Yesterday in AI | 12 Oct 2026

Firing the Watchdogs, Bots Writing Prescriptions, and an Exoplanet Found on Claude

Artificial intelligence quietly crossed into the physical and professional roles that used to require a human diploma this week, from writing medical prescriptions and managing company inboxes to discovering new planets, just as the people tasked with safety inside the labs were shown the door. This weekly digest explores the top 10 stories defining AI.

We examine OpenAI firing three prominent safety researchers after they raised concerns over outside auditing and contact with METR, and analyze a brutal Tech Against Terrorism benchmark where 132 out of 134 leading AI models failed dangerous weapons testing. We look at OpenAI dismantling state-backed fake newsrooms alongside Anthropic banning "cruelty" to Claude, unpack Meta’s Muse assistant quietly compiling hourly dossiers on users' friends and family, and explore OpenAI and Anthropic shipping dynamic in-chat apps, interactive calculators, and live data dashboards to over a billion users. We evaluate Google giving autonomous agents their own company email addresses and staff directory seats, inspect the brutal price war sparked by 10-cent tokens and Mistral's open 1-trillion parameter "le Chonk," cover Utah issuing a waiver for AI to write acne prescriptions without a doctor in the room, look at the mathematician backlash against OpenAI dumping 722 unreviewed papers on GitHub, and celebrate a solo researcher using Claude to discover a new exoplanet candidate 116 light-years away in NASA archives.

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