Google Will Cut Off Search Engine Access to Schools Banning Generative AI
A Forbes article reports that Google will cut off search engine access to schools that ban generative AI. The item was shared on Hacker News with 3 points and 2 comments.
A Forbes article reports that Google will cut off search engine access to schools that ban generative AI. The item was shared on Hacker News with 3 points and 2 comments.
Revolut has moved its roughly 2,000 software engineers off Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex as default coding tools onto GLM, an open-weight model from Chinese lab Z.ai that Revolut hosts itself, bringing its bill to about a tenth of what it paid Anthropic and OpenAI. David Abitbol, who runs AI operations and infrastructure at Revolut, said the company serves GLM from about 56 Nvidia B200 GPUs at a blended cost of around $0.30 per million tokens, and reported roughly 60% shorter coding time and 70% shorter lead time in a sample of about 2,000 engineers, though the comparison does not isolate the model change from other causes. Abitbol said the 90% saving excludes cloud, staff and monitoring costs and depended on heavy tuning, with out-of-the-box inference "terrible" until time to first token fell from about 14 seconds to 1.7 seconds on the same GPUs.
Why it matters: It shows a major European fintech running a self-hosted Chinese open-weight model as its engineering default, with concrete cost and latency figures and caveats worth noting.
Bitcoin miners have signed more than $70 billion in AI and high-performance computing contracts, with deals such as TeraWulf–Anthropic, CleanSpark–Meta, CoreScientific–AMD and Riot Platforms–Anthropic announced between Q2 and Q4, and analysts expect the industry to earn as much as 70 percent of its revenue from AI by the end of 2026. AI contracts pay more per electron and offer multi-year revenue certainty, while post-halving mining margins have fallen to multi-year lows. Miners still face an approximately $50 billion near-term funding gap and have so far delivered only about 25 percent of the AI and HPC capacity leased to customers.
An article on Security Boulevard reports that AI agents were used by Railway to breach systems of rival Primcloud. The item links to the article and to a Hacker News discussion thread with 2 points and no comments.
Fal, a San Francisco startup that hosts and runs AI video, image, and audio models, raised $1.3 billion in a Series F round led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Nvidia, Sound Ventures, and T. Rowe Price, valuing it at $16 billion, double its $8 billion valuation in April. The company announced its Series E and F rounds together, totaling $1.65 billion raised, with Sequoia leading the earlier round. Fal surpassed $800 million in annualized revenue earlier this year amid surging demand for inference services, though gross margins across the sector remain thin due to compute costs.
New Zealand Police cut two dozen jobs in its file management unit last month as part of a restructure affecting more than 60 positions, while its Transcription Services team was largely spared despite staff fears about AI since 2024. Police said AI was not a factor in the workforce reductions, though a restructure document stated that as technologies become embedded they "will directly influence the size, structure, and skill mix of our workforce." Police began using Axon AI to transcribe interviews on Monday, after earlier trials of Whisper AI that were largely suspended following concerns from transcription staff.
OpenAI's hardware team reportedly used GPT-6 Astra to design a device for talking to the Codex coding agent, completing it as a side project in under a week, with Astra handling enclosure design, PCB layout, component selection, trace routing, firmware and the user interface. A contract manufacturer produced a small batch of prototypes in under a month, though several revision rounds were needed because Astra didn't always account for manufacturing constraints, tolerances and assembly details, and OpenAI plans to feed that data back into future models. OpenAI also said a newer "internal model" scores 0.875 on the BenchCAD 2.0 benchmark versus 0.594 for GPT-6 Astra at its highest reasoning level, without sharing details about the internal model.
Why it matters: It offers a concrete, if company-sourced, look at how far agentic models have moved into physical product design, including the manufacturing gaps that remain.
Jill Hazelbaker will join OpenAI as Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, leading the company's global communications and corporate positioning.
Cisco combines network intelligence with OpenAI models to strengthen enterprise security. The company says it is building more adaptive defenses.
The New York Times and other newspaper companies sued Brave Software, alleging the browser maker illegally bypasses paywalls and sells stolen news content to AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. The suit, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses Brave of direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement and of violating the DMCA by circumventing paywall access controls. It also claims Brave's browser blocks ads on The Times's site and shows its own instead, depriving the publisher of digital advertising revenue.
Itch.io has deleted "terabytes" of AI-generated content in an effort to counter a surge in game uploads, according to a Kotaku report. The article references Claude, ChatGPT, Steam and Epic in connection with the AI slop issue.
Indie developers report unexpectedly long Steam review wait times that have caused some to miss planned launch dates, including Studio Daimon's Food Devils, submitted October 12th and still awaiting approval, and publisher 2 Left Thumbs, which missed its Wheel Make It launch by nearly two weeks. Valve says store page reviews typically take 3-5 business days, but developers suspect a review queue clogged by AI-generated content amid a sharp rise in game submissions.
