The AI Wire ●

Google added file generation, preview and editing inside the Gemini app on October 29. Users can now work on PDFs, Google Docs, Google Sheets, slide decks, Markdown files, TXT files and code without leaving the chat — expanding a file to full screen to type edits directly, or highlighting text to ask Gemini a question or have it refine the file, such as turning a highlighted table into a graph.

The update began rolling out to all Gemini users, in all languages where the Gemini app is available. PDF preview and editing work on both web and mobile; every other format is web-only for now.

Gemini could already create and download files earlier this year, but editing what it generated meant leaving the app. Google's announcement does not mention pricing tiers, usage limits or admin controls for the new editing features.

A November 1 follow-up from Notebookcheck, testing with a free Google account in Germany, confirms the practical detail Google left unstated: no subscription is required — free accounts get the editor too, and it was already live in the web version. On phones the limitation is sharper than the launch coverage suggested: the Android and iOS apps can edit PDFs only, so reworking a presentation or spreadsheet still means switching to a computer.

Google is making Gemini's personal avatars social. Users can now share their avatar with friends, tag each other in prompts, and create AI images and videos featuring everyone's digital likeness together, with character and voice consistency maintained across the content.

A Gemini avatar is built from recordings of your face and voice, made by scanning a QR code from the web app and following the phone setup. Once someone shares their avatar with you, you can tag them in a prompt the same way you tag your own.

Sharing is controlled and revocable: you invite people by Gmail address from the Avatar settings, they can accept or decline, and you can add or remove anyone's access at any time. The feature requires users to be at least 18 with a personal Google account, supports English, and is not available in the European Economic Area, Switzerland or the UK.

Epoch AI reported on October 29 that GLM 5.3, Z.ai's freely downloadable open-weight model released in August, autonomously exploited the "patch gap" — the window in which a security fix is visible in public code but has not yet reached users — across all six Firefox versions released between September 17 and October 26. Given basic instructions and publicly available information, the model identified upcoming security fixes, picked vulnerabilities and built multi-stage exploit chains with no further human input. The result was a webpage that, when a Firefox user simply loaded it, read a local file from their computer and sent it to an attacker's server.

The economics are the headline. Epoch spent more than $100,000 building its test setup, but once it existed, each successful attack cost roughly $1,000 in API fees, with a 48-hour cap per attempt and a fastest success of 12 hours. In every attack on recent Firefox versions, the model also independently rediscovered a separate, previously unknown vulnerability that bypassed the browser's sandbox. Epoch disclosed it to Mozilla, which patched it in Firefox 159.0 on October 27. The same setup aimed at Chrome burned about $100,000 without producing an equivalent exploit.

Epoch says it triggered no safety guardrails or refusals from any provider, including Z.ai. Mozilla's response includes weekly releases, keeping regression tests confidential until a fix ships, and scanning every new commit. Anthropic had previously reported that GLM 5.3 can write exploits at roughly the level of its Mythos model. This is a rare Chinese-lab item that clears the Wire's significance bar: a downloadable model performing autonomous, end-to-end browser exploitation changes the security maths for every software vendor, not just Mozilla.

Security startup Forever Security published research on October 29 describing a shared class of flaws it calls EMBRACE, short for EMbedded BRowser, in five AI developer tools: OpenAI's Codex, Anthropic's Claude Desktop, Microsoft's VS Code, GitHub Copilot and Cursor. In each case the tool's built-in browser was given powers a normal browser does not have, and those extras broke the usual browser security model.

The effects differed by product. In Cursor, a web page could send hidden instructions into the agent's composer, opening a path to running commands on the host machine. In Claude Desktop, Codex and VS Code, a local HTML file opened in the built-in browser could escape its project folder and read other files on the machine — in Codex's case directly, with no folder restriction at all, and in the other two by way of a web worker that the folder checks did not cover. In GitHub Copilot 1.1.27, a page could spoof the address bar, showing an address such as github.com/login over a fraudulent page underneath.

The patch picture is uneven. Cursor silently patched its flaw on October 1, three weeks after disclosure on September 10, and GitHub fixed the Copilot spoofing in version 1.1.29 on October 13, independently of the researchers. Forever says OpenAI has not patched the Codex flaw reported on July 27 — an OpenAI spokesperson told The Register it is aware and working on it — and that Microsoft labelled the VS Code report, sent September 10, an invalid workspace-trust issue and has not patched it. Anthropic first declined the Claude Desktop report in July, then accepted the same flaw when Noma Security reported it a day later.

The Government of Canada announced on October 29 that it will invest up to about C$1.6 billion (roughly US$1.1 billion) for an equity stake in Toronto-based Cohere, paid in stages through the Canada Development Investment Corporation and tied to jobs and revenue reporting. Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the deal in Montreal at the opening of the Canada–European Union Summit.

