The top things worth knowing about in AI today.
Anthropic told US senators that operators tied to Alibaba used about 25,000 fake accounts to run 28.8 million queries against Claude between April and June, then used the answers to train its Qwen models, a technique known as distillation. It is the largest such campaign Anthropic has disclosed, bigger than the combined activity it earlier attributed to DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax. Alibaba shares fell more than 4% after the claim became public. The case shows how much value now sits in the outputs of frontier models, and why API access is becoming a security question.
Read moreNobel laureate John Jumper, co-creator of the protein-folding system AlphaFold, is leaving Google DeepMind for Anthropic after nearly nine years, one of four senior departures in a single week. Days earlier, Transformer co-author Noam Shazeer left for OpenAI. Alphabet shares fell around 6% on the news, wiping more than $245 billion off its market value. The moves show how concentrated frontier-AI talent has become, and how much markets now price it.
Read moreMicrosoft Copilot Cowork, the agent layer that runs multi-step tasks across email, files and meetings, is now generally available and billed by usage rather than per seat. Each task draws on Copilot Credits priced at one cent, with the cost depending on the model, the tools called and how long it runs. For finance teams it changes the maths: AI spend now scales with how much work agents do, not headcount. Worth modelling before turning agents loose across a department.
Read moreThe 2026 PwC Global AI Jobs Barometer, drawn from more than a billion job ads, finds the labour market dividing into two tracks. Roles where AI handles routine work and people supply the judgement, such as radiologists and recruiters, are seeing twice the job growth and 42% faster wage growth than roles AI simply makes easier to do. The takeaway for workers: pairing AI with hard-to-automate skills pays more than competing with it.
Read morexAI Grok 4.3 is now available through Amazon Bedrock, making xAI the third independent lab on the platform alongside OpenAI and Anthropic. It offers a one-million-token context window and, at $1.25 and $2.50 per million input and output tokens, is the cheapest US frontier reasoning model on Bedrock. For AWS customers it means more model choice without leaving existing infrastructure.
Read moreAI infrastructure firm Baseten raised $1.5 billion at a valuation of up to $13 billion, one of the larger US AI raises on record. The company, which runs more than a billion model queries a day, was valued at $5 billion only five months ago. The round is a sign that serving AI models, known as inference, is now treated as its own infrastructure category, separate from training.
Read more8.5% of Australian employers advertising on Indeed mentioned AI in at least one job posting in early 2026, up from 5.8% a year earlier, according to the Indeed Hiring Lab. But demand is concentrated: two-thirds of those postings come from just 1% of employers. Adoption is real and growing, but for now it is led by a small group of larger firms.
Read moreA short read every week — the few things worth your time, and nothing that isn’t.