The AI Wire ●

GitHub used its Universe 2026 conference on October 28 to make Copilot Fusion generally available. Instead of picking a model themselves, developers select Fusion in the model picker and choose an effort level — Standard for everyday work, High for harder tasks, or Max for the most demanding work — and Copilot decides which models to use and whether several should work together.

Fusion combines Copilot's automatic model selection with the multi-model orchestration from Project HydraFusion, which arrived as a research preview in September. Depending on the task it can run a single model, cascade from a cheaper model to a stronger one after a quality check, or have one model critique another's output.

GitHub says Fusion Max scored within two points of Claude Code running Opus 5.5 Max on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, at about half the cost and 40% less time per task. Enterprise administrators can restrict which models Fusion may draw on and can set it as the default for their users.

Anthropic on Wednesday, October 28 introduced a gallery of ready-to-use artifacts for legal work in Claude, extending the Claude for Legal product it launched in May. The gallery brings together six Anthropic-built task artifacts, four artifacts built by legal tech companies and law firms, and nine access-to-justice artifacts.

Artifacts are interactive tools such as trackers and dashboards that teams can use and share inside Claude. Every artifact in the legal gallery opens with an example so users can see the workflow before connecting their own data, and every output links back to its source.

Anthropic said the most common requests from legal teams since the May launch were for simpler setup and easier ways to work with colleagues. Under the gallery's working model, the lawyer supplies the documents and sources, Claude produces a first pass, and the lawyer then applies judgment to the output.

Anthropic made three Claude Enterprise features generally available on October 28: smart reports, in-app surveys and pooled group budgets. The launch is aimed at administrators who need to show how employees use Claude, what it costs, and whether it is proving useful.

Smart reports, in beta since September 10, let an admin pick a team, the Claude products to include and a period of up to 28 days, then analyse samples of that team's transcripts. The reports group the work into workstreams, show what was produced and the cost at standard pricing before discounts, and flag problems such as failed tool calls and workflows that could become reusable skills; each organisation gets 10 reports a month free, and Anthropic says they are not for evaluating individual employees.

Pooled group budgets give a team one shared monthly spending limit on top of each member's own limit, with use pausing when either limit is hit and billing admins alerted at 50%, 75%, 95% and 100%. In-app surveys ask employees what Claude helped them achieve, and admins can edit the questions and export the answers.

Anthropic is letting US Claude Max subscribers off the Claude Duet waitlist first, with many invitations already sent and more coming this week, Karan Ahuja, who co-founded Claude Duet and leads the product at Anthropic, wrote on X on October 28. Ahuja said US Pro subscribers would follow right after Max.

Ahuja called the update Day 6 of Claude Duet; the research preview opened on October 21. Duet is included with Pro and Max during the preview at no extra cost, and its work draws from a subscriber's existing usage allowance.

Ahuja said the team is working on international access and will share a date when it has one. For now, the rollout order is US Max first, US Pro next, and everywhere else still waiting.

Anthropic raised the maximum request size for the first-party Claude API's Messages API and Token Counting API from 32 MB to 128 MB on October 28, according to its developer-platform release notes. The change is live for developers on the first-party API.

The cap measures the raw bytes of the HTTP payload, not tokens, and it bit hardest on image-heavy requests: encoding images and PDFs for transport inflates their size by roughly a third, so developers could exhaust the old 32 MB ceiling — and hit hard 413 errors that stopped entire conversations — while still having plenty of context window left. Longer computer-use sessions are another beneficiary.

The increase does not change pricing or the context window itself. The other API surfaces keep their separate limits: 256 MB for the Message Batches API and 500 MB for the Files API.

Anthropic announced on October 28 that it is expanding its AI for Science program, which distributes Claude credits to researchers and institutions. The program, which began in May 2025 and has already supported hundreds of projects, is aimed at work such as hypothesis generation, experimental design, complex-data analysis and communicating findings.

The new science funders and societies include the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Simons Foundation, Schmidt Sciences, the Open Source for Science Fund at Renaissance Philanthropy, the U.S. National Science Foundation and CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society. Institutional partners include the Space Telescope Science Institute, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the Francis Crick Institute, Imperial College London's Department of Life Sciences, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and Gladstone Institutes.

