The AI Wire ●

OpenAI is opening a dedicated Election Operations Center this week to watch for misuse of its tools during the US midterm elections, Politico reported on Wednesday, October 28. The center will stay active through the end of vote counting after the November 3 election, and is led by Josh Lawson, OpenAI's head of civic and strategic risk.

Hundreds of employees from several divisions will staff it. They will track breaking developments, take in reports of OpenAI's models behaving in unexpected ways, and investigate accounts suspected of breaking the company's rules, with its own products — ChatGPT above all — as the main focus. The effort also backs the voter-information services ChatGPT routes to partners Democracy Works, for registration and polling-place information, and the Associated Press, for live results.

The center builds on years of work steering users to reliable voting information, Lawson said, and follows OpenAI's October 8 report disclosing that it banned ChatGPT accounts tied to two covert influence campaigns, run from Russia and from Iran. AI companies have rarely set up such election centers, though social platforms such as Meta have run comparable operations in previous cycles.

A malicious ChatGPT shared link could run an attacker's code inside the signed-in session of anyone who opened it, letting them list and read that person's private conversations, security firm Parameter has disclosed. The researchers reported the flaw to OpenAI on October 18 and published their full technical writeup on October 28, after the fix was live. 'Essentially, we could perform any action on behalf of the victim's ChatGPT account,' Parameter wrote of its controlled test between separate accounts.

The trap was an ordinary public conversation shared with the same /share link anyone can create — no install, workspace or fake sign-in page needed. The chain combined two features in one chat: the HTML Preview, which runs in an isolated frame, and an interactive graph whose MathLive library left a listener on the main ChatGPT page accepting messages from any sender. Attacker HTML pushed through that gap created an unsandboxed frame the browser treated as part of chatgpt.com, and because ChatGPT's content policy allowed YouTube scripts, a YouTube oEmbed endpoint was abused to run the attacker's JavaScript. The reliable version needed one click on Preview; a later version triggered on simply visiting the link.

OpenAI reproduced the attack on October 21, raised its severity from P2 to P1 — its most serious level — and had fixes live across two versions of ChatGPT's web frontend by October 26, paying a $5,000 bounty through Bugcrowd. There is no report of the bug being used against real users, the fix is server-side, and ChatGPT users do not need to do anything.

OpenAI has begun rolling out texting for its Dot agents, nearly a month after Dots debuted with a promise that users would eventually be able to text them. The preview is rolling out among US Pro users first.

You can send your Dot texts, photos and even voice memos, and it can text you back proactively with updates on tasks you have assigned to it. Setup lives in the Dot's profile in ChatGPT under Texting, and OpenAI says memory is shared across ChatGPT and text, so context carries over between conversations.

OpenAI says it partnered with Linq to provide messaging support and did extensive penetration testing, stressing that you are the only one who can text your Dot, and your Dot can only text you. The launch sharpens the always-on agent race with Anthropic's Claude Duet, which is still waitlist-only in the US.

OpenAI announced on October 28 that eligible ChatGPT Pro and Business subscribers can claim up to $500 per month in API credits to build apps and agents. The offer came from the company's @OpenAIDevs account, with the eligibility rules set out in an updated Help Center page.

To qualify, a subscriber needs a Pro subscription, or a Business workspace with paid seats, that has been active for at least seven days, and must own the API organization that receives the credits. Availability also depends on the country.

The credits are a subscription perk, not extra ChatGPT capacity. They fund a single linked API organization and do not extend ChatGPT usage or Codex usage on account sign-in, and API billing stays separate from the ChatGPT bill.

An unannounced model named Obsidian 3 appeared in the public data behind Cognition's FrontierCode 2.0 leaderboard on its October 28 launch day, scored 46.8% at high effort against 45.5% for Claude Opus 5.5 at max, and was gone from the file within hours. Because the run used the claude-code harness, X posts quickly read it as Anthropic's long-rumored Claude Fable 5.5.

The identification is far from settled. One detailed Fable 5.5 tracker notes that the file gave Obsidian 3 the same chart colour as Meta's Muse Wonder 1.0, not the orange used for every Claude model, and a separate check of the claim notes the hidden row is not in Cognition's published table and traces to a single X post.

