Issue 9 October 2026

Thursday was a busy day at Anthropic. The company published a 2026 Usage Policy refresh, effective 12th November, that consolidates bans on fake accounts and fabricated news into a single Do Not Engage in Deceptive Campaigns or Artificial Activity section, renames the elections rules Do Not Undermine Democratic Processes, drops the blanket ban on personalized campaign targeting (nonprofits writing ballot notices in other languages were caught; deceptive targeting remains banned elsewhere), and spells out stop-buttons for Claude when it is wired to hardware that can injure. Most of this, Anthropic says, restates enforcement already under way.

Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni, the three safety researchers OpenAI fired last week, published an open letter on Thursday denying the company’s claim that they mishandled sensitive information and warning that colleagues are now “afraid to speak.” They say AI safety work depends on “close collaboration with outside experts,” and that terminations “executed and communicated so abruptly” chill the open culture OpenAI once prized. They deny involvement in a leak to The Information about less-monitorable architectures in newer models, and deny engaging outside parties beyond their job mandates.

At a Google Cloud event on Thursday, Gemini crossed from answering questions to “getting things done.” The new enterprise agent takes objectives, not just instructions: it plans work, loads skills, and connects to Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Jira, Confluence, Git, BigQuery, Databricks, Postgres, Snowflake and any Model Context Protocol server inside or outside the network. By default it picks a model; users can override, including to Anthropic’s Claude, with open-source and private models promised later. A tasks inbox shows thinking, subagents and progress. Sundar Pichai noted more than a billion monthly Gemini users and that nearly 90% of Fortune 100 firms already use Gemini Enterprise.