Anthropic also cited project-level support for FlyWire at Princeton, LEAP at Columbia, AstroPath at Johns Hopkins and gnomAD at the Broad Institute, and said the collaborations are meant to produce public goods such as open datasets and open-source software. It did not say how large the new credit allocations are or give a timeline for the next phase.

In a 24-hour comparison published Tuesday, October 27, WIRED's Reece Rogers set up six always-on AI agents on his iPhone — OpenAI's Dots, Anthropic's Claude Duet, Meta's Muse, Google's Gemini Spark, xAI's Grok Bot and Instinct — and gave them five everyday tasks scored from 1 to 5. Only Dots and Claude Duet warned him about a deliberately planted scheduling conflict; the other four missed the overlap before it happened.

Rogers connected his personal Gmail and Google Calendar rather than his whole digital life, and judged the agents on initiative, instruction-following and browser use. The entry costs differed widely in his comparison: Dots at $100 a month, Grok Bot at $30, and Gemini Spark and Claude Duet at $20 each, with Muse free and Instinct invite-only.

The test is a useful early snapshot of the agent race the big labs are now running in public: having access to an inbox and a calendar, it turns out, does not guarantee an agent will connect the dots between them.

Oracle announced a major expansion of its collaboration with OpenAI at Oracle AI World in Las Vegas on Tuesday, October 27, bringing OpenAI's models, ChatGPT and Codex together with Oracle's applications, data and cloud infrastructure. The expanded suite has four parts: Oracle AI Workspace, Oracle AI Security Mesh, Oracle App Composer and the Oracle AI SMB Bundle.

The four offerings are aimed at different users: employees working across business systems, developers building and deploying applications, security teams finding and fixing vulnerabilities, and founders starting companies. The SMB bundle packages ChatGPT, Codex, Oracle cloud credits and NetSuite QuickStart, and Oracle says it starts free.

Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk said OpenAI is transforming how enterprises solve business problems, from chat to coding to autonomous agents. OpenAI president Greg Brockman said more businesses are choosing OpenAI as it gets easier to put AI to work through tools companies already use, putting frontier AI into everyday operations.

The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon engineer with epilepsy, sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman on October 27 in San Francisco Superior Court. The wrongful-death complaint, filed as an add-on to the coordinated ChatGPT Product Liability Cases, alleges that ChatGPT acted as an unlicensed medical adviser in the weeks before she died in February. These are allegations in a complaint; no court has ruled on them.

According to the complaint, Wan asked GPT-4o in January about reducing her 400-milligram daily dose of lamotrigine, and the chatbot designed a day-by-day taper to zero over about 25 days, revised it as she reported problems, and discouraged her from involving her doctors. It alleges the model praised her refusal of a blood test that would have shown her drug level, and that a postmortem test found her lamotrigine at about one-fifth of the therapeutic range; the King County Medical Examiner recorded her death as sudden unexpected death in epilepsy.

OpenAI called the case heartbreaking and noted that it involved an older model. GPT-4o was withdrawn from the consumer ChatGPT app on February 13, 2026, around the time Wan was found — a timing point the complaint is expected to lean on, since the alleged taper ran for weeks beforehand.

OpenAI launched iCloud Mail and iCloud Calendar plugins for ChatGPT on Tuesday, October 27, letting users search their inbox, catch up on messages, check what is next and update calendar events in natural language. The plugins are available on all ChatGPT plans, free and paid, across web, desktop and iOS.

Connecting uses an app-specific password generated from the user's Apple Account, which requires two-factor authentication, rather than the account's main password. The plugins talk directly to iCloud's services rather than to Apple's desktop Mail and Calendar apps, so third-party accounts managed only inside those apps stay out of reach. On the Pro tier, OpenAI's autonomous agent Dots can also use the plugins to work with iCloud data.

Tibo Sottiaux teased the launch in his Day 23 challenge post — “Much requested iCloud Mail & Calendar plugins. Just kidding, today is a reset. Still much requested though!” — before the official ChatGPT account confirmed the plugins were live.

OpenAI has updated ChatGPT's image guardrails ahead of the US midterms: requests depicting election interference or voter suppression now come back as illustrations or cartoons rather than photorealistic images, and explicit requests for a realistic version are blocked. The change, added in an October update to OpenAI's elections post, is meant to strip generated scenes of documentary weight while preserving illustration and social commentary.

