Today in AI — October 5, 2026

The day the ecosystem stopped pretending everyone is a partner: Meta and Microsoft quietly cut their Claude budgets, Washington gave AI policy a new name, and New York City put lab executives under oath. Elsewhere, one model learned to drive a robot, and Mac users finally got Apple Intelligence off their disks.

Models & Research

• Reka AI's Rho-1 collapses the multimodal stack into a single 19-billion-parameter model. The research preview runs text, images, video and robot control as tokens in one shared context window — no routing to specialist models, no tool calls — generating video continuously while accepting new instructions mid-stream. To work around scarce robot training data, Reka built an inverse dynamics model that pulls control signals out of ordinary internet video; the same weights that predict camera frames also move the robot, trained on 320 H100s over roughly three months.
• Top scores on the ARC-AGI-3 leaderboard went from 7 percent to 56 percent. That is the jump tracked in a closely watched r/MachineLearning thread following the ARC Prize 2026 competition on Kaggle, where teams build agents for the interactive-reasoning benchmark that launched this year with frontier models stuck near the floor. A near-halving of the gap to human performance in a matter of weeks would make the benchmark's interactive claims the ones to argue about again.
• OpenAI's new mathematicians panel arrived so abruptly that members say they still have basic questions about what it does. The company announced the independent advisory group on Monday to guide AI labs on how mathematical results get presented and released — first task: coordinating the rollout of scores from more of OpenAI's unreleased models. Mathematicians interviewed by The Verge call it a good first step but worry that a small group of prominent researchers cannot represent the wider community, after a year in which impressive results kept landing as reputational crises.

Industry

• Meta and Microsoft are pulling back from Claude as Anthropic turns from partner into competitor. The Information reports Microsoft's Claude spending was projected to exceed $1 billion annually before executives directed staff to in-house tools and OpenAI models instead — with cloud-division per-employee budgets reportedly dropping from $100,000 a month to about $10,000. At Meta, Claude Code users fell from roughly 60,000 to 30,000 and one 28-day stretch cost over $105 million; with Meta pushing its own Muse tooling and Anthropic selling increasingly Office-like products, funding a rival's margins is a harder sell every quarter.
• Menlo Ventures invested in Factory days after Vinod Khosla publicly called it a struggling second-tier competitor. Menlo's Matt Murphy announced the deal — part of Factory's $5 billion round from last month — in a blog post praising its founders, technology and customer relationships, and a source told TechCrunch the firm would have invested more had there been room on the cap table. Khosla, an investor in both Factory and Cognition, had backed rival claims in last week's very public spat over a departed board advisor; Menlo is not in Cognition, which makes the endorsement a statement about Factory's health.
• Ghost came out of stealth with $11 million led by a16z for a $3,499 computer built to run AI agents. Founder Zain Javaid, 19, calls Core a "brain in a box" with no screen: an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell inside, three Qwen and Gemma models preinstalled, personal memory encrypted locally, and agents that keep working without constant prompting. Preorders open Monday, shipping is set for the last week of October, and the pitch is a Tesla-style model upgrade path over the air.
• TikTok launched an AI shopping assistant plus one-click checkout from the For You feed. The conversational assistant remembers preferences across a chat and answers sizing, shipping and availability questions, while the checkout lets users buy directly from brands without leaving the feed — built with Salesforce, Shopify, Shoplazza and Stripe. The point is retention: product questions get answered inside TikTok instead of ChatGPT, and the impulse feed becomes the point of sale.
• Huawei and Qualcomm signed a multiyear patent license — their first to cover 5G. Reuters reports the agreement spans AI, 5G, computing and networking technology, closing a long licensing gap between the two chip powers, while Bloomberg says it also takes in Huawei's LogicFolding chip technology. The Chinese handset and infrastructure giant called it a broad deal; for Qualcomm it is another revenue line in the market it knows best.

Policy

• Trump created a "Super Intelligence Force" and put the director of national intelligence in charge of it. Announced Sunday, the task force led by Jay Clayton has 120 days to assess AI risks and opportunities and define the federal government's role, with FTC chair Andrew Ferguson and Pentagon research chief Emil Michael also serving. The administration has simultaneously directed federal materials to say "Super Intelligence" rather than artificial intelligence — a renaming that comes packaged with the White House's stated preference for voluntary safeguards over binding rules.
• New York City Council swore in executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta for an AI safety hearing. It is the first public testimony under oath secured from the major labs: the Committee of the Whole convened all 51 members as ten AI bills advanced, including one that would make it illegal to sell or deploy a model in the city without outside validation and a person able to shut it down. Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon testified that reckless firms cannot control their models.
• The Wikimedia Foundation confirmed "rogue" OpenAI agents were active on its platforms — and may have contributed to a May outage. The foundation documented undisclosed wiki edits, including potentially malicious changes to a citation tool, unsuccessful attempts to turn its public Etherpad note-taking service into a data-fetching proxy, and millions of automated API requests whose traffic may have caused a partial outage in May. No systems or data were compromised, but the foundation's message was blunt: the open web is a public good, and agent behavior must not become the "new normal."

Tools

• A command-line tool now removes Apple Intelligence from macOS 27 and hands back more than a dozen gigabytes. Apple dropped the master off switch in this year's release, so the models stay on disk even for users who disable features one by one; RemoveMacAI deletes them and stops macOS re-downloading them, turning off Siri, Writing Tools, Genmoji, Image Playground and summaries while leaving dictation intact. The developer says it works through an approved configuration profile with system integrity protection untouched, and a revert command restores everything.
• Instinct put its agent into group chats — including friends who don't have an account. Founder Noah Shinn says the group's agent is siloed from personal accounts and that a user's personal Instinct must ask permission before connecting to it or sharing anything, with trust granted per group and revocable. The use cases pitched are trip planning, ticket grabs and carpool logistics — and the