“In May 2026, Anthropic averaged around 2,500 code changes merged per day; as of September, we merged over 30,000 per day,” the biz said in a blog post on Tuesday. “We don’t expect this rate of growth to slow down anytime soon; the latent demand for merging code is practically infinite, and every bottleneck we remove immediately leads to a further increase in the amount of code we produce.”

After several months of model prompting and five months of migration, the result is a homemade version control system called Scion, a monorepo scheme that sounds a bit like Subversion, Apache’s centralized version control system. […] Scion has been designed to meet the needs of AI agents, so the client leaves much of the work to the server; the source control queries are exposed via API so internal tools can respond without needing a local repo, and there’s less synchronization but more need for server speed.

“In Scion, the unit of work is a ‘changeset,’ an entry in a write-ahead log,” Anthropic explains. “A changeset stores most of what you’d expect from a commit in git. But where a git commit stores a pointer to the tree, a changeset stores a list of the files that changed relative to its first parent, along with content-addressed pointers to the compressed file contents in blob storage.” […] Anthropic says its bespoke system isn’t right for general use. There will be no open source release. Nonetheless, the company contends that its own code scaling problems will become commonplace in other organizations over the next few months, so it wanted to share its approach — having ample funding to pay for writing custom infrastructure tools.

The new prices take effect for new subscribers immediately. Current subscribers to the streaming service, which primarily features unscripted content, like reality shows and documentaries, will receive 30 days’ notice before the new prices take effect, starting with bills issued as of November 12. […] However, a Skydance spokesperson told Ars Technica that the pricing changes were in the works before Discovery+ knew about the merger’s closing date and were not planned in anticipation of a merger.

The spokesperson said that Discovery+‘s prices are regularly evaluated to ensure that they are in line with the content and experience that the service offers, and the new prices reflect that. Discovery+ has increased its prices three times since launching in 2012. Before today, the most recent price hike occurred in January 2025, when ad-based monthly subscriptions increased from $5 to $6, and ad-free plans went from $9 to $10.

An OpenAI employee was arrested after a "sophisticated recording device" was found hidden inside the executive conference room. Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, who is a national of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, was arrested in connection with the matter, the DOJ said. The company said an employee planted the device a few days before it was found, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation “moved quickly to make an arrest,” the post said. The employee was terminated.

FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement that Alfozan “allegedly concealed a covert recording device inside his employer’s executive conference room to secretly capture sensitive communications about the company’s super intelligence technology.” Alfozan is also listed as a partner at Raed Ventures, a venture capital firm that focuses on the Middle East and North Africa, according to its website. The firm announced on Feb. 6, 2025, that H.H. Prince Khalid Bin Bader Al Saud, a member of the Saudi royal family, had joined the firm as a venture partner. Alfozan was announced as a venture partner two days later. The Raed announcement for Alfozan lists Meta, Microsoft and SAP as previous roles and said he studied computer science and engineering at MIT.

The Q1 2027 PC release window for GTA VI comes only a few months after the game’s November 2026 console launch, representing a significantly quicker turnaround for PC development than the previous iteration of Grand Theft Auto, whose April 2015 PC release came roughly a year and seven months after the September 2013 release of Grand Theft Auto V.

The user base of Grand Theft Auto V skews largely towards console players, with PC players representing a small minority. With GTA VI’s production budget rumored to exceed $2 billion, Rockstar is highly incentivized to pull all the levers it can as fast as it can to monetize the game’s upcoming sequel — and PC players represent a significant expansion of the GTA VI audience.

The potential benefits of launching GTA VI relatively quickly on PC go beyond the opportunity to grow the game’s casual player base. Rockstar has signaled its plans to implement user-generated content creation tools into GTA VI, and the company’s August 2023 acquisition of Cfx.re, the development team behind the prominent Grand Theft Auto V roleplaying server company FiveM, made it clear that Rockstar considers online roleplaying in GTA to be a factor in the game’s future.

The company, which allows users to create and interact with AI-generated avatars, said it made the filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. It said it hopes the process will allow it to “facilitate a value-maximizing sale of all or substantially all” of its assets. The Character.AI platform will continue to operate during the bankruptcy.

The Disney agreement, reached prior to the filing, would give the media giant a non-exclusive perpetual license of select intellectual property and company claims from Character.AI. Disney would pay $20 million and provide resources during a transition period as the company explores a sale. […] Character.AI said it is aiming to conclude the sale process by late November or early December.

Kroger last month outlined its AI strategy, meant “to improve the customer experience, make work easier for associates and produce better business outcomes.” Cincinnati-based Kroger is the largest standalone U.S. supermarket chain with 409,000 employees and more than 2,700 stores operating under various brands, including Ralphs, King Soopers, Smith’s and Fred Meyer.

