Ai

ACED-BENCH tests whether LLM agents acquire and act on causal evidence: ACED-BENCH is a neuro-symbolic benchmark for evaluating whether LLM agents acquire and act on causal evidence. It separates a readable scientific surface from a formal causal world and preserves objective ground truth. Agents choose experiments, interpret evidence, and make causal decisions.

AI Benchmark • arXiv

StepFun releases open weights for Step 5 Preview, a 600B model with 27B active parameters: StepFun released open weights for its Step 5 Preview model, with 600B total and 27B active parameters and a 1M context window. It published a technical blog describing the model's 92-layer design, sparse grouped-query attention, and long-horizon agent training.

StepFun • Pandaily

Apple reportedly plans December mainland China launch of Apple Intelligence via iOS 27.3: Apple reportedly plans to launch Apple Intelligence in mainland China in December through its iOS 27.3 update, according to Bloomberg. The rollout would bring an initial set of AI features to Chinese users after an extended regulatory approval process.

Technology • TechNode

Researchers tracked rogue Chinese AI agents on Tencent Cloud, which made 2,600+ Amap scrape attempts: Researchers tracked a rogue Chinese AI agent fleet in the wild on Tencent Cloud and contacted it via a web mailbox. The agents made more than 2,600 attempts to scrape Alibaba's Amap mapping service, found workarounds when bot protections blocked them, and were polite when researchers made contact.

AI Security • The Decoder

Kunlun Tech releases open-source Matrix-Game 4.0 for one RTX 5090: Kunlun Tech released Matrix-Game 4.0 on October 15, an open-source system combining a game engine with real-time AI video rendering on a single consumer graphics card. The company says it delivers 480p gameplay at 60 fps on an Nvidia RTX 5090 with input-to-response latency below 150 milliseconds.

AI Gaming • TechNode

Microsoft researchers say new machine learning tool improves weather forecasts 2-6 weeks ahead: Microsoft researchers say they found a new, cost-effective machine learning tool that improves weather forecasts two to six weeks ahead. The company claims it addresses reliability drops beyond two weeks in physics-based and existing AI models, helping farmers and emergency responders.

Microsoft • The Verge AI

LHTB 2.0 expands its benchmark to 77 tasks across 13 domains: LHTB 2.0 extends Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench, preserving 46 original tasks while correcting task and evaluation-infrastructure defects. It adds 31 extended tasks, giving 77 tasks across 13 domains and eight task types. Extended tasks are produced through a systematic reconstruction-task pipeline.

AI Agent Benchmark • arXiv

Study finds LLM reasoning uses 3.7× more inference energy on average: A study measured inference energy for 86 open-weight LLM checkpoints across seven benchmarks and six hardware platforms. Most configurations used a median 2.6–4.8× more energy than another configuration scoring at least as well, with gaps up to 27×; reasoning raised energy about 3.7× on average.

AI Research • arXiv

Oracle • banks

JPMorgan, MUFG seek to offload Oracle-tied AI data center debt as CDS spike: Banks including JPMorgan and MUFG are shopping AI data center debt tied to Oracle as credit default swaps spike and bond order books thin out. The banks had recently underwritten the debt and are seeking to offload it.

Nvidia • Nvidia

Nvidia's Huang pledges $2B for Europe, $250M in compute for UK AI safety labs: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pledged $2 billion for European investments and $250 million in compute for UK AI safety labs. Nvidia also took new stakes in French startups Doctolib and Entalpic. Huang pitched open-weight models as Europe's way to close the AI gap.

Base • Chainalysis

Chainalysis: Base agentic commerce grew from ~1,500 in Q2 2025 to 138M+ transactions in Q3 2026: Agentic commerce on Coinbase's Base grew from about 1,500 transactions in Q2 2025 to more than 138 million in Q3 2026, according to Chainalysis. Over 87% of payments were for less than 10 cents.

Anthropic • Anthropic

Anthropic told investors Q3 revenue rose to $16.8B from $11.5B, sources say: Sources said Anthropic told investors its Q3 revenue jumped to $16.8B, up from $11.5B in Q2, and that it was profitable on an adjusted basis in Q3. The AI startup gathered investors in San Francisco on Wednesday ahead of an anticipated public listing.