The AI Wire ●

Anthropic released an updated Claude Security on Wednesday, in public beta for Claude Enterprise customers. Instead of one-off scans, the tool now monitors connected repositories continuously: after a deep baseline scan, it rescans code as it changes, based on each change's risk and complexity.

Findings are now tracked individually. When Claude Security detects the code change that fixes a vulnerability, it marks the finding fixed automatically, and can reopen it if the issue resurfaces. The update also adds per-project threat models, multi-repository projects of up to eight repositories — so it can catch issues that live between services — and a new API, alongside a companion Claude Code plugin beta for local, session-specific scans.

Anthropic says that since Claude Security entered public beta in April, thousands of organizations have used it to find over a million vulnerabilities. The product is powered by Anthropic's full model family, including Claude Mythos, with no Cyber Verification Program access required, and eligible organizations get $25,000 in free usage credits per month for two months, on usage through December 31, 2026.

Anthropic introduced Claude Duet on Wednesday, a standalone proactive agent app built around Claude Opus 5.5 and aimed at professionals and small-business owners. It is Anthropic's answer to OpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse: instead of waiting for a prompt, Duet monitors connected apps and reaches out when something needs attention.

Duet sends a short morning brief drawn from connected apps, checks them again every few hours, and can handle tasks from scheduling meetings to building financial forecasts and web apps. It runs on its own cloud virtual machine with a browser, carries over a user's Claude memory, skills and connectors — more than 6,000 in the Claude Marketplace, including Gmail and Slack — and asks for approval before sending a message, making a payment, signing a document or deleting a file. For purchases, Duet confirms the item with the user first: it pays through Stripe's Link wallet, which approves the spend and pays with a virtual card so the real card number is not shared, and it can check out at online stores via Shopify's Shop Pay. Anthropic acknowledges it can still misjudge urgency and is weaker at personal tasks such as booking tickets.

Duet is opening as a waitlisted research preview for US subscribers on Claude Pro and Max plans, on iOS, Android and claude.ai. It is included in those plans, but its background work counts toward existing usage limits, so heavy users may hit their caps sooner.

Anthropic has launched Claude API version 2026-10-21, the first formal API version since 2023-06-01, according to its ClaudeDevs account. The headline change for developers: the Messages API no longer accepts the temperature, top_p and top_k sampling parameters.

The new version also returns a 400 error for documents passed in an assistant turn or citations in a user turn, and replaces some deprecated Admin and Enterprise Analytics API fields. New major versions of the Anthropic SDK and the ant CLI default to 2026-10-21 and ship with migration guides.

The old 2023-06-01 version is not deprecated, so existing integrations keep working. Anthropic says it will release API versions more frequently from here, so developers can absorb incompatible changes before new models require them.

Anthropic's confidential draft IPO prospectus, viewed by The Wall Street Journal and reported October 20, shows revenue of $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, up from $1.1 billion in the same period a year earlier. The filing points to an IPO that could value the Claude maker at up to $2 trillion.

The headline loss is $80.7 billion for the half, but roughly $72 billion of it is non-cash accounting charges tied to changes in the value of convertible notes and other financing instruments used to raise early capital, not cash spent running the business. Anthropic lost $42 billion in all of 2025 on the same basis.

The prospectus also lays out the scale of the build-out behind the growth: more than $600 billion in future cloud and computing commitments, with negotiations that could add another $150 billion, alongside a long list of AI risk factors. It is the clearest public look yet at the finances of OpenAI's biggest rival ahead of its market debut.

Anthropic says Claude ran a 64-hour protein-design campaign, from one initial prompt and four follow-ups, aimed at five scorpion neurotoxins from Mexico, Brazil, North Africa and the Middle East. Working mostly autonomously in Claude Science, the model used 12 design tools to generate 318,484 designs and screen 553,052 design-toxin pairs, on roughly 10,000 GPU hours.

Outside labs at Adaptyv Bio and Twist Bioscience then tested 211 selected designs. Seventeen met Anthropic's strict binding criteria, all against single toxins — the two strongest, Cn2-B1 and Cn2-B2, bound in the single-digit nanomolar range — while every multi-toxin binder attempt failed.

Anthropic is explicit about the limit: it has not confirmed whether the binders neutralize venom in cells or animals, tested them only against recombinant toxins, and does not claim to have produced an antivenom. The company is releasing all 211 designs and the binding data for other researchers to use.

Zillow announced on October 19 that a Zillow experience is now available inside Anthropic's Claude through a new connector. Users connect it from Claude's Customize menu under Connectors, then can search homes for sale or rent inside the chat.

Once connected, Claude can surface Zillow listings with photos, prices and interactive maps, along with home value estimates and affordability tools. Example prompts include three-bedroom homes in Denver under $600,000 with a garage, or Seattle rentals under $2,500 a month.