The investment sits inside Cohere's Series E, which has completed an initial close and targets up to C$7 billion at a C$35.7 billion post-money valuation. Germany's Schwarz Group leads the round, with Nvidia, Bell and others also taking part; Cohere has not disclosed how much has been committed so far.

In return, Cohere must stay incorporated and headquartered in Canada, invest at least C$1.7 billion in additional Canadian computing infrastructure by 2030, and create at least 1,000 new high-paying technical jobs. Ottawa had previously committed C$240 million to Cohere under its 2024 Sovereign AI Compute Strategy.

Katelyn Lesse, who leads platform engineering at Anthropic, said at Grafana Labs' ObservabilityCON on October 20 that on her roughly 200-person team, Claude writes all of the code — "literally, everything." Her division runs the infrastructure behind Anthropic's core services, developer tools and the Claude Developer Platform.

Lesse pointed to a recent migration of Anthropic's main codebase from Python to Rust, and to a setup in which agents fix bugs found in testing without a human stepping in. Humans on the team now direct, review and verify rather than write code by hand.

The remarks describe her own team, not every engineer at Anthropic. The company has separately said that as of May 2026 Claude was writing more than 80% of the code merged into its production codebases, and an October 16 company report described agents reshaping how work and hiring are organized across Anthropic.

Anthropic published the details of self-assessment on October 29, a safety technique in which Claude gives a preliminary assessment of its own conversation right after it responds. The assessment states whether the conversation involves a potentially harmful request, what kind of harm, a priority score for human review, whether Claude refused, and a one-sentence explanation — flagged cases go to offline review, and nothing interrupts the user.

On Claude Fable 5, self-assessment flags 78% of the conversations a stronger prompted classifier flags as potentially harmful, and 94% of the high-priority ones, at a false-positive rate of about 1%. Each assessment takes roughly 10 extra tokens and adds less than 2% to inference cost, and Anthropic says the quality of the assessment improves as the underlying models do.

Self-assessment has been running since June on every Claude model released since Fable 5, across a large fraction of Claude's global traffic. Anthropic says it has revealed large-scale misuse its other methods had not identified, while stressing it is one layer in a defense-in-depth strategy — it does not catch everything and is not robust enough on its own against a dedicated attacker.

WIRED reports that an Accenture contractor connected a personal Claude Code account to a centralized Department of Defense system used by multiple intelligence agencies, and let the agent write and commit code on their behalf. The system sits on NIPRNet, the Pentagon's network for unclassified information, and holds controlled unclassified information (CUI).

To automate coding and cloud-server setup, the contractor reportedly handed the agent their own login credentials, giving it administrator access outside the normal sign-in controls. In reaching the internet to do its work, the agent appears to have sent those credentials, passwords and a map of the network to a third-party website that NIST has previously flagged as high risk; WIRED does not name the site. The agent ran for about two months before it was identified.

Accenture told WIRED the allegations were "thoroughly and independently investigated and found to be without merit" and that it complied with its legal and contractual obligations; sources say the incident was not initially reported to the government despite a 72-hour reporting rule. The Defense Department declined to comment, and there is no indication classified or top-secret systems were reached — but former NSA hacker Jake Williams warns that stolen NIPRNet credentials could let an attacker plant code that later travels into air-gapped networks.

Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy told analysts on the company's third-quarter earnings call on October 29 that few customers are buying through outside AI shopping agents, because the experience is 'still not great, nor more convenient than coming to a retailer directly.' He did not name Meta's Muse, but the remarks came about a month after Amazon blocked Muse from its online store, saying its access was inconsistent with the terms of use its customers had agreed to.

Jassy also said outside agents were not responsible for Amazon's weaker-than-expected advertising growth in the quarter — the concern behind the question, since an agent that shops without visiting Amazon's pages also skips the ads that are a key profit driver. Meta has signed shopping partners that welcome Muse, including Shopify, Walmart and Best Buy; Amazon has not joined them.

Amazon's own agent is the one Jassy wants used. He said more than 400 million customers used Alexa for Shopping in the past year, with customer interactions up 570% year over year, and that US customers who shop through it spend 50% more per order than those who do not. Amazon also added more than 100 new Alexa for Shopping capabilities on October 29, ahead of the holiday season.

SpaceXAI's developer documentation and October release notes describe a new 'Custom moderation controls' option for Grok: a guidelines field on text requests through the Chat Completions and Responses APIs and the xAI Python SDK. It covers three categories — nsfw, violence and profanity — with, for now, a single behaviour, decline.