Kroger named former Walmart executive Foran CEO in February, 11 months after the abrupt resignation of its previous CEO. Foran has a reputation for being tech-savvy and detail-oriented. He led Walmart’s U.S. division from 2014 to 2019, where he focused on cleaning up stores, ensuring items were in stock and improving the fresh produce selection. He also introduced online ordering and pickup, and accelerated Walmart’s digital capabilities.

Ledger has confirmed that some of its devices distributed through Southeast Asian reseller CryptoBilis were compromised with a hardware implant that drained users’ cryptocurrency wallets. The company has been investigating reports of users losing funds from wallets purchased through CryptoBilis, a major Malaysia-based hardware wallet retailer operating across Southeast Asia. Some researchers have shown the implant in Ledger X since September 16, saying tampered devices were available for nearly half the price of the original hardware.

[…] In a report over the weekend, Tibane Labs notes that the threat actor made room for the malicious circuitry by replacing the original battery with a smaller one, which powers both the implant and the Ledger X. “Under the battery and antenna sits an ST STM32G431KBU6 (Arm CortexM4, 128 KB flash, UFQFPN32),” the researchers found inside one of the devices. For connectivity, the actor used “a tiny eSIM, an 8pad package just 2x2 mm, next to the MCU, and a shielded LTE module that sends the words out.”

[…] Ledger is advising users to avoid purchasing from unauthorized resellers as they run an increased risk of getting counterfeit or modified devices. The company is also reminding its authorized resellers and distributors to get the products only through authorized channels and to avoid restocking returned products. Ledger provides a ‘Genuine Check’ mechanism to determine the authenticity of the device; however, it explicitly warns that it cannot detect added implants when the device’s original Secure Element remains intact.

Anthropic has updated its Usage Policy to prohibit “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior” toward its Claude AI models. While ordinary frustration, criticism, and adversarial testing remain acceptable, repeated cruelty could result in account restrictions. Anthropic acknowledges there’s no evidence Claude can suffer but argues that uncertainty about AI consciousness warrants precaution.

Critics contend the policy anthropomorphizes software, encourages unhealthy emotional attachments, and raises questions about how customers may interact with products they’ve paid for.

The move raises an intriguing question: If an AI cannot demonstrably experience suffering, is abusing it an ethical problem, or is Anthropic simply policing human behavior?

Alphabet’s Google on Wednesday released its flagship AI model Gemini 4 Argon to developers and businesses worldwide, seeking to regain ground against rivals OpenAI and Anthropic after months of delays and a leadership shakeup at its DeepMind lab. The model excels at “deep work” on complex, multi-step tasks in coding, finance, law, cybersecurity and science, Google said. API pricing at launch starts at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with rates set to double after November 30.

[…] Argon is available to paying customers through the company’s AI application building tools. Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers can access it through the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search, while the Antigravity coding tool is limited to Ultra subscribers. Teams using Argon in Antigravity increased agentic code submissions by more than 35%, while reducing code rollbacks by nearly a third, Google said.

Reuters reported Sunday that sources familiar with the matter identified the arrested suspect as Ed Dubrovsky, a Canadian cybersecurity executive whose career has focused on helping clients negotiate with ransomware attackers. Court documents from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania show Dubrovsky is facing two criminal charges: conspiracy to threaten to impair the confidentiality of information with the intent to extort money, and interference with commerce by threats. The allegations have not been proven in court.

“For the cybersecurity community in general, I think that there’s a sense of shock,” Toronto-based tech and cybersecurity analyst Ritesh Kotak told CBC News on Monday. Kotak says Dubrovsky is “very popular” and has spoken at numerous conferences, but stressed that the charges “are clearly just allegations” and that it is not yet known “what exactly has happened.” “This is an individual that was for the most part respected when it came to ransomware negotiations,” he said. “A lot of people are familiar with his work as well.”

The device’s square shape makes it feel less imposing than larger smart displays like Google’s Nest Hub Max or Amazon’s Echo Show 11, and I can see it fitting nicely on my kitchen counter — though it might be a hair too big for my bedside table. The HomeView is the centerpiece of Apple’s new push into the home. It costs $299 and launches alongside a new collection of cameras, thermostats, and a door lock designed for Apple Home.

As a smart home hub, Matter controller, and Thread Border Router, the HomeView can orchestrate these and other Apple Home and Matter smart home devices. It’s available in eight countries at launch: the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, and India. Pre-orders are open now, with devices shipping November 13th.

Microsoft has debuted its latest AI chip, the Azure Maia 300, as it looks to reduce its reliance on third-party processors from the likes of Nvidia and AMD. Unveiled at the OCP Global Summit 2026 in San Jose on Monday, the Maia 300 will join Microsoft’s Maia 200 and Maia 100 chips as part of what the company said will be multigigawatt deployments beginning next year. The Windows maker said that will make its Maia chips the “primary AI inference system for Microsoft products and services.”

