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A federal judge in San Francisco denied home confinement to Abdulrahman Alfozan, a former OpenAI engineer accused of planting a recording device in a company conference room. Prosecutors said he was days from fleeing to Saudi Arabia and that his wife and child already left the U.S. on a one-way ticket paid for by a Saudi military official. His next court date is in November.
OpenAI says its newer models show large improvements writing and migrating code in older languages like COBOL, Fortran and Visual Basic. Using its new MultiLangBench test, GPT-6 Astra scored an average 87.4% pass rate versus 26.8% for GPT-5.6 Sol, with COBOL jumping from 10.9% to 72.1%. Separately, GPT-6.1 Sol reportedly reached 86.6% accuracy migrating COBOL to modern languages at low reasoning effort, rising to 97.9% at higher effort.
The Department of Homeland Security has directed U.S. federal civilian agencies to stop buying and to remove products and services built on Chinese startup DeepSeek's AI, citing national security risks from data that could be accessed by Chinese authorities. The ban extends beyond DeepSeek's own tools to third-party products built on its technology, though agencies may seek exceptions. China's Foreign Ministry criticized the move as politicizing trade and technology issues.
Bob McGrew, OpenAI's former research chief and a longtime Palantir engineering lead, has raised $230 million for his manufacturing startup Arda at a $1.5 billion valuation. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Accel and Khosla Ventures, and Arda's AI software is already deployed with defense tech company Anduril. McGrew describes the product as an AI assistant for manufacturing engineers, similar to coding tools like Claude or Cursor but aimed at speeding up assembly-line changes.
OpenAI has updated its ChatGPT browser extension with two new modes, Chat and Work, that let the AI read open tabs, compare information across sites, and perform browser actions like downloading files, grouping tabs, and filling out forms using local documents. The update also adds a dedicated ChatGPT tab for chat history, an @Chrome tagging shortcut, and site-specific permission controls, and is free on Chromium-based browsers including Chrome, Edge and Brave.
OpenAI released benchmark results showing its latest models, including GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol, perform significantly better at writing and migrating code in legacy languages like COBOL, Fortran and Visual Basic. Using an internal test suite called MultiLangBench, OpenAI reported Astra's average pass rate across 20 languages rose to 87.4 percent, though COBOL remained the toughest language at 72 percent. Separately, GPT-6.1 Sol reached up to 97.9 percent accuracy when migrating COBOL programs to languages such as Python, Java and Rust while preserving original program behavior.
A federal court ruled Monday that Abdulrahman Alfozan, a former OpenAI engineer, must remain detained while prosecutors pursue charges that he secretly bugged a company conference room. Prosecutors say Alfozan, a Saudi national, had a phone folder labeled 'Saudi Gov Docs' and had booked one-way travel for his family to Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with tickets allegedly paid for by Saudi government or military contacts.
A federal magistrate judge ruled that Abdulrahman Alfozan, a former OpenAI engineer accused of planting recording devices in a company conference room, must remain in custody until his trial. Prosecutors argued he poses a flight risk, citing an offer from the Saudi consulate to help fund his bail through a bonds firm. Alfozan's attorney countered that there is no evidence of espionage and called the flight-risk concerns unfounded.
OpenAI and Anthropic continue to generate billions of dollars in revenue, but reports indicate their growth rates are decelerating. That slowdown is drawing scrutiny from investors who are questioning whether current valuations across the AI sector are justified.
The rise of consumer AI agents like OpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse—which can book flights, hotels or restaurants on a user's behalf—has led sites including Pizza Hut, Yelp and Amazon to block them outright. Muse reportedly reached 5 million downloads in its first month, and agentic web traffic tripled between August and September. Amazon has also sued Perplexity over its AI agents and is appealing a court loss, arguing the bots make it harder to distinguish human ad views from automated ones.
Nick Cammarata, who previously worked on interpretability techniques at OpenAI, published a blog post suggesting a new way to understand the internal structure of neural networks, challenging the long-held view that their mechanisms are inherently tangled and unreadable. The post triggered strong reactions online, with some researchers calling it a landmark moment in AI science, while others, including Stanford's Chris Potts, argue it offers little more than a hunch without solving the field's core problems.
Prosecutors have filed a detention request against Abdulrahman Alfozan, a former OpenAI employee accused of planting a bugging device, arguing he poses a flight risk. The filing states that Alfozan had discussed potential jobs with a Saudi royal and that his wife and child have permanently relocated to Saudi Arabia.