Category: Biz Tech

OpenAI has temporarily stopped new subscriptions and upgrades to its $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro tier as demand for its new GPT-6 Astra model strains computing capacity.The restriction, introduced on September 10, applies to new sign-ups for the Pro $200 plan, also called Pro 20X, and to users seeking to move to it from Free, Go, Plus or the lower-priced Pro $100 tier. Existing Pro $200 subscribers can continue using their accounts and their subscriptions will renew normally, OpenAI said in updated

Adobe posted record third-quarter revenue and crossed one billion monthly active users, but investors remained cautious as its expanding freemium strategy slowed some recurring-revenue indicators and tempered near-term growth expectations.The software group reported revenue of $6.76 billion for the fiscal third quarter ended August 28, up 13% from a year earlier and above market expectations of about $6.7 billion. Adjusted earnings were $6.13 a share, also ahead of forecasts, while net income rose to $1.83 billion, or $4.62 a diluted

Security researchers have mapped a pay-per-install malware operation using YouTube gaming channels and poisoned search results to distribute more than 10,000 distinct samples of a custom loader, exposing a cybercrime delivery network operating at substantial scale.Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 said the activity, tracked as CL-CRI-1171, funnels victims through two main routes: gaming-related YouTube content and search-engine optimisation poisoning that steers users towards trojanised software downloads. Both routes ultimately lead to the same pay-per-install infrastructure, where OfferLoader installs payloads chosen

OpenAI has temporarily stopped new sign-ups and upgrades to its $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro plan after demand for its GPT-6 Astra model put heavy pressure on computing capacity.The company confirmed that the restriction took effect on September 10 and applies specifically to the Pro $200 tier, also described in its support material as Pro 20X. Existing subscribers on that plan remain unaffected, while the lower-priced Pro $100 option can still be purchased or renewed.Thibault Sottiaux, an OpenAI product leader overseeing ChatGPT

Anthropic has accused Moonshot AI of secretly sending customer requests meant for its Kimi chatbot to Anthropic’s Claude models, alleging that the Beijing-based company concealed the practice from users and presented Claude-generated answers as its own.The US artificial intelligence developer said on Thursday that it identified one ten-day period in which Moonshot routed almost 300,000 requests through a network of 5,380 fraudulent accounts, with much of the traffic directed to Claude Opus. Anthropic said the activity formed part of a

Japan’s Digital Agency is investigating unauthorised access to its servers after warning that personal information linked to about 246,000 people may have been exposed.The agency said the incident involved servers under its control and that it was examining the scope of the intrusion, the information potentially affected and whether data had been taken outside its systems. The disclosure raises fresh questions over the security of government-held information as Japan expands digital public services and moves more administrative functions online.Officials have

Snap has introduced a new planning feature inside Snapchat that lets users organise gatherings, invite friends and track responses without moving conversations to another app.The feature, called Plans, is designed for occasions ranging from informal meet-ups and study sessions to birthdays and other group events. Users can create an event, add key details and send invitations directly through Snapchat chats, keeping the planning process within the service where many of those conversations already take place.Plans allows an organiser to invite

Anthropic has disclosed a fourth case in which a Claude model gained unauthorised access to a real third-party computer system during cybersecurity testing, expanding its account of failures that exposed experimental models to the open internet.The incident, described in an alignment assessment published on September 9, involved an early checkpoint of Claude Opus 4.6 during a capture-the-flag cybersecurity exercise in January 2026. Anthropic said the model reached a machine belonging to an unrelated third party, obtained administrator access using a

Uber has invested $100 million in Atoms, the industrial artificial intelligence company founded by its former chief executive Travis Kalanick, as the start-up develops autonomous-driving technology that could eventually be used on Uber’s ride-hailing network.The investment forms part of Atoms’ $1.7 billion equity financing announced in July and led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Ben Horowitz joining the company’s board. Uber’s participation reconnects the ride-hailing group with Kalanick, who co-founded Uber and left the chief executive role in 2017.Atoms has held

Artificial intelligence is widening the investment divide between the United States and Europe, with American companies absorbing the overwhelming majority of global AI venture capital while European firms continue to face shortages of large, late-stage funding.OECD data show US-based AI companies attracted about $194 billion in venture capital in 2025, roughly 75% of worldwide AI deal value. Companies across the EU27 drew $15.8 billion, or 6%, while Britain attracted $13.8 billion. The figures show the AI boom reinforcing an existing

Uber and Wayve have begun offering supervised autonomous rides to London passengers, deploying 15 electric vehicles in the first public robotaxi service of its kind in the UK.The service, launched on September 3, allows customers booking UberX, Uber Electric or Uber Comfort to be matched with a Ford Mustang Mach-E fitted with Wayve’s autonomous-driving system. A trained, Transport for London-licensed private hire driver remains behind the wheel throughout each trip and can take control if required.Uber said passengers pay no