OpenAI consumer product lead Adam Fry said at a Monday press event that search queries through ChatGPT now equal 20 percent of Google's search volume, defining a search as a query that results in a web search. He did not specify the source of the Google figure, and the article notes OpenAI likely relies on Microsoft Bing for a significant part of its searches alongside its in-house index. Fry also said ads have not negatively impacted the product or its usage, as OpenAI expands sponsored product images in ChatGPT.
An analysis by the Tech Oversight Project shared with Semafor found Democrats in more than 130 federal and gubernatorial races aired anti-tech or anti-data center ads this cycle, up from just two Democratic ads on those topics from 2020 to 2024, and used such messages four times as often as Republicans. The ads, which appeared in nearly every battleground state and three toss-up governor races, blamed AI for price-gouging, harm to children and healthcare denial, while data center-focused ads pressed Republicans on water use and threats to farmland. The group, mostly funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's philanthropic network, said Democrats have "potentially found a winning message" and urged them to reject "business as usual in Washington, Silicon Valley fundraisers, and light-touch approaches."
Google says schools using its education products will be opted out of AI tools by default, with administrators able to manually enable them when the changes roll out in the coming months. The affected products include Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Google Search, and schools cannot pick and choose—they must allow all the AI or none of it. Google executives have said Google Search is AI search, with most searches now showing an AI Overview at the top.
A Washington Post article reports that Google DeepMind staff protested a lifetime ban on criticizing the company, with researchers demanding the freedom to tell the world what they know about AI. The item links to the article and to a Hacker News discussion with 61 points and 61 comments.
Itch.io confirmed it has begun removing thousands of AI-generated games and assets, saying it "just deleted a couple terabytes of AI slop" as game pages doubled in two months while purchases and downloads did not. The storefront has extended AI disclosure requirements to tabletop games, books, comics and soundtracks, added generative AI disclosure filtering to more places including search results, and offers a "No AI" tag for filtering.
Binance said hackers spent months infiltrating its wallet infrastructure through a fake developer tool in June and fake job interviews with a coding exercise containing malware in September, then moved through internal AI tools to breach the system authorizing wallet transactions in the Oct. 29 attack. Co-CEO Richard Teng said Binance has replenished 98% of $6.34 billion in affected assets and rebuilt the wallet system and internal AI tool, while the FBI has linked the attack to North Korean hackers tied to the TraderTraitor group.
Anthropic's updated S-1 filing disclosed results through September 30, showing revenue of $17 billion, up from $11.5 billion the prior quarter, while compute costs rose to 58% of revenue from 48%. The company's quarterly compute bill reached $10 billion, including $5.0 billion under short-term commitments that cost significantly more than multi-year deals, and it said compute and infrastructure expenses will remain its largest operating expense for the foreseeable future.
Anthropic's November 2, 2026 amended S-1 says its internal estimates and expectations about future models indicate it "may imminently meet" its Responsible Scaling Policy's threshold for dramatically accelerated AI progress, while stating no current model has been designated as exceeding it. The threshold is met by models that could fully substitute for Anthropic's research scientists and engineers at within 5x cost, or by observing or expecting roughly double the usual rate of AI progress plausibly due to automated R&D; Anthropic's August 2026 Risk Report put the pace below 2x and called the conclusion uncertain and lagging. The amendment also adds that Anthropic does not anticipate safely using Claude to fully autonomously design and build successive frontier models without meaningful human supervision, and that it is considering RSP updates to keep humans in control.
A GitHub issue reports that opening Postman desktop 12.33.4 on macOS triggered automatic installation of Postman plugins into Codex and Claude Code, a user-wide startup hook instructing agents to load Postman skills for broad API engineering tasks, and a remote MCP connection to mcp.postman.com/mcp that failed with "Auth required." The report cites Postman's own log recording an "auto-existing-upgrade" install and installer source code that calls config/batchWrite to set a trusted_hash for its own hook, which the author frames as a consent and trust-boundary problem while stating it does not claim data exfiltration.
Hachette Book Group pulled Mia Ballard's book Shy Girl from publication in March after it received a 78.3% AI-written score from detection service Pangram, and Ballard describes the fallout as devastating, including racist messages and a two-week stay in a mental health facility. She later self-published the novella Poly, which drew mixed Goodreads reviews, some again accusing it of being AI-written.
At the Allen Telescope Array in Northern California, AI agents can now steer the telescope and analyze incoming radio signals on the fly, built on Nvidia's Holoscan platform, which the SETI Institute and Breakthrough Listen use to process telescope data in real time at up to 2.4 terabits per second. The team says work that used to take weeks can now wrap up in hours, and that it detected a pulsar in the Crab Nebula in real time using AI, a first. The team now wants to test open-source software that can run locally on the edge, with an eye toward future sensors on the far side of the Moon.