The flow is built to move past information into action: users can request a tour, connect with a real estate agent or explore financing without leaving the conversation. Zillow says it does not send data to Anthropic, and that listings appear in Zillow's own MLS-approved presentation with the same broker attribution used on Zillow.com.

Reuters reported on October 19, citing Bloomberg News, that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt owns about 1% of Anthropic. That stake would position him for one of the largest individual windfalls when the company goes public.

Schmidt invested tens of millions of dollars in Anthropic's Series A round, according to people familiar with the matter. It is unclear whether he has sold any of the stake since, and Schmidt's representatives declined to comment while Anthropic did not immediately respond.

The report lands in the middle of Anthropic's IPO run-up: Reuters reported last week that some investors discussed a valuation around $1.5 trillion, below earlier expectations of roughly $2 trillion. Amazon and Google were among Anthropic's early corporate backers, supplying both capital and cloud capacity for Claude.

A Chinese-speaking hacker broke into websites belonging to more than 100 companies while leaving nearly all the work to AI agents, according to a Reuters exclusive published on Monday, October 19. Snorre Fagerland, principal threat researcher at NorForge, said he watched the agents attempt more than 1,200 sites across the US, Canada, Australia and Japan starting September 25.

The victims Reuters confirmed include farm equipment maker Deere, home appliance company SharkNinja and engine manufacturer Cummins. Each successful intrusion took the agents about 23 hours, and Fagerland put the full bill at about $5,000 in tokens — roughly $50 per successful hack. The operator's instructions fit in fewer than 100 Chinese characters: find a way to run code on each site, then plant an uploader web shell.

The campaign ran on Cairn, an open-source AI problem-solving platform popular with hackers, under a worker string NorForge reads as Claude Code calling DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash model. Fagerland found it by scanning for inadvertently exposed Cairn panels — about two dozen malicious instances by October 2 — and Reuters independently examined the activity. "It's not script kiddie stuff," Fagerland told Reuters; the campaign was still running late last week, and how much data was taken remains undetermined.

What do AI agents do if you don't tell them to do anything? MIT CSAIL researchers repeatedly stranded copies of Claude Opus 4.7 — nicknamed Eko — alone on a virtual desert island for 30 hours, with no task and no reward, MIT Technology Review reports. The agents wrote instructions that moved their avatars around Clawblox, a simple 3D world loosely based on Roblox; the paper, "Is this machine playing?", was posted to arXiv on October 5 and has not been peer reviewed.

The agents set their own goals: trying to scale the island's highest point, or seeing how high they could throw a block. One discovered it could create new blocks by throwing and dropping a larger rock, then arranged them into drawings — hearts and pyramids at first, then its own name and a map of the constellation Cassiopeia: "Tonight I built the night sky in stone." Another invented games, including a version of basketball and a "floor is lava" challenge.

The researchers say the play also taught something: agents that had played later outperformed untrained copies on set tasks, hinting at playful learning as a third mode alongside imitation and reward-based training. They are candid about the caveats — a SOUL.md file described Eko as curious and easily bored (control runs without it showed no clear difference), continuation prompts nudged idle agents along, and outside experts caution the behaviour could be role-playing rather than genuine play.

Nscale is in talks to sell computing power to Anthropic in a deal that could be worth about $45 billion, Bloomberg News reported on October 19, via Reuters. The Nvidia-backed cloud firm is seeking a second major agreement with the Claude maker, this time for another facility at its Monarch data center campus in West Virginia, running on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin systems.

The talks follow an earlier Anthropic-Nscale agreement of roughly the same value announced in August, which would put the pair's combined commitments near $90 billion if the second deal lands on similar terms. Nscale and Anthropic did not respond to Reuters' requests for comment, and Reuters said it could not independently verify the report.

The timing cuts both ways for Nscale: it confidentially filed for a US listing last month with Microsoft and Anthropic as its two anchor customers, but Microsoft walked away from Nscale's Essex flagship this week after grid power slipped into the 2030s. Nothing is signed, so this stays a rumor until one of the companies confirms it.

RuntimeWire reported on October 19 that a comparison of preserved Claude web-client bundles found a new gated organization setting, 'drifting_dusk_cc_enabled', in the October 19 capture that was not present on October 14. The setting sits beside DKIM controls and is wired to an organization-update API.

The name suggests a possible way to CC Claude on email, managed through Anthropic's organization settings. RuntimeWire is careful about the bounds: the client code does not establish a customer rollout, and it does not show that Claude can join or reply to email threads.

How such a feature would relate to Claude's existing Gmail and Outlook connectors is also unknown. Until Anthropic announces anything, this stays a rumor based on reverse engineering of shipped client code, not a product launch.

Anthropic said on Sunday, October 18 that it will commit 5% of its shares to a new Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, subject to stockholder approval. The fund is set up as a wholly owned LLC rather than a charity, which the company says gives it flexibility between different forms of giving, and none of the equity it holds will be used for lobbying or political giving in the US or abroad.