At max effort the two models were reportedly tied, and Obsidian 3 was said to cost several times more per task than Opus 5.5. Anthropic has still announced no Fable 5.5 — its newsroom, checked October 28, lists Haiku 5.5 as its latest model — so this stays a rumor, and a thin one, until a lab claims the name.

Nvidia on Wednesday, October 28 released Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe, a free, open-weight model that transcribes audio in up to 40 languages. It also released version 2 of Granary, its open source speech dataset.

Nvidia says Nemotron 3.5 can translate 31 languages to and from English, handle recordings up to an hour long, and tell up to eight speakers apart. It claims the model beats rivals on benchmarks including Hugging Face's Open ASR Leaderboard, and targets developers building apps for business meetings and medical transcription.

One drawback is that Transcribe works with recorded audio, not livestreams. At 30 billion parameters, Nvidia says it can run on a single chip, from the Jetson AGX Thor robotics controller and DGX Spark to Blackwell datacenter chips.

LG smart TV owners began seeing an on-screen notice on October 28 saying Microsoft has decided to end support for Copilot functionality on all TVs, including the Copilot-enabled feature on LG TVs — the feature is described as no longer available and may stop functioning shortly. The affected features include Copilot's parts of Voice Search and AI Concierge; Samsung's 2025 TVs and smart monitors also carried Copilot.

That date has since firmed up. Microsoft's own support documentation now states that Copilot 'is being retired from TVs and will no longer be available on Samsung and LG TVs on December 1, 2026,' Broadband TV News reported on October 30 — confirming the December 1 date one earlier report had put forward but LG's on-screen notice did not include. Copilot remains available on web, desktop and mobile platforms, and Microsoft has not given a reason for the withdrawal.

The TV integration arrived after LG and Samsung announced Copilot partnerships at CES 2025, and it had a rocky run on LG sets: a December 2025 webOS update added a Copilot shortcut users could not remove, drawing widespread complaints before LG allowed it to be deleted.

Microsoft said on October 28 that it is making the Microsoft Copilot harness available through Microsoft Foundry, extending a runtime it says already powers Copilot across its own products. The company framed the move as a way for developers and enterprise customers to build agents that can reason, use tools and complete longer-running tasks.

With the Copilot harness, Microsoft runs the agent loop and sandbox, with governance and optimization built in from the start. Developers bring the instructions, skills, tools and model choice, and Microsoft says the platforms remain open and interoperable, so other harnesses and frameworks can still be brought in.

Microsoft says the SDK is available to download, or the harness can be run in the cloud, all managed by Foundry. Because agents built in Foundry can run on the same harness Microsoft has adopted internally, its continuous harness improvements should benefit those agents too.

Microsoft and Alphabet both reported September-quarter earnings on Wednesday, October 28. Microsoft posted revenue of $92.3 billion, up 19%, and for the first time disclosed Azure's revenue in dollars: $33.2 billion, up 48% year over year and ahead of the roughly $32.3 billion analysts expected, making Azure its largest product line.

Alphabet reported revenue of $127.6 billion, up 25%, with Google Cloud roughly doubling to $30.7 billion — just behind Azure in dollars, but growing about twice as fast. The market split the two: Microsoft rose after hours, while Alphabet fell roughly 7% after Search and YouTube advertising revenue missed estimates and an $8.7 billion loss on equity securities cut into earnings.

The AI buildout's cost showed up in cash flow. Microsoft's capital spending totaled $45.2 billion in the quarter including finance leases, with free cash flow still positive at $18.6 billion, while Alphabet's free cash flow was negative $9.1 billion as its spending surged.

Meta made Muse, its personal AI agent, available in Singapore on October 28, on iOS, Android and the web at muse.ai. Singapore is Muse's fourth market in 50 days since its September debut in the US and Canada, and its second market outside North America after Japan on October 23.

From the start, Muse links to Gmail, Google Calendar and Instagram, so it can sort email, arrange schedules and draw on saved posts. Meta named eight local partners whose apps Muse will connect to, among them Shopee, Grab, Lazada and Singapore Airlines, plus Agoda, ShopBack, Klook and Trip.com.

Meta's examples include comparing prices before buying on Shopee or Lazada, planning groceries and meals through Grab, and earning cashback through ShopBack. The company says partner features will roll out progressively, with some arriving after launch, without saying which work on day one.