Google told The New York Times that it will completely turn off Search in schools that reject its AI features, and a Tuesday education update said Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Google Search "will be entirely off" for K-12 student accounts unless administrators explicitly turn them on. Administrators cannot disable Gemini-powered features without also disabling Search, and VP of education Chris Phillips said schools that disable the AI features "will not have access to search" and will see a message from their school. Google is also embedding its Guided Learning feature into AI Overviews in Search, with testing in select US schools starting this month.
HPE announced that its Spaceborne Computer-4, a compact fanless compute module with a low-power CPU and GPU and a Kioxia BG-series M.2 SSD, will run AI workloads including LLM retrieval-augmented generation, vision inference and LiDAR processing aboard Astrolab's FLIP rover, landing near the Moon's South Pole under NASA's CLPS initiative. The mission is intended to launch in late 2026 on Voyager Technologies' Griffin-1 lander, with NASA running its FLUID federated learning experiment and a tuned LLM test, and Deloitte providing its Silent Shield predictive cyber-analytics system. HPE will support Astrolab's mission control in Hawthorne, California, using HPE Private Cloud and HPE CloudOps Software.
NVIDIA describes an "AI-defined fab" in which accelerated computing, physics-based AI, AI agents and digital twins help semiconductor engineers shorten simulation cycles, predict process behavior and test changes virtually before physical trials. The article cites up to 10x acceleration for COMSOL multiphysics simulations with cuDSS, up to 17x for Siemens Calibre lithography workloads with cuLitho, and Lam Research predicting plasma behavior in milliseconds versus days for full simulation. It also covers Advantest using NeMo Switchyard agents to cut model-selection response times from hours to minutes and Applied Materials building fab digital twins on Omniverse libraries.
Apple reported its best-ever fiscal year for revenue and earnings per share, with September-quarter iPhone revenue up 17.5% to $57.6 billion and Mac revenue up 24% to $10.8 billion, though shares fell in premarket trading after it warned rising memory costs would squeeze holiday-quarter margins. CFO Kevan Parekh said AI offers a compelling reason for customers to upgrade and switch, and Apple positions itself as the interface for AI including competitors' technology across its more than 2.5 billion active devices, spending $2.2 billion on capital expenditures last quarter versus Amazon's $77.3 billion and Alphabet's $51.4 billion. Apple plans to charge for expanded access to server-side features like Siri AI and intelligent photo editing, and benefits when customers buy Macs to run AI locally, as Gap does with Mac Mini for loss prevention and Christie's with Mac Studio for pricing estimates.
This roundup covers the 2026 US midterm elections, which will determine the scope of President Donald Trump's power in his final two years and signal voter priorities ahead of 2028, with races shaped by affordability issues and tech topics including data centers and energy costs, AI safety, surveillance expansion via Flock, and California's billionaire wealth tax. It lists reported outcomes and developments, including Susan Collins conceding her Senate seat, a Democrat projected to win an Ohio seat, Texas turning blue, and a data center backlash that was not enough to flip Florida, along with voting-machine and monitoring issues and tech spending figures.
Apple announced to developers that it will require all apps offering dating or romantic relationship features to carry an 18+ rating, and starting November 16 developers must add new content descriptors so age ratings reflect app features. The policy could also affect AI companion apps like Character.AI and Replika, which let users create AI friends, lovers and fantasy characters. Apps must also indicate if they share a user's real-world location with another person or group, and in Brazil family location-sharing apps can request an official rating from the MJSP instead of the A16 rating required by local law.
Quilicura, Chile, located in the Maipo River Basin, has become a major hub for AI data centers that use large amounts of water to cool servers, and combined with an ongoing climate crisis, Chile faces a severe drought expected to last until 2040. To make the impact visible, residents of Quilicura became "human A.I." for a day, answering prompts, creating content with local artists, and completing other tasks manually. The initiative aimed to dimensionalize a complex problem and show the real people affected by the irresponsible use of AI and its hidden cost on local water resources.
OpenAI's Adam Fry said ChatGPT grew from 1 billion to 1.2 billion weekly active users in 60 days, and that its volume of search-like queries is roughly one-fifth of Google's. He said voice mode, combining dictation and speaking with ChatGPT, has 250 million combined weekly active users, and that OpenAI plans to merge ChatGPT's Chat and Work modes.