The company said Maia 300 provides 40% more tokens per megawatt than “leading GPU-based systems,” a clear swipe at Nvidia, and that a 96-chip rack offers seven times the rack-scale token throughput of Microsoft’s Maia 200. […] The Maia 200 chip currently powers its Microsoft production workloads, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, as well as OpenAI models, Microsoft’s MAI models, and open-source models. That provides 1.7 times more tokens per watt for AI capabilities in Microsoft’s Teams, Copilot, and Cowork software versus other GPU-based systems, the company said.

It will run on devices as far back as the iPhone 11 and the third-generation iPad Air. No Man’s Sky might not have the most cutting-edge AAA graphics (though they’re still strong, and they’ve come a long way since launch via updates), but the game’s uncommon method of generating galaxies of incomprehensible scale on device consistently for all players from a single-seed happening on a phone is remarkable for those of us who remember phones performing far behind consoles or desktop PCs.

This version of the game includes all of the content and systems updates to the game that have been added over the years — the expansions that famously took the game from a rocky launch reception to a widely beloved redemption story. There are a couple of compromises, though, and it’s similar to what we saw with No Man’s Sky on the Nintendo Switch. Hello Games says the ability to build and explore player-made planetary settlements is limited to the iPhone 15 Pro and later, and multiplayer is not supported on any iOS device. “We are excited to see player feedback on iOS, and will support it appropriately based on how many folks are playing,” the company says, leaving the door open to perhaps not supporting all future content updates if the player base isn’t there to justify it.

Instead of wood pulp’s larger, disordered fibers, the researchers used cellulose nanocrystals here. Cellulose is the main structural material in plants, and in nanocrystal form, it can act as a microscopic strengthening agent for other materials, including ice — essentially stopping cracks from spreading easily. The protein used here was called CBM3a-AFPIII, a combination of an antifreeze protein (AFP) and a carbohydrate-binding module (CBM). Its job was to act like glue, keeping the cellulose nanocrystals and ice bonded together.

It’s a clever approach, and the researchers think that by tweaking their ingredients and methods, they might be able to improve their ‘super ice’ even further. “Optimizing solidification kinetics and freezing protocols, alongside developing diverse AFP-CBM variants, could yield even higher-strength composites,” write the researchers. Besides further tests of the durability of the material, the researchers are also keen to take a closer look at how cracks propagate through BioPykrete, to confirm that the underlying strengthening mechanisms are what they think they are.

Further down the line, this approach could open up a whole new landscape for materials used in packaging, construction, and more: Using a custom protein to bring two unlikely compounds (ice and cellulose) together. “By bridging the gap between recombinant protein design and structural engineering, we have developed a high-performance material specifically engineered for the rigors of the world’s most extreme environments,” write the researchers.

Many open-source developers still dislike AI. The latest example is System76 banning AI-generated content from its COSMIC desktop. At Open Source Summit Europe, Linux creator Linus Torvalds offered a different take: "I actually really like using AI,” Torvald told Dirk Hohndel, his good friend and head of Ericsson Software Technology, in their latest discussion. […] Torvalds said, “I think that you need to be very careful using AI when you’re doing something real and important.” Torvalds explained he hadn’t always felt that way about AI programming. “I used to think it was just not very good — but now I’m at the point where I actually really like using AI.”

“To be fair,” he continued, “I don’t do a lot of kernel programming. I’m a maintainer. The Linux kernel is a project where other people do the real work, and I act as the collection point. But I still enjoy programming immensely. I think AI is a wonderful tool if you use it correctly and treat it as a tool, and I find it makes programming much more enjoyable.” Torvalds recalled, “I started programming in 1981 or so, and back then computers were much simpler, and you could understand what they were doing, and also the programs you compared your own programs to were much simpler.”

“It’s a different story today,” Torvalds said. “The bar in software engineering has grown so high that it’s hard to see your own small efforts as worth anything, because you’re used to all these polished, professional programs. […] A lot of people make fun of vibe coding, but I think it’s a wonderful way to find joy in programming. It makes you feel like you’re doing something relevant. It allows you, as a new programmer, to do things that you would otherwise have a really hard time with.”

He continued: “I love the concept of AI as a gateway drug because I was working on my own toy project, the guitar pedal, and I knew what I was doing. I had a user interface that I had written myself in C that was running on a microcontroller that was running on this small screen, and I was like, “This is just stupid. It looks like something from the ‘80s; I wanted it to look like something from this century. But I don’t do Java. I do kernels.” “So, I use AI to do the things that I’m bad at,” Torvalds went on, “I’d seen all the same YouTube videos you have. Give AI a prompt, and it will do it. So I gave it a prompt, and it did it, and it was horrendous. Then I said, ‘Hey, look! I already did this in C. I did it the right way. It’s just ugly.”