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Google launched direct checkout in Canada on November 4, letting shoppers buy products inside the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search without leaving for a separate store website. The first retailers on board are Lululemon, Shoppers Drug Mart, Simons and select Shopify merchants, following earlier rollouts in the United States and Australia.

Payments run through Google Pay using cards and shipping details already saved in Google Wallet, and retailers remain the seller of record. The feature is built on the Universal Commerce Protocol, the open standard Google launched with industry partners earlier this year to give shopping agents, retailers and payment providers a common language.

At launch the Canadian tool is limited to one item at a time, with multi-item carts and price alerts planned to match the US feature set. Google says 59 per cent of Canadian holiday shoppers plan to use an AI tool to help them shop this season, and that over the coming months it will work with retailers on extras such as applying loyalty rewards at checkout.

ChatGPT's volume of search-like queries is now roughly one-fifth the volume of Google's, consumer product lead Adam Fry said at an OpenAI-hosted dinner in New York on Monday night, in a fireside chat with Big Technology's Alex Kantrowitz published November 3. Fry's definition is narrow: a search is a user question that makes ChatGPT look something up on the web — current information about people, places or things, plus some finance and health questions. OpenAI did not disclose which Google baseline it divided into, and no independent firm has checked the comparison.

The same conversation put fresh numbers on ChatGPT's scale: 1.2 billion weekly active users, up from 1 billion over the last two months at roughly 100 million a month; 1.5 billion images created a week; and 250 million weekly users of voice input, counting dictation and voice conversations. Gizmodo noted the framing would make ChatGPT the world's second-largest search engine by volume — and that such numbers are exactly what a company says publicly ahead of a planned IPO.

Treat the growth timeline with some care: Fry described the jump from 1 billion to 1.2 billion as happening over the past two months, but The Verge was already reporting the 1.2 billion figure on September 29, so the timing of the increase is unclear. The one-fifth figure is OpenAI's own estimate using its own definition — a company claim about query volume, not a measured share of the search market.

Google said on Tuesday, November 3 that Google Search, Gemini, Gemini Notebook and Gemini in Classroom will be switched off by default for K-12 student accounts, staying off until a school administrator explicitly turns each one on. The company said it was acting because schools, teachers, researchers and policymakers had asked for control, and published a 29-page report on AI in education the same day. Guided Learning, already available in Google Classroom from November 3, will also reach Search for student accounts through a pilot in selected US schools later in November. Google gave no date beyond 'the coming months'; The New York Times reported early next year.

The catch is in the bundle. Each product can be enabled separately, but the Search a school switches on still includes AI Mode and AI Overviews, which Google describes as part of the product — there is no way to give students classic Search and leave the AI layer off. 'Search and A.I. are deeply integrated,' Chris Phillips, Google's vice president for education, told the Times. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani accused Google of using monopoly power to force AI into public schools, and a Community Note on Google's own response post made the same point: schools cannot enable basic Search without the AI features.

The stakes are the habits of the education market: Gemini Notebook — the renamed NotebookLM — counts more than 30 million users, and defaults set in school accounts shape what a generation reaches for first. Districts that keep AI off entirely will now lose student access to Google Search altogether, and students will see a message saying it is not available.

Update, November 4: Google spent Tuesday playing defence. In a blog post titled 'Designing responsible AI for learning' and a post on X, the company said the policy was meant to give schools more choice, repeating that Gemini, Gemini Notebook and Search are off by default and that 'schools are in control,' able to turn each on as they see fit. It also said Search for schools is being updated for learning: AI Mode and AI Overviews will offer step-by-step Guided Learning through problems so students do not simply get quick answers to schoolwork. The response did not address the central criticism — that a school cannot switch Search back on without the AI layer that comes bundled with it.

An adviser to Europe's highest court said on November 3 that Google's Gemini chatbot may breach publishers' copyright when it retrieves their articles and reuses them to generate answers, Reuters reported. Advocate General Maciej Szpunar's opinion in the case brought by Hungarian news operator Like Company draws a line: a publisher's reproduction right may be infringed when a chatbot gets around a paywall or other technical barrier, or reuses 'the form of expression of that publication in a recognisable manner.' The mere facts in a story are not protected — only their specific expression.

The same opinion cuts the other way on training: using copyrighted material to train large language models is 'freely permitted under the text and data mining exception,' Szpunar said, and there was no evidence Google had used Like Company's articles to train Gemini. The disputed activity covers June 2023 to May 2024. Google welcomed the training point and said Gemini 'learns linguistic patterns to create original outputs,' with publisher opt-out controls; the European Publishers Council argued publishers should not have to choose between search visibility and protecting their rights.