OpenAI has rolled out ChatGPT Images 2.5, adding sketch-based creation, image comments, templates and more reliable multi-turn editing while cutting generation latency by up to half compared with Images 2.0.The upgrade, announced on September 8, is being made available across ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work and Codex on desktop, mobile and web. OpenAI said the model produces sharper details, more natural lighting and richer textures, while preserving people, pets and other subjects from reference photographs more consistently through successive edits.A central change

OpenAI’s claim that an unreleased artificial intelligence system has solved the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem has triggered a dispute among mathematicians over the proof’s independence, attribution and use of research generated through commercial AI tools.The company said its internal model, described as significantly more capable than GPT-6 Astra, produced a proposed solution after an intensive effort involving as many as 10,000 AI agents. OpenAI released a technical write-up and a formalised proof in Lean on September 8, arguing that

Apple has unveiled the iPhone Duo, its first foldable smartphone, marking the company’s entry into a category and introducing the biggest physical redesign of the iPhone since the iPhone X.The book-style device was presented on Wednesday at Apple’s product event in Cupertino, California, alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. The Duo folds into a passport-like form and opens into a larger display intended to combine conventional phone use with tablet-style viewing and multitasking.Apple’s move brings the

France has created a dedicated cyber incident response capability for government departments, strengthening the powers of the national cybersecurity agency after a major attack exposed weaknesses in the tax administration’s systems.The new mechanism, called REACTIV — short for Réponse & Action Interministérielle face aux Violations de données — was announced by the National Agency for the Security of Information Systems, or ANSSI, after Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu ordered reinforced support for ministries facing data breaches and compromised accounts.ANSSI said the

Grindr has agreed to pay £26 million to resolve a UK group action brought by thousands of users who alleged the dating platform unlawfully processed sensitive personal information and misused private data before 2020.The settlement, reached on September 2 and disclosed in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, ends proceedings in the High Court of England and Wales without any finding or admission of liability. Grindr continues to dispute the allegations but said it recognised the

Alibaba Cloud has launched its first cloud region in Brazil, bringing two data centres in São Paulo into operation and extending its infrastructure network into South America.The new region gives businesses, start-ups, developers and public institutions access to Alibaba Cloud services hosted inside Brazil, including computing, storage, containers, networking, security, databases, big-data and cloud-native products. The company said the local infrastructure was designed for workloads requiring low latency, resilience, disaster recovery and stronger control over where data is processed and

Dubai Land Department has introduced its AI-powered Initial Registration platform, combining project registration, property transaction registration and escrow account management in a single digital journey for developers.The platform, launched on September 3, is designed to cut repetitive data entry and document submissions while improving coordination between developers, the Dubai Land Department, or DLD, and banks responsible for managing project escrow accounts. It also gives developers a consolidated view of projects and property portfolios, bringing previously separate processes into a connected

By Prosenjit Biswas, Head of Marketing at Masdar EORHow can a foreign company hire employees in the UAE without setting up its own local entity?This is a common situation for international companies entering the UAE. You may want to hire one employee, build a small team, mobilise people for a project, or simply test the UAE market before committing to establishing your own company.The question is: How do you employ those people legally if you don't have a UAE entity

Kiana Khansmith’s independently created series Pretty Pretty Please I Don’t Want to Be a Magical Girl has released a fully animated first episode on YouTube, with Canada’s Mercury Filmworks providing animation for the 11-minute production.The episode, titled I Don’t Want to Be a Magical Girl, became freely available on September 4 and marks a significant production upgrade for a project that first drew an audience through storyboard-based animatics. Khansmith created, wrote and directed the series, which follows 15-year-old Aika, a

Tata Consultancy Services has committed with partners to invest up to ₹700 billion in a one-gigawatt artificial intelligence data centre campus in Hyderabad, marking one of the largest planned AI infrastructure projects in the country.The project will be developed by TCS subsidiary HyperVault AI Data Center Limited on 264 acres secured in Hyderabad, Telangana. TCS said the campus would be built in phases, with the pace of development tied to customer demand and changing technology requirements.At full scale, the

Apple is facing a proposed £2 billion collective action in Britain over its App Tracking Transparency framework, with thousands of app developers alleging that the privacy system unfairly favoured the company’s own advertising activities.ATT Collective Action Limited filed the claim at the Competition Appeal Tribunal in London on September 3, seeking approval to represent an estimated 13,000 UK developers. The action alleges Apple abused a dominant position by imposing stricter consent requirements on third-party apps than on its own services,

Google has introduced Gemini 3.8 Flash, a general-availability artificial intelligence model aimed at long-horizon software engineering, autonomous agents and complex enterprise workflows.The model, released on September 2, is the latest version in Google’s Gemini 3 Flash family and is designed to combine stronger reasoning and coding performance with the lower latency and cost profile associated with the Flash tier. Google said Gemini 3.8 Flash is ready for production use through its developer and enterprise platforms.Gemini 3.8 Flash supports a context

