GoKawiil
Tech News
A Brooklyn father of two used AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude to research and compare back-to-school products instead of manually checking retailer sites and online reviews. The AI consolidated his shopping list across multiple stores and even advised him on optimal timing to buy items at the lowest prices. Retail surveys indicate this behavior is becoming widespread among shoppers this school season.
Anthropic has published instructions for managing Claude's memory feature, which organizes saved information by topic and can be edited or deleted through the web client at claude.ai or the mobile app. The company also introduced an 'Include sensitive topics in memory' setting, since Claude normally avoids storing details about health, race, religion, politics or gender identity unless a user opts in.
On Thursday, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and xAI's Grok all experienced outages within the same window, though the scope varied by provider. OpenAI attributed its disruption to a routing error around 7:43 am PT that was resolved by 8:17 am PT, while Anthropic said only its Opus 4.8 and Opus 5 models were hit and xAI reported broader failures. No common infrastructure failure has been confirmed, with Cloudflare denying any service disruption on its end.
Security personnel working at San Francisco offices of major AI firms, represented by SEIU-United Service Workers West, voted this week to authorize a strike. The vote gives union leadership the go-ahead to call a walkout if labor negotiations with contractors fail to produce an acceptable deal.
ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok all went down Thursday morning within roughly an hour of each other, though OpenAI and Anthropic did not cite any shared external cause. OpenAI blamed a routing error resolved within about 34 minutes, Anthropic reported elevated errors across several Claude models fixed within roughly three hours, and xAI said its Grok outage stemmed from a failure at its Memphis compute facility that took nearly four hours to resolve.
OpenAI unveiled GPT-6 Astra, touting gains in cybersecurity, software engineering and agentic workflows, and calling it its most capable model yet. The release is rolling out first to enterprise and security customers before reaching Plus, Pro and Business users. In the same week, Anthropic, Meta and Google each pushed out their own model updates, with Anthropic releasing Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1.
Major AI platforms including ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Google's models experienced overlapping service disruptions Thursday morning. Anthropic reported elevated errors on several Claude models starting around 9:23 am, resolving them by early afternoon, while OpenAI logged degraded ChatGPT and Codex performance from 10:43 am until nearly 1 pm. xAI's Grok also displayed error messages, with user reports on DownDetector spiking into the thousands before tapering off.
OpenAI unveiled GPT-6 Astra, its newest flagship model, claiming top-tier performance in browsing the web, operating software, and solving complex math problems. The rollout begins with enterprise users in OpenAI's Daybreak early access program before expanding to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Business subscribers, though availability for free users remains unconfirmed. Cofounder Greg Brockman told reporters he believes the company may have just ushered in the AGI era with this release.
An opinion piece critiques a recent open letter from over 100 tech firms—including OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Google—warning that AI will make cyberattacks cheaper and more frequent. The author praises the letter's factual basis, citing a real August incident where federal agencies found AI-generated exploit scripts targeting Siemens industrial controllers, but argues the letter fails to address who is actually responsible for defense. A think tank's counterpoint is cited: criminals adopt new tools mainly when old revenue streams dry up, not simply because new technology exists.
Anthropic notified affected customers that malware on their own computers had stolen active Claude login sessions, letting attackers rack up unauthorized usage and charges. The company responded by signing out compromised sessions, removing saved payment cards, and refunding the fraudulent charges. Anthropic clarified the breach originated from infostealer malware on users' devices, not from any compromise of its own systems.
Claude experienced a widespread outage on September 3, 2026, with many users reporting they could not access the AI assistant starting around 10:02 AM ET. Anthropic confirmed by 12:27 PM ET that the issue had been fixed and all models were back to normal operation.
Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the AI development platform known for hosting open-weight models, in a deal valued at $13 billion. The acquisition strengthens Nvidia's position in the open-source AI ecosystem beyond its core chip business.