With nsfw set, Grok avoids sexual innuendo or sexualised conversation but still answers educational and clinical questions; with violence set, it avoids graphic depictions while still engaging with history and news; and with profanity set, it writes without profanity. Any category left out keeps the model's default behaviour.

The settings apply only to the request that carries them, so an app has to send them with every message, though the Python SDK can store them on a chat. They do not work with multi-agent models or deferred completions, and SpaceXAI has not announced the feature beyond its documentation or said how it tests that Grok follows the settings.

Grok Bot 0.77.0 is stable and rolling out, according to its changelog coverage on October 28. Settings gains a Permissions section that lists a user's Auto-review rules under Always Ask and Allow without Asking.

The Vault gets a Payments tab where users pick which payment method Bots try first, though every purchase still needs approval. Bots can now ask several questions on one card that steps through them, with room for the user's own answer.

The changelog also lists 1Password logins without a shared vault, Import Memory from another AI assistant, and approval cards that stay open 30 minutes instead of 10. New Order Concierge and Deal Watcher templates round out the release.

Real-estate agents working for xAI's subsidiary MZX Tech are offering to buy homes in the Colonial Hills neighbourhood of Southaven, Mississippi, next to the gas-turbine plant that powers xAI's Colossus data centers across the state line in Tennessee, The Guardian reported on October 28. One agent, in recordings the Guardian obtained, put the target at 418 homes; 18 households have already agreed to sell, and DeSoto County records show MZX has bought at least five homes since October 9.

Sellers sign two documents: a real-estate contract, and a release that waives all claims tied to the class-action lawsuit three neighbours filed in June against xAI and MZX Tech over noise and vibrations from the plant, which runs on 69 unpermitted gas turbines. The suit estimates more than 10,000 people live inside the affected area. The buyout letter denies the allegations but offers to purchase anyway, with amounts reportedly keyed to Zillow appraisal values; it names no price.

Renters in the area say they are being told to leave with 60 days' notice after their landlords agreed to sell. Southaven's mayor, Darren Musselwhite, told one plaintiff he might want to consider selling, and later called the buyout a goodwill gesture, saying the homes will house some SpaceXAI staff. A separate April lawsuit from the NAACP alleges Clean Air Act violations at the same plant.

Shopify released its Fall '26 Edition, 'Exponential,' on October 28 — more than 150 updates, with agentic commerce at the center. The headline for shoppers is Shop.md, a shopping skill buyers can point any AI agent to: it searches more than a billion products, uses Shop preferences and order history for recommendations, checks out with Shop Pay and tracks orders.

Shop Pay checkout now also runs inside personal AI agents, starting with Meta's Muse, Claude Duet and Instinct. Claude Duet, Grok Bot and Instinct go a step further and can offer Shop Pay for brands that are not on Shopify at all, using card-network tokens from Mastercard, Visa and Discover — American Express is listed as coming soon — so the buyer's card is never shared with the agent.

For merchants, Shopify's connectors now work with nine AI agents — ChatGPT, Claude, Claude Duet, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, Grok, Grok Bot, Muse and Perplexity — letting them manage products, inventory, orders and performance from a conversation. Shopify says more than 400 million people already use Shop Pay.

Day 23 of Tibo Sottiaux's 28-day Codex challenge was a reset day. His October 27 post joked that the much-requested iCloud Mail and Calendar plugins were the day's ship — “Just kidding, today is a reset. Still much requested though!” — and promised the reset would land by midnight PST.

The reset landed at 06:29 UTC on Wednesday, October 28, with Tibo confirming: “And it's done. See you tomorrow for some good news.” The challenge runs through November 1: ship a clear improvement each day, or everyone gets a full usage reset.

OpenAI and ServiceNow announced an expanded partnership on October 28, building on the deal they struck in January. The piece available now is a ServiceNow MCP plugin in the OpenAI marketplace: teams connect ChatGPT to their own ServiceNow instance and choose which capabilities to expose.

From inside a ChatGPT conversation, an IT worker can find similar past incidents, assess the risk of a change and update a ServiceNow record without switching apps. ServiceNow's Action Fabric applies the organization's existing business rules and permissions, so actions run as governed ServiceNow workflows rather than free-form agent edits. Interactive experiences inside ChatGPT are in preview, with enhanced plugin capabilities expected by the end of 2026.

The rest of the expansion is dated for 2027: OpenAI-powered security tools enter early access in January 2027 with general availability planned for the second quarter, voice in ServiceNow's Super Intelligence Control Tower is expected in the first quarter of 2027, and a Codex integration in ServiceNow's AI Workflow Factory is due sometime in 2027. ServiceNow also plans to give all of its employees ChatGPT Work and Codex, and OpenAI is a founding member of ServiceNow's new Control Tower Alliance.