Meta announced on October 28 that it is partnering with five US universities — the California Institute of Technology, The Ohio State University College of Medicine, Louisiana State University, Indiana University and UTHealth Houston — granting $2 million across the five schools, alongside access to its Superintelligence models and direct collaboration with Meta researchers. The work spans medicine, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science and mathematics.

At Caltech, five faculty members get access to frontier Muse models through Meta's API, with project grants lasting up to three years, including a project testing whether AI systems can generate machine-checkable mathematical proofs against a benchmark of more than 86,900 open research problems. Ohio State researchers are studying whether routine CT scans, medical records and ECG data can flag future heart-failure risk, alongside chest X-ray reporting and Alzheimer's diagnosis support. LSU is building a camera-based system, exploring Meta's open-weight SAM models, to watch infants with tracheostomies for tube displacement and distress; Indiana is studying conversational AI for people with dementia.

Support varies by institution and project, and Meta says patient data in the healthcare projects will remain within institutional environments, with university researchers controlling the research. The model list named across the projects includes Muse Spark Open, the Muse Wonder and Muse Spark series, the 30-billion-parameter open-weight Muse Glimmer, and the SAM, V-JEPA, DINO and SeamlessM4T models.

Google has introduced Immersive Explorations in the Gemini app, a feature that lets students explore topics from microscopic systems to deep space through interactive scenes. The experiences are aimed at science and history topics that are hard to picture from text alone.

Students can open the library from the Gemini student hub by choosing "Try immersive explorations," and Google says the experiences will also be accessible directly inside Gemini chat conversations soon. Audio narration to guide users through the scenes is also on the way.

Immersive Explorations is available in English, Indonesian, Hindi, Brazilian Portuguese, French and Simplified Chinese. Google announced the feature in a blog post on Wednesday, October 28.

Google DeepMind announced Gemini 4 Carbon on Wednesday, October 28, calling it its strongest model yet, with state-of-the-art cybersecurity and long-horizon capabilities. It arrives just two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon, and Google says it ranks first on Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index v5.0 with a score of 59, a point ahead of Claude Opus 5.5.

Cybersecurity is the headline: Google reports 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding vulnerabilities, 54.8% on ExploitGym and 71.0% on CWE-bench for patching, run without guardrails. It also says Carbon more than doubles Argon's success rate at generating secure code. Those security figures are Google's own, not independently reproduced.

Access starts narrow. A subset of cyber defenders gets Carbon this week through Google's Fairwind Program, then more trusted partners, while Google takes part in the US government's voluntary pre-release testing process. Wider access for developers, businesses and consumers is promised as soon as possible, with no date; introductory pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, rising to $4 and $20 later.

Google said on Wednesday, October 28 that Chrome's enhanced autofill can now suggest details pulled directly from a user's Gmail while they fill out online forms. The suggestions can include order numbers, package tracking information, flight bookings and hotel reservations, surfaced under a 'Suggested by Gemini' section.

The feature is powered by Gemini with Personal Intelligence and is opt-in: it is rolling out in the US to Gemini in Chrome users who have Personal Intelligence enabled, on desktop, Android and iOS. Google says sensitive data stays encrypted, and users can remove suggestions or turn the feature off in Chrome settings.

It builds on last year's autofill upgrade, which could fill in details such as passport numbers and addresses from a Google Account and Google Wallet. Google says Google Photos is next, with autofill soon able to pull information from images stored in a user's Photos library.

Google announced on October 28 that it is scaling ads in AI Mode, its conversational AI search experience, to 10 new countries: Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Singapore. It plans to expand to Brazil, Mexico and the United Kingdom in the fourth quarter of 2026, and in the United States it is launching multiturn ads, so advertising can appear in follow-up queries, not just the first answer.

The ads will be clearly labelled "Sponsored." Google says queries in AI Mode are on average three times longer than traditional searches, that its research shows people are comfortable with ads in AI Mode and find them highly relevant, and that click-through rates are already similar between sponsored and organic product listings.

The announcement came on Alphabet's third-quarter earnings call, as growth in its core Search advertising business slowed to 12% year over year, down from 19% in the first quarter and 17% in the second, even as total revenue rose 25% to $127.6 billion. "This includes taking our monetization footprint global for the first time," chief business officer Philipp Schindler told investors.