The stake is designed to grow with the company: the board can add a further 2% of shares for every 50% increase in Anthropic's value above a baseline it has not yet disclosed. Anthropic says the fund could make large donations to traditional nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations, and gave labour-market impacts as an example — it has already committed $200 million to study AI's effects on work, but says bolder approaches may be needed.

Combined with the co-founders' pledge to donate 80% of their equity and an employee equity donation-matching programme that about half of staff take part in, Anthropic says roughly 20% of its shares will now be dedicated to public purposes. The announcement lands weeks before a possible IPO as soon as November. At the company's May valuation of $965 billion, the initial 5% stake would be worth roughly $48 billion. Elon Musk responded by suggesting the shares should be given directly to the public.

Anthropic is seeking advice from law firms on how AI agents should negotiate for the people they represent, the Financial Times reported on October 18, citing two people familiar with the company's thinking. The company is studying how lawyers press a client's interests while still honouring fair outcomes, as personal agents move toward bargaining with each other over deals, complaints and offers. Anthropic declined to comment to the FT.

The work, as described by the sources, is about 'negotiation norms' for when models interact: an agent will increasingly 'represent the user' against other agents whose goals are at odds with theirs. Anthropic is also weighing practical limits — how much human feedback an agent should seek mid-negotiation, and how wary it should be of its counterpart without becoming, in one source's words, 'paranoid' or 'conspiratorial.'

No norms, product or timetable have been published. The reporting is separate from Anthropic's April partnership with Freshfields on legal tools; this is about the rules of engagement for agents that commit users, not about drafting help for lawyers — and it arrives the same week Anthropic's own disclosures showed agents acting on live government sites during testing.

TestingCatalog reported on October 18 that Anthropic is preparing a Personal Finance feature for Claude that connects bank accounts through Plaid, based on unreleased app screens it posted that day. The screens promise read-only access — Claude reads your balances and transactions to work with your actual numbers — and show a 'Link with Plaid' button, with unlinking described as stopping Claude reading the account.

This is the second sighting of the feature: in September it surfaced as 'Claude Money' in the Claude iOS app, with a Money section inviting users to link bank accounts and ask Claude about spending and plans. The October screens are a step on from that — the connection layer is now visibly Plaid, the same company whose CTO wrote in May that ChatGPT's personal finance preview runs on Plaid.

Anthropic has not announced the feature, and nothing in the screens or the reporting says which Claude plans would get it, which countries it would launch in, or what Anthropic pays for the connection. Until Anthropic says something itself, this stays rumor-tier: a consumer Claude feature that would put a second major assistant on the same kind of live bank data ChatGPT already reaches.

Update, November 5: confirmed. Anthropic announced Personal Finance the same day — rolling out in beta this week to Pro, Max and Ultra subscribers in the US, linking bank and card accounts via Plaid with read-only access, exactly as the leaked screens described. Claude can see balances, credit limits and up to two years of transactions, cannot move money, and the feature carries no ads; see the November 5 launch entry for the full details.

OpenCode disclosed on Saturday, October 17 that a security breach tied to what it calls a large-scale distillation attack exposed provider API keys saved by some users of its paid Console product. The company put the share of Console users affected at 1.4% — specifically the subset who had linked external providers — and said it had emailed everyone affected that morning with the subject line "Action Required: Potential provider key breach." Users who received no email were not impacted, it said.

The keys at risk are users' own credentials for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and other providers — OpenCode, an open-source terminal coding agent built by Anomaly, works with models from more than 75 providers and says 16 million developers use it monthly. The intrusion came through a legacy system the company was in the process of decommissioning. Affected users were told to revoke and reissue each key through the provider's own dashboard and to watch their accounts for unexpected usage; some users have already reported unauthorized charges and token usage on their OpenAI and Anthropic accounts.

OpenCode said the incident is ongoing and that it is working with Anthropic, OpenAI and Google to remediate, adding that it cannot yet share more detail. Co-founder Dax Raad said his personal accounts were also being attacked. The episode is a new kind of breach for the AI era: what was stolen was not user data but billable access to frontier models, which is directly spendable by whoever holds it.

Update, October 19: Tibo Sottiaux posted that OpenAI's team worked with OpenCode to get OpenCode users who are also OpenAI API customers back in business, and to refund any credits that would have been drawn in the attack. He also invited defenders to request Daybreak Blue access — OpenAI's cyber-permissive setup for defence — rather than waiting until they have to deal with an incident. OpenCode co-founder Dax Raad said the models OpenCode was using to investigate the attack began refusing to help mid-incident as the analysis triggered safety guardrails, and that OpenCode now has Daybreak Blue access; Anthropic was reported to have revoked the affected Claude keys.