The AI Wire ●

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Terra on Monday, October 26, the mid-tier model that was left out when the GPT-6 family launched last month. It succeeds GPT-5.6 Terra and is available now in ChatGPT Work and Codex for Plus, Pro, Enterprise and Edu users, and through the API as gpt-6.1-terra; it is also generally available on Amazon Bedrock. OpenAI positions it for workday computer use: drafting proposals, reading technical drawings, filling out forms and editing video.

The price is the headline. API pricing is $1 per million input tokens, $0.05 per million cached input and $5 per million output, which OpenAI says is half the price of both GPT-5.6 Terra and GPT-6.1 Sol. The context window is 1.05 million tokens with up to 128,000 tokens of output, and prompts above 272,000 input tokens are charged at higher rates.

On OpenAI's own figures, Terra scores 50.3% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 at maximum effort against 21.5% for GPT-5.6 Terra, and its error rate on an internal difficult-prompts test fell from 53.6% to 16.7% at low effort and to 4.3% at maximum effort. OpenAI also says it completes tasks more than three times faster than GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol, while still recommending Sol and Astra for the most complex coding. Artificial Analysis calls it a new mark for intelligence per dollar; those benchmark figures are vendor-reported and early third-party results, not yet independently settled.

ChatGPT Slides, the presentation tool OpenAI rolled out inside Space earlier this month, now supports multiplayer editing. Teammates can edit a deck together in real time, and can @mention ChatGPT in shared comments to have it make edits, according to OpenAI's release notes as summarized in a weekly product digest on October 26.

The feature is still rolling out, and only to eligible Pro, Business and Enterprise plans with Space access. That keeps it in the paid workspace tier where Slides launched on October 16, rather than in the free or Plus versions of ChatGPT.

It is a small update, but it is the kind that decides whether a tool gets used at work: a slides product that only one person can touch at a time is a demo, while shared editing and comment-driven AI changes put Slides in direct competition with Google Slides and PowerPoint for live team work.

Apple released iOS 27.2 and iPadOS 27.2 on Monday, October 26, the first major update to iOS 27. The headline change is Siri AI, which now works in French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish, on supported devices from the iPhone 15 Pro onward. Siri AI remains unavailable in the European Union and mainland China on iPhone.

Siri can now recall past conversations, so users can ask about something it recommended before, and it draws on more personal sources: photos attached in Messages, Calendar event attendees, voicemails, and Safari history and Reading List. A new Excluded Apps setting lets users control in one place which apps Siri, Search and suggestions can access, and users can select and copy just part of a Siri response.

The update also switches on SynthID watermarks for images created in Image Playground and for larger edits in Photos, using the invisible watermark developed by Google DeepMind. Apple listed more than 160 security fixes in the release.

Anthropic released a Claude for Nonprofits plugin on Monday, October 26, built with about 30 nonprofit organizations. The plugin maps an organization's files and tools and carries that context across grant research, reporting, hiring, marketing and organizational policy work, aiming to cut the setup friction small teams face.

Grant support can research donors and open grants with cited sources, pull requirements out of RFPs and draft proposals from the organization's own materials. With memory enabled, Claude saves each user's map of organizational resources, and policy guidance is based on the nonprofit's own AI rules.

Anthropic says more than 25,000 nonprofits already use Claude, and more than 75% of them have fewer than 10 seats; it cites limited AI skills, alongside cost, as the main barrier. The release comes with plans to extend Claude Corps, which is placing 1,000 early-career fellows at at least 400 U.S. nonprofits, through a proposed Taproot partnership that would add experienced pro bono consultants for shorter projects; that partnership is planned, not yet operating.

Grok has published a seven-minute AI-generated take on "The Odyssey," billed as "Episode 1 of our Odyssey series" and made with Grok Imagine. The clip, a creative collaboration with Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker, depicts the Greeks' arrival at Troy and names only Odysseus among its characters.