An advocate general's opinion is advisory, not a judgment — but the Court of Justice follows the majority of them, and it will rule in the coming months. A ruling against Google could force it to pay fees for content reused in AI answers, at a moment when publishers say AI summaries are replacing the search traffic they used to receive.

Google announced on November 3 that Dreambeans, its experimental Google Labs app that creates personalised daily story collections, is now available to everyone in India aged 18 and over. India is the app's first market outside the United States, and it is available on Android and iOS in 14 languages: English plus Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Punjabi, Assamese and Nepali.

Dreambeans brews its stories from the Google apps a user chooses to connect, including Calendar, Gemini, Gmail, Photos, Search and YouTube. The resulting daily collection can cover places to explore, arts and crafts, or reminders of upcoming local events, and users can dive deeper into a story, bookmark it for later, or share it with others.

The expansion is also a test of appetite. Dreambeans first appeared in the US in June, and Sensor Tower estimates cited by TechCrunch put US downloads at nearly 55,000 since then, with some stories now able to include short animations made with Google's Veo video model. Those same estimates suggest downloads fell sharply in October, so India — where Google says interest was strong — will show whether the daily-story format travels.

Google announced on November 3 that its AI Educator Series, a no-cost on-demand training programme giving teachers practical AI skills, will expand in the coming months to Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Australia and sub-Saharan Africa. The series first launched in the US earlier this year and has since reached India, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, and the UK and Ireland.

Teachers already in the programme are using Gemini and Gemini Notebook to turn topics into comic strips, podcasts and infographics, build lesson plans and assessments, and cut preparation time. Google says September sessions in India trained 80,000 educators, Malaysian teachers report saving three to five hours of prep per topic, and a partnership in the Philippines aims to bring AI training to over one million educators.

New November modules go live in the US on November 4, focused on saving teachers time: building interactive assessments with instant feedback, guiding students through game-based learning, and spotting assignment questions that invite shortcuts. Educators who complete the training earn a badge and join the programme's global community.

A WIRED investigation published November 2, built on research by the nonprofit AI Forensics and cybersecurity firm Infoblox, found a network of more than 400 connected apps and websites posing as everyday tools — pet-photo editors, language tutors, workout planners — that could secretly load interfaces for making sexually abusive and violent deepfakes from uploaded photos. A server-side switch turned the hidden features on after the apps passed store review, in some cases triggered by arriving through a Meta ad.

The scale ran through both major stores. On Google Play, 27 of the apps were live in September with more than 350,000 combined downloads, including DiffAI at over 100,000 installs; Google had removed most of them before WIRED got in touch. Apple removed 19 apps after WIRED contacted it, including the pet-photo app Viefur, and said the apps complied at review and were changed afterwards — adding it has suspended tens of thousands of apps for similar bait-and-switch tactics in the past year.

Researchers traced the network to Chinese-language codebases and a Hong Kong-registered company, KeLing Technology Limited, registering as many as 30 domain-and-app combinations a week at its peak. Meta said it banned KeLing in 2025 after a cease-and-desist, and reported acting against 11,600 ad accounts, about 4,700 business pages and 209 apps on its advertising platform, while WIRED found more than 84,000 ads tied to the network had run on Meta since January 1.

SemiAnalysis released GDPx on November 2, a benchmark for general agentic capability spanning 11 domains the firm picked for where frontier models will earn their money: chip design, cybersecurity, biology, finance, legal, quant trading, recursive self-improvement, hardware design, materials science, alignment and software engineering. Version 1.0 has 206 tasks built with 14 specialist data partners, an eight-hour default time limit, and models running in their native harness — Claude Code for Claude, Codex for OpenAI's models, Antigravity for Gemini. New versions are planned every three to six months, with a public leaderboard at gdpx.semianalysis.com.

The headline number is how low the top score is: Claude Opus 5.5 leads at 12.0%, ahead of Gemini 4 Carbon at 10.9% and GPT-6 Astra at 9.6%. No model leads everywhere — Opus 5.5 wins quant trading, hardware and chip design, Carbon wins biology and edges software engineering, Astra wins recursive self-improvement and materials science — and under binary grading, finance and legal came back at essentially zero for every model. SemiAnalysis also notes Opus 5.5 and Astra are held back in cyber, biology and alignment by their own safety classifiers: strip those three domains out and Astra edges Opus 5.5, while Meta's Muse Wonder Full is rated the best available cyber model. Opus 5.5's lead is not cheap, at $51.41 per task against roughly $17 for Carbon.

Two caveats belong with the headline. GDPx is a paid SemiAnalysis product whose authors want it to become the benchmark of record, and its partner-built tasks are not independently audited. And a 12% top score reflects tasks deliberately chosen to be frontier-hard — it measures how far agents are from full automation of expert work, not whether they are useful today.