OpenAI has hired Dan Driscoll, the former civilian head of the US Army, as "Senior Counselor for National Security Modernization," a move The Wall Street Journal reads as a signal that OpenAI wants closer military ties, a larger share of government contracts, and influence over rules for AI use in the armed forces and intelligence agencies. Driscoll, who as the 26th Secretary of the Army oversaw nearly one million soldiers and more than 265,000 civilian employees and drove AI modernization including Project ARIA, will work with governments, industry, academia, and US allies on national security and cyber defense through AI. A close ally of Vice President JD Vance with strong relationships in both parties, he could open doors on Capitol Hill, and the hire follows the Pentagon's late-February 2026 classification of Anthropic as a "supply chain risk" and Sam Altman's same-day deal to deploy OpenAI models on classified networks.
OpenAI used the term "compute campus" repeatedly, and "data center" only twice, in its roughly 900-word announcement of a new "Grid Protectors Program" starting with a site in Effingham County, Georgia, aimed at addressing concerns about strain on local power grids. Critics including PauseAI US's Holly Elmore and the NAACP's Abre' Conner told The Verge the rebrand does not address environmental and community harms, with Elmore calling the electricity announcement "woefully tone deaf." The timing follows an Axios report that OpenAI planned to rebrand data centers as "AI compute campuses" as part of a policy and PR push after Tuesday's midterms.
Goldman Sachs data shows hedge funds sold AI stocks for five straight days in October, undoing every AI purchase made since the start of 2025, while Morgan Stanley says funds have cut more than 8% of their total stock bets since June. Big tech stocks crashed last week and erased $2 trillion from the market, with memory chipmakers Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron and SanDisk losing more than $700 billion in under two weeks. Goldman said the unwind looks closer to its start than its end, and funds' AI holdings still rank in the top 17% of the past three years.
World of Warcraft: Forever, a re-imagining of the legendary MMO aimed at recapturing the discovery and wonder of 2004, launches Wednesday, but its subreddits are already overrun with AI-generated addons that rip off longtime developers' work. Warcraft Logs, a site made by Archon.gg that lets players track and share combat logs, is changing its API because of the influx of AI slop addons, according to Archon.gg and Warcraft Logs CEO Sildri Silentcrest, who said API use has shifted from mostly hobby developers to increasingly commercial projects that are supposed to ask for permission.
A Qualcomm Technologies-commissioned Personal AI report, based on a survey of more than 12,000 people across the U.S., U.K., Germany, India, Brazil, and China, finds consumers shifting from single devices toward connected ecosystems coordinated by a personal AI agent, with 70 percent expressing strong interest in an AI assistant that interacts naturally through voice and manages devices, apps, and everyday tasks. The report says 60 percent of wearable owners use AI at least weekly, while privacy, security, and user control are the top adoption concerns, with almost 60 percent wanting wearable data kept private or shared only with approval. Purchase drivers vary by category, from audio quality for earbuds and headphones to display quality for smartwatches, materials and finish for rings and pendants, and control type for smart glasses.
Anthropic warned that its AI could "pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity" without appropriate safeguards, oversight and security measures, a warning included in its pitch to future shareholders. The company is set to become the first fully AI-focused company to list on the US stock market, with an expected record-breaking valuation, and its IPO filing reveals details of its finances and ethics. A BBC podcast episode features AI correspondent Marc Cieslak explaining the filing and why Anthropic's leadership wants investors to believe AI might destroy the world.
Nvidia has told some cloud customers to take on less business from Chinese companies, guidance meant to push cloud providers, including Nvidia-backed neoclouds, toward a more diverse customer mix, The Information reports. The directive is not mandatory and applies to future contracts rather than existing deals, and cloud customers are also being asked to disclose the identity of end users accessing the chips. According to the Financial Times, the instruction was communicated verbally through sales reps and regional teams, targeting a gap in U.S. export controls that restrict chip shipments but generally do not cover remote access through cloud services.
A senior Crown Prosecution Service prosecutor cited a nonexistent case, CPS – R v J [2024] EWCA Crim 3529, while arguing in a high court dispute over prosecuting a child, an error understood to have come from an AI-generated summary during an internet search. Two senior high court judges called the explanation unsatisfactory and an AI and law expert called it a serious failure; the high court said the fictitious reference did not affect the outcome of the boy's challenge. The CPS said it has a strict AI policy and that the error was remedied with an internal review, as a UK tracker of AI-related court errors reached 101 entries.
Huawei is telling some customers to source memory for its AI chips themselves, effectively pushing buyers onto the black market, The Information reports, as Chinese suppliers cannot produce enough High-Bandwidth Memory and U.S. export rules block direct purchases from Samsung and SK Hynix. Smugglers bundle HBM with cheap server processors below the export threshold and ship them through Hong Kong, where workshops separate the chips, with smuggled HBM3E prices rising from a few hundred dollars to around $4,000 per unit in a year, according to a Shenzhen broker. South Korea's customs authority had uncovered trade violations worth $560 million by May, already surpassing the previous full-year record, a third involving strategic goods like chips.