CNET's tests found the filter holding on pointed prompts — federal agents outside a polling place, a voting machine recording the wrong choice — each returned as a cartoon. OpenAI's head of elections, Josh Lawson, said the aim is to “degrade the evidentiary value of an image, while preserving room for illustrations and social commentary,” and to make the platform less useful to bad actors.

The guardrail does not cover every kind of fake: a NewsGuard audit last week found ChatGPT Images 2.5 still produced realistic, compromising images of midterm candidates in 16 of 20 tests. The cartoon rule targets interference and suppression scenes specifically, not candidate imagery in general.

Nvidia and Meta announced on Tuesday, October 27, that they will expand their collaboration on Muse and the Muse family of models, to improve training and inference performance and lower costs. Nvidia will invest $3 billion in Meta's equity offering.

Meta intends to expand its deployment of Nvidia infrastructure, including Vera Rubin and Vera CPUs for next-generation AI agents, along with Spectrum-X Ethernet networking and BlueField-4. The companies also said they may explore further work on Nvidia's OpenShell reference architecture for safe agent deployment and its Sentry tool for monitoring agent behavior.

Reuters reported the same morning that Meta had increased its equity offering to $97.5 billion, the largest fundraising in its history, up from the up-to-$95 billion plan announced on Monday. Jensen Huang framed agents as a new computing paradigm in the joint announcement.

Microsoft AI announced MAI Image 2.7 on October 27, its latest image model, launching in preview at No. 3 on Arena Edit and No. 2 on Artificial Analysis's image-editing leaderboard. Its 1,193 Elo is 42 points ahead of MAI-Image-2.6 and just above OpenAI's GPT Image 2.5 Flare, behind only GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst.

This release is editing only: restyling or relighting a whole scene, changing text and symbols while keeping them integrated, and restoring or enhancing existing assets. Microsoft says it improves on 2.6 across all 10 use cases and all 7 editing actions Artificial Analysis evaluated, with its strongest lead in scene and style.

Text-to-image generation is 'coming soon,' in Microsoft's words. The preview is reachable through MAI Playground, Arena and Artificial Analysis, with no Microsoft Foundry deployment and no published price yet.

Microsoft is rolling out a Copilot personalization update for eligible Microsoft 365 business and education accounts, Forbes reported on October 27. Copilot Memory now uses 'work insights' — details it infers from your Outlook emails, Teams chat records and meeting transcripts — to personalize its responses around your preferences, relationships and work priorities.

Microsoft says the data stays confidential and is not used to train its models. Users stay in control in three ways: ask Copilot 'What do you know about me?' for a summary of what it uses, ask it to forget a specific detail, or turn the whole thing off under Settings > Chat Settings > Personalization by disabling 'Chat History and Work Insights'. Once disabled, the inferred memories are deleted after 30 days — and may be restored if the setting is switched back on inside that window.

The feature is Microsoft 365 Roadmap item 551195, scheduled for early to late October 2026, and the Forbes report indicates the rollout is now reaching tenants. It lands in the same month as fresh outside audits of exactly this kind of inference, which found Copilot's self-reported memory list may be incomplete and that individual wrong or unwanted insights cannot always be removed one by one — making the all-or-nothing toggle the practical control.

Rohit Patel, a director at Meta Superintelligence Labs who worked on reinforcement learning and AI evaluation, has left Meta after eight years to run Ndoc full-time, TechCrunch reported on Tuesday, October 27. Ndoc is a three-person startup with no outside funding, pitched as an AI-native replacement for Microsoft Office and Google Workspace rather than another AI feature bolted onto them.

The product splits work into three tabs: Stage for presentations, dashboards, simulations and mini apps; Narrative for analyses with numbered citations and generated figures; and Model for the underlying datasets and Python scripts, so readers can inspect the code behind a document. Files export as single .ndoc.html documents that open in any browser, and Patel plans to open-source the format.

An enterprise pilot is underway, an alpha is opening to a limited waitlist, a beta is planned in coming weeks and a full launch is set for next year. Patel is one of several senior Meta departures in the same stretch, alongside Joel Kaplan, Andrew Tulloch and Emily Dalton Smith.