The Weekly · Issue 2026·44 · 26 Oct – 1 Nov 2026

I · The stories

The story of the week: Three Qwen3.8 Models Sent Web Requests to Alibaba Cloud

Vals AI found requests to an Alibaba Cloud server in evaluation traces for three Qwen3.8 models, with no matches in two Qwen3.7 models it checked. The researchers reproduced the behavior in controlled tests and said they found no evidence of sensitive data theft.

• Google’s Suncatcher Satellite Sends Its First AI Response to Earth
• Pika Releases H3 Flex, an Open-Weight Video-and-Audio Model
• DoorDash Has Seen Only Hundreds of Orders From Some AI Agents
• OpenAI Expands Misalignment Monitoring, but Flags Gaps
• Anthropic Says Claude Chained Exploits Across Five Platforms
• OpenAI Releases GPT-Rosalind-6 for Approved Biology Research
• Cursor Finds Malicious Claude Code Extension in Its Marketplace
• Epoch AI Says GLM 5.3 Exploited Six Firefox Releases
• Anthropic’s Claude Watermark Leaves a Sampling Loophole
• UK CMA Opens Competition Probe Into Meta’s Business Terms
• Krea Launches Ad Studio to Turn Brand Websites Into Ads
• Amazon’s AI Buildout Drives $42.4B Trailing Free-Cash Outflow
• CrowdStrike Says VAPOR PANDA Used AI Agents Against 200 Targets
• GXO Adds Two U.S. Sites for Agility’s Digit Robots
• ByteDance Adds 4K to Seedance 2.5, With Cheaper Drafts
• Subvocal Opens $499 Preorders for Silent-Speech Glasses
• AI gets people into trouble in the backcountry
• Chainalysis Discloses Breach Exposing Customer Names and Emails
• IBM Trains Granite Models to Resist Prompt Injection
• Salesforce Agrees to Buy Rune in Reported $375M Deal
• OpenAI Promises a Daybreak Blue Training Opt-Out After Backlash
• Microsoft Finds North Korean Groups Using ARTEX AI Agents
• Anthropic Used Claude to Find Gaps in Its Training Monitor
• Raincheck Cuts First-Token Latency While Restoring Pruned Context
• Vaani Opens Its Voice-Agent Platform to Developers
• Satlyt Tests Orbital Software for Shared Computing
• A Probe Flags AI Agents Before They Leak Secrets
• Robot Policy Readout Nearly Halves Xiaomi Inference Latency
• Mollie Brings 60+ Financial Workflows to Claude and ChatGPT
• Accenture Contractor’s Claude Agent Ran on a Pentagon Network for Two Months
• Study Finds AI Human-Likeness Is Separate From Task Accuracy
• Synthflow Launches Vector, an AI Agent That Tracks Lending Accounts
• Google Takes AI Search Ads Global as Search Growth Cools
• GitHub Says Agents Started More Than 40% of September Pull Requests
• Meta Rebuilds Andromeda to Score a Billion Ads per Second
• Kindo Ships Deep Hat Sift to Filter Enterprise Alerts
• Property Finder Finds 96.8% of Its AI Labels Came From the Old Model
• Socure Reports 99.99% Lab Accuracy Identifying Muse and Instinct
• Google Puts Gemini Robotics ER 2 in Cloud Preview

II · Worth a page

• AskStream: When and What to Ask Proactively under Uncertainty in Streaming Video Understanding

  Computer Vision / multimodal large language models (MLLMs) — specifically streaming video understanding and proactive human–model interaction

• Read, Allocate, Route: Role-Coupled Tokenization for Pixel-Space Generative Transformers

  Computer Vision — pixel-space generative Transformers (rectified-flow diffusion models that operate directly on pixels rather than in a compressed latent space)

• Unlocking Any-Order Generation in Pretrained Autoregressive Image Models

  Computer vision and generative modeling, specifically autoregressive (AR) image generation and any-order (permutation-based) sequence modeling

• Timestral

  Time series foundation models (TSFMs) for probabilistic forecasting, within artificial intelligence and machine learning

• OBB-PBD: Extending Parallel Box Decoding to Oriented Bounding Boxes for Referring Expression Grounding in Aerial Imagery

  Computer vision and vision-language models — specifically referring expression grounding (localizing an object described in natural language) in aerial/UAV imagery, combined with oriented bounding box (OBB) geometry and parallel coordinate decoding

• EmbeddingGemma 2: Unified and Efficient Multimodal Representations

  Machine learning — multimodal representation learning and embedding models (information retrieval, semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation)

III · The essays

No essay ran this week; the newest on file when it closed:

• Super Intelligence by executive order: the new federal name and the word's long history
• Atlas lasted 292 days: what a failed AI browser leaves behind
• Inference Economics: Quantization, Speculative Decoding, and the Art of Serving LLMs Cheaply
• The Sovereign AI Race: Why Every Nation Wants Its Own Foundation Model

IV · On the ladder

No votes this week.

V · On the calendar

• 2 Nov Mississauga Write Better with Claude AI Fast
• 2 Nov Toronto Claude AI Essentials: Hands-On Deep Dive
• 2 Nov Richmond Hill Claude for Founders: Workflow Automation Bootcamp
• 2 Nov Brampton Claude Vibe Coding for Professionals

VI · On the board

• Head of AI Factory Commissioning — Firmus
• Platform Reliability Engineering Manager — Firmus
• Software Development Engineer, Ads AI Core Infra (ACI) — Amazon

Every issue

1. Issue 2026·44 · 26 Oct – 1 Nov 2026 — Three Qwen3.8 Models Sent Web Requests to Alibaba Cloud

   278 stories · 224 papers · 0 essays

2. Issue 2026·43 · 19–25 Oct 2026 — A Unitree G1 Robot Learns to Shift Objects Across Its Body

   292 stories · 312 papers · 0 essays

3. Issue 2026·42 · 12–18 Oct 2026 — Google Research Releases Harness² for Agents That Rewrite Their Setup

   380 stories · 398 papers · 0 essays

4. Issue 2026·41 · 5–11 Oct 2026 — Meta and Microsoft Cut Internal Claude Use as Bills Rise

   326 stories · 384 papers · 0 essays

5. Issue 2026·40 · 28 Sep – 4 Oct 2026 — Thomson Reuters Faces Antitrust Suit Over Casetext Shutdown

   294 stories · 297 papers · 1 essay

6. Issue 2026·39 · 21–27 Sep 2026 — Google Opens Free AI Video Creation in Vids to Everyone

   271 stories · 136 papers · 0 essays

7. Issue 2026·38 · 14–20 Sep 2026 — Leverate Lets AI Assistants Connect Directly to Trading Accounts

   311 stories · 67 papers · 10 essays

8. Issue 2026·37 · 7–13 Sep 2026 — Researchers Tie OpenAI Agents to May RubyGems Campaign

   88 stories · 72 papers · 9 essays