Google's Project Suncatcher prototype satellite — its first attempt at a data centre in space — is online and communicating with the ground, TechCrunch reported on October 30. The satellite, built with Planet and launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 on October 1 alongside more than 100 other spacecraft, carries four Google Tensor Processing Units and generates up to 1 kW of electricity. After about three weeks of commissioning tests, engineers sent it a first prompt this week.

The onboard model is Google DeepMind's Gemma 4, and the request was suitably ceremonial: write a haiku about being in space. It replied: "Blue marble below / Data streams in silent grace / Starlight feeds my core." The team also asked the spacecraft to report on the orbital conditions around it, and a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch the satellite is operating nominally.

The engineering constraints are severe: the power budget means only one TPU can run at a time, in bursts of roughly 20 minutes, which complicates timing contact with ground stations. The test campaign's real purpose is measuring how the chips handle thermal stress and the space radiation environment, where high-energy particles can flip bits and silently corrupt data. If the TPUs hold up, Google plans two more Suncatcher satellites in 2027 with higher power generation and laser links between spacecraft — the step toward the close-flying inference networks the project ultimately imagines.

Google has moved its Gemini Computer Use tool into general availability, giving developers a production release of the software that lets AI agents interact with browser, mobile and desktop screens. The change appears in the October 30 Gemini API changelog and applies to both the Interactions and GenerateContent APIs. It is a change in release status, not the technology's first introduction — the changelog records earlier preview versions.

Computer Use lets a model analyze screenshots and propose actions such as clicking, scrolling and typing; developers must supply the software that carries out those actions and sends updated screenshots back. Google lists repetitive data entry, website form filling, web application testing and research across websites among the uses. Its documentation also describes configurable safety policies and optional screenshot scanning to detect hidden adversarial instructions, with an action system that can require user confirmation or block an action outright.

General availability is not a clean bill of health: Google warns Computer Use may contain errors and security vulnerabilities, recommends close supervision for important tasks, and advises against using it for critical decisions, sensitive data or actions where serious errors cannot be corrected. It is also a developer tool — not an announcement that Gemini chat users now have an autonomous computer operator.

Big Tech's earnings week turned into a referendum on AI spending on Friday, October 30. Amazon, Google and Microsoft are set to lose a combined $900 billion in market value after their quarterly results, according to the Financial Times, as investors recoil not from weak sales but from the sheer size of the cash burn attached to the AI infrastructure race. The Nasdaq Composite fell roughly 3% on Friday and the S&P 500 about 1.8%, capping the worst week for the Nasdaq since April.

The numbers behind the nerves are large: Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta are planning a combined $660 billion in capital expenditure in 2026, up 60% from $410 billion in 2025. Amazon alone guided 2026 capex to about $200 billion, roughly $50 billion more than expected, and its shares fell; Microsoft has dropped sharply since reporting even though cloud revenue rose, with data-center spending up 66%.

Alphabet has posted two straight quarters of negative free cash flow for the first time on record as AI spending outpaces revenue growth, and Meta recently disclosed its first negative-free-cash-flow quarter since 2012. Analysts quoted in the coverage say the burden is now on the hyperscalers to prove the spending earns attractive returns.

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic all said on October 30 that they will honor a single shared robots.txt policy token, __usage_ai-training, so a website can opt out of AI training by every participating company in one entry instead of blocking each crawler separately. The signal comes from an IETF Internet-Draft authored by Kevin Kelley of Anthropic, building on the IETF's AI Preferences working group.

The token covers training only. It does not block crawling, search indexing, or AI answers that quote a site's pages, and it does not remove material already collected into existing training sets.

The timelines differ sharply. Anthropic says it has already started implementing support, OpenAI says it aims to implement the signal in the coming months, Microsoft targets February 1, 2027 — and says it will add separate page-level controls for training and AI grounding — and Google targets 2027, treating an opt-out as equivalent to blocking Google-Extended unless that is set directly. The underlying draft is not yet a formal standard and expires in May 2027 unless updated.

Google announced on October 29 that Jules, its asynchronous AI coding agent, will wind down on December 31, 2026, as part of its work to unify its agentic coding efforts. Users have until November 11 to finish active sessions, after which Jules becomes read-only until the end of the year.

An export is available now, saving settings, environment variables, scheduled tasks, repos, memories, setup scripts and full session history to a local folder. Code, branches and pull requests already in GitHub are unaffected.

Google says what it learned from Jules — autonomous remote background task execution — is shaping Antigravity, its agent-first development platform. The same day, Antigravity launched a Plugin Marketplace: a directory of Google-built and third-party plugins, each bundling skills, MCP servers, rules, hooks and custom agents, rolling out in the Antigravity app and CLI.

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.