars are coming to the Windows desktop — and Microsoft just gave stage time to a rival.

At its Windows and Surface event in San Francisco on October 7, Microsoft announced that Meta's Muse personal AI agent is coming to Windows as a native app. Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft's executive vice president of Windows and Devices, said Muse for Windows would arrive "coming soon" with MXC integration — a notable move from a company that is simultaneously pushing its own Copilot agent.