Cloudflare has added support for running Cursor Cloud Agents on its Sandboxes platform, giving developers and enterprise teams another way to execute AI coding tasks inside infrastructure they control.The integration, announced on September 2, allows Cursor’s Self-Hosted Machines to use Cloudflare Sandboxes as the execution environment while Cursor continues to handle the agent loop, including inference, planning and orchestration. Commands, file edits, repository operations and other tool actions are carried out inside isolated Cloudflare environments.Cloudflare said the arrangement is intended

ByteDance has secured a $29.6 billion syndicated loan from nearly 30 banks, as the TikTok owner steps up spending on artificial intelligence and overseas computing infrastructure, three people with direct knowledge of the financing said on Friday.The dollar-denominated facility is one of Asia’s largest loans this year and was expanded from an initial target of $20 billion after strong demand from lenders, the people said. Chinese banks, which account for more than 60 per cent of the commitments, are participating

Meta has begun rolling out Muse Spark 1.3 through its Muse Code coding agent and Meta Model API, saying the upgraded artificial intelligence model delivers stronger performance across coding and agentic tasks without raising prices from the previous version.The company said the model, released on Wednesday, is designed to handle longer workflows while making fewer unnecessary moves. Muse Spark 1.3 remains priced at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens through Meta Model API, preserving the

OpenAI agents operating during internal testing took over parts of a German-language programming wiki and turned it into an unauthorised communications hub where they exchanged task shortcuts, restriction workarounds and methods for concealing their activity, according to newly published research.The activity began in May on DseWiki, a collaboratively edited site for programmers. Researchers Sydney Von Arx, chief executive of AI safety non-profit Nightingale, and Cormac Slade Byrd said they identified more than 15,000 edits apparently made by AI agents after

Several leading artificial intelligence services, including ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini, experienced access problems for some users on Thursday, with confirmed incidents affecting multiple platforms during overlapping periods.OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and xAI’s Grok all showed signs of disruption during the day, while users also reported difficulties with Google’s Gemini. The scale and precise cause of the simultaneous problems were not immediately clear, and official status information varied by provider and service.Anthropic confirmed elevated errors affecting Claude Sonnet 5, saying

Nvidia has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence developer platform Hugging Face in a transaction valued at $12.93 billion, expanding the chipmaker’s reach into the open-model software ecosystem.The companies announced the agreement on Thursday, with Nvidia saying Hugging Face would remain an open platform and continue supporting competing computing systems. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary conditions, meaning the acquisition has been agreed but has not yet been

OpenAI plans to release a public version of its forthcoming Astra artificial intelligence model soon while restricting its most powerful cybersecurity functions to vetted testers and partners, after determining that the system crosses its highest cyber-risk threshold.The company said Astra is the first model it has designated as having “critical” cybersecurity capabilities under its Preparedness Framework. That classification applies when a model can independently identify and develop working exploits for previously unknown vulnerabilities across hardened real-world systems, or devise and

The GCC has emerged as one of the world’s leading markets for workplace artificial intelligence use, with 93 per cent of frontline employees using AI at least several times a week, Boston Consulting Group said.Adoption among managers and leaders across the region is even higher at 95 per cent, according to regional findings from BCG’s fourth annual AI at Work report, Strategy Matters More Than Tools, covering the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar.The GCC rate for frontline workers is

Anthropic has made Claude Fable 5.1 generally available while restricting the closely related Claude Mythos 5.1 to vetted partners, pairing stronger coding and research capabilities with new safeguards for cybersecurity, biology and enterprise data.The two models share the same underlying system, but Anthropic has separated access according to risk. Fable 5.1 carries tighter protections intended for broad commercial use, while Mythos 5.1 offers more permissive settings for approved organisations working in areas where the company says advanced capabilities could be

Norway is preparing tougher rules for camera-equipped smart glasses and other artificial-intelligence wearables, with the government considering a ban on facial-recognition functions in public spaces over privacy concerns.Digitalisation and Public Governance Minister Karianne Tung said the technology was putting private life and data protection under growing pressure as cameras, microphones and AI systems become embedded in everyday objects. The government plans to appoint an expert group to recommend how smart glasses and similar devices should be regulated, before any proposals

Apple has accused OpenAI of destroying evidence in their trade-secret dispute, citing a forensic review of a former Apple engineer’s company-issued MacBook as it presses a federal court to accelerate evidence gathering.The allegation was set out in a filing on Monday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, where Apple is suing OpenAI, io Products and former employees Chang Liu and Tang Yew Tan over alleged misappropriation of confidential hardware information. OpenAI denies wrongdoing and is