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Anthropic has announced two Claude features in testing. Users can connect a company data platform and ask in natural language for an automatically updating dashboard, or turn text, charts and other materials into a short animation. Dashboards are available to all paid-plan users, while Motion is limited to Team and Enterprise users.

Google announced a unified Gemini agent for businesses, with a consumer rollout planned later. It can plan tasks, use tools and connect to internal systems. Users can track progress in a tasks inbox and choose a model themselves, initially including Anthropic’s Claude models.

Amazon has announced three Alexa Tablets to replace its Fire Tablet lineup. All include Alexa+, run Android and can access the full Google Play store. The 8-inch model starts at $229.99, while the standard 12 Pro costs $499.99.

The Verge compares Meta Muse and OpenAI Dots, agents pitched for multistep tasks such as restaurant bookings. Muse is free, while Dots are offered to subscribers paying $100 or more per month and include specialist versions for marketing and legal work. The reporters are still testing both and say they cannot yet trust them to complete important everyday tasks end to end; access to email and credit card data also raises privacy concerns.

Anthropic has launched Cyber Mission, offering Claude models, on-site engineers and threat research to critical infrastructure defenders. Its opt-in OSS Scanner provides free, periodic vulnerability scans for open-source projects. Reports are sent without human review, so maintainers still need to check the findings.

Google announced JPEG XL image decoding support in Chrome 155. The format suits high-fidelity or lossless photographic images and supports progressive decoding, so an image can become recognizable before the full file downloads. Chrome integrates jxl-rs, a decoder written in Rust; Google says its tests found no memory safety issues during development.

Microsoft announced that Copilot can hand some coding tasks to MAI-Code-1.1-Flash running on a PC, with no inference charge for local model calls. The model retains a 256K-token context window; Microsoft says its quantized version scores the same as full precision on two coding benchmarks. Microsoft also announced that its MXC agent sandbox is generally available on Windows 11.

RTX Spark brings NVIDIA’s AI software stack to Windows laptops and compact desktops for running AI models locally. Laptop preorders are open, with availability set for October 16; compact desktops are due to go on sale in November. Microsoft also announced general availability of Microsoft Execution Containers, which let AI agents run in the background on Windows.

Microsoft revealed two base Surface Laptop Ultra models starting at $2,600 and $3,700, plus the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box starting at $6,000. The devices are designed to run AI models locally. Microsoft says Windows 11’s “Execution Containers” will make AI agents easier to sandbox, and the feature will be available to all Windows 11 users.

At its Windows and Surface event, Microsoft showed a Copilot upgrade that it says will access local PC files and take actions across the operating system. In a demo, a Microsoft executive asked an AI agent to help with a tax filing task. The material does not say when or to whom these capabilities will be available.

Rolling out with GPT-6, Intelligent UI can add tappable buttons, interactive charts and task-specific calculators to conversations to help users understand complex topics. Users can reduce the visuals in responses. The feature rolls out globally on Wednesday for Pro, Plus, Business and Enterprise users, and arrives Thursday for Free and Go users.

Google announced an experimental gaming platform called Playground in partnership with Unity. Users can create a game draft through conversational prompts, then adjust its physics, rules and characters. The browser-based platform works on computers and phones, and games can be shared with others or posted to Explore. Integration with Unity Spark and more advanced 3D development capabilities are planned for the future.

OpenAI says ChatGPT will use account activity signals to estimate users’ ages and enable a teen experience for those identified as under 18, restricting some sensitive content and interactions. Adults incorrectly classified as teens can submit a live selfie or identity document through Persona for age verification; the protections will be removed if they are confirmed to be 18 or older.

A quoted update says default speed will be about 50% faster for GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol through subscriptions across its products and partners using Sign in With ChatGPT. Users need make no changes, and the effect was expected within two hours of the update.

TikTok announced a shopping assistant that can answer questions about product details, shipping, sizing and availability, and help users complete purchases. It also says users can buy directly from brands in the For You feed with one click; the features are being built with partners including Shopify and Stripe.

OpenAI says it will introduce text watermarks for eligible ChatGPT and Codex users in the EU over the coming weeks, without making them the global default at launch. The watermark embeds an invisible statistical signal during word selection; API customers worldwide can opt in for text outputs from some models starting today.

Google Research announced a federated learning system built on trusted execution environments and says its differential privacy guarantees can be verified externally. Gboard has launched English and Japanese next-word prediction models using the system; Google says they offer stronger privacy guarantees and improved accuracy.

The Huawei Mate 90 series is on sale, with Tao Law chips across the lineup: Kirin 9030, 9035, 9050 or 9050 Pro, depending on the model. According to the reported performance figures, the standard model’s Kirin 9030 has 54% higher GPU performance than the Kirin 9020; the Pro Max Collector’s Edition and RS Ultimate Design use the Kirin 9050 Pro.

Microsoft announced that Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) will expand to Qualcomm, Intel and Nvidia hardware this month; AMD's RDNA family already supports it. The feature lets users download precompiled shaders from the cloud to shorten game load times and eliminate shader stutter. Snapdragon X2 integrated graphics already support ASD through a graphics driver, while Intel and Nvidia support is due later this month.

Airbnb CTO Ahmad Al-Dahle says AI now resolves roughly half of the company’s support tickets without human assistance, while safety issues are among the cases deliberately left to people. He says Airbnb tests the system with synthetic data before putting it into production.