Anthropic has opened Claude Code's cloud sessions—previously a research preview—to eligible Pro and Max subscribers, letting them run coding tasks on Anthropic's servers instead of their own machines. To encourage adoption, Pro users get $100 and Max users get $250 in promotional credits, claimable via Claude's website by October 7, with unused balances expiring November 4.
CNET details customization settings inside ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Claude AI that let users permanently adjust how the assistants respond, rather than repeatedly tweaking prompts. These options, found under menus like 'personalization' or 'personal intelligence,' allow control over things such as warmth, emoji use and how the tool addresses the user. ChatGPT uses toggle-based settings while Gemini's Personal Intelligence takes a more open-ended approach.
A developer built a single-agent system on OpenComputer that uses Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to turn a webpage's content into an explainer video without any traditional video-generation model. The system fetches page data, runs the rendered page in a disposable microVM with a virtualized clock for deterministic frame capture, and encodes frames into an MP4 via ffmpeg, storing the result as a public Vercel Blob URL.
The Cutting Room Floor (TCRF), which had implemented a feature banning visitors using a 'Claude-code' user agent, became the target of a large-scale distributed denial-of-service attack. The site's operator says the attack began shortly after a Twitter user was banned under this policy, spread false claims about the incident, and stirred online backlash. Unlike prior bot-based DDoS attempts against the site, this attack flooded the network connection directly, forcing host Linode to null-route the server's traffic.
Instinct, an invite-only AI assistant that operates through iMessage and WhatsApp and connects to users' email and calendar, is reportedly in talks to raise $1 billion, which would value the company at $10 billion, according to The Information. The startup, which has already raised $350 million since its February private beta launch, is gaining traction in the Bay Area as a more accessible alternative to complex AI agents. Meanwhile, Meta's own assistant Muse has become Apple's most-downloaded free app despite reports of a serious security flaw that could have let attackers control users' Macs.
Anthropic reported that its Claude AI model identified a previously undocumented enzyme system that structurally resembles the Cas9 protein used in CRISPR gene editing. The company acknowledged it cannot yet confirm what functions the newly flagged system actually performs.
A team backing Whiteboard (YC W26) released an open-source desktop app that lets developers and coding agents like Claude Code and Codex collaborate on a shared visual canvas. The tool connects to existing coding agents through an SDK, letting agents draw diagrams describing their work, which developers can then edit or annotate to guide further changes.
A writer described how Anthropic's Claude chatbot became a constant presence during a family vacation with his parents, sparking discussion about generational AI use. Readers responded with a range of reactions disputing the notion that older adults are uniquely dependent on AI tools.
Adobe announced it is expanding its AI chatbot integrations by adding Acrobat PDF tools to its existing Claude and Claude Code plugin, and by bringing its creative tool suite to Google Gemini. The Acrobat tools let Claude users organize, redact, convert and edit PDFs, including an interactive editor and a Document Review skill that adds suggestions directly into files.
Anthropic announced that its in-house wet biology lab, using its Claude AI model, identified a previously unknown enzyme system found in bacteriophage DNA that can cut, copy and paste DNA similarly to CRISPR. CEO Dario Amodei said the work took Claude about 21 hours using roughly 950 agents and 210 million tokens, and credited the discovery mostly, though not entirely, to the AI, while noting it builds on prior research including a similar Stanford finding.
Anthropic engineers spent a two-week sprint in August optimizing four core user journeys in claude.ai and the Claude desktop app, which together account for 95% of user activity. Measured at the 75th percentile, load time for a fresh claude.ai page dropped from 3.1 seconds to 0.55 seconds, new Claude Code sessions went from 0.8 to 0.3 seconds, and Claude Cowork cloud sessions improved from 2.6 to 0.73 seconds, with a 3.1x average speedup across 13 measurements.
Anthropic announced a new life sciences research group that uses its Claude AI model to analyze DNA datasets, identify uncharacterized protein families, and generate testable hypotheses. The company reported an early result in which Claude, given only high-level guidance from scientists, identified a previously unknown enzyme system with features resembling CRISPR, which was then validated through lab experiments.