The release is a scaled-back version of what Elon Musk promised in July, when he said Grok would put out a full-length, "historically accurate" movie version of the epic before the end of 2026. Three months on, the project is framed as a series rather than a feature film, and no schedule for further episodes has been given.

TechCrunch's Anthony Ha reviewed the episode on Sunday and found individual shots that could pass for real footage, but called the whole thing airless: a long British-accented voiceover, stilted dialogue and no narrative momentum, with the reviewer checking the remaining runtime before the clip was halfway through.

Elon Musk announced on X on Sunday, October 25, at 7:35 AM PT that Grok Bot can now place phone calls on a user's behalf: 'Grok @Bot can now call someone or a business for you, make a request on your behalf, take notes on the response and send you a note summarizing the conversation!' The workflow is end-to-end — the user hands off the call and reads the outcome later instead of waiting on hold.

The direction is the new part. SpaceXAI added voice calls in September and one-press access through the iPhone Action Button on October 19, but those features let the user talk to the Bot. What Musk described points the Bot outward, so it speaks to other people for the user, building on Grok Voice 3.0, which launched publicly on October 14.

Musk did not say which subscription plans include calling, which countries it works in, or what number shows up on the other end. The official @bot account had not posted rollout details as of Sunday morning, so it is unclear whether the feature has reached every Grok Bot user yet.

Update, November 3: the first real calls are now public. Peter Yang posted a recording of his Bot phoning Comcast, citing a competitor's price and negotiating his internet bill down by almost $500 a year, and wrote that 'all Grok Bot users should have access to call US businesses now.' Musk spent the same afternoon pitching the feature — a Bot that can research which doctors are best in your area, call them and book the appointment, and another that handled a family's complex flight booking. What SpaceXAI still has not documented is the other end of the line: whether the Bot discloses that it is an AI, whether calls are recorded, and which plans and countries are officially included.

xAI has updated Grok Bot on iPhone and Android with on-device connections for Calendar, Reminders, Contacts, Messages, location-based search and Home controls, Softonic reported on October 23. Users can ask Grok Bot to check their schedule, create calendar events and reminders, add contacts, read or send messages, find nearby places, and control smart home devices such as lights and locks.

That puts Grok Bot much closer to the phone assistants people already know from Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa. xAI says permissions are handled one app at a time rather than through a single all-or-nothing prompt, so a user could allow Reminders while keeping Messages blocked. The update also brings Apple CarPlay and iPhone Action Button support.

The company has shared little publicly about how the connected data is stored or kept separate, and the broader access is likely to draw more scrutiny over memory and safety. Grok Bot launched in beta on August 11 and is available through paid offerings including SuperGrok.

NVIDIA released Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB on Friday, the small edge model its October 15 Nemotron launch had scheduled for October 23. It is post-trained from Google's Gemma 4 E4B using reinforcement learning alone, has 8 billion total parameters (4 billion effective), a 64K-token context window and a switchable thinking mode, and is open under the OpenMDW-1.1 license with commercial use allowed.

The model is built to run locally: NVIDIA targets local assistants, interactive characters and robots, and demoed a Reachy Mini robot chatting and moving on an 8GB Jetson Orin Nano, with Bolt handling conversation and Cosmos handling vision. It is available on Hugging Face, Ollama, LM Studio, Unsloth and Jetson AI Lab, and as an NVIDIA NIM. The '4GB' name is a memory-envelope target; the downloadable Q4_K_M file is 6.18 GB.

In NVIDIA's own BF16 measurements, Bolt scores 84.8 on the instruction-hierarchy benchmark IHEval against 67.0 for the Gemma model it started from, and beat Gemma 4 E4B, Qwen3.5-4B and Nemotron 3 Nano 4B on 15 of 21 evaluations in reasoning mode — though it trails Qwen3.5-4B badly on Tau2-Bench, 55.1 to 75.1. With its DFlash speculative-decoding drafter, NVIDIA reports up to 272.6 tokens per second on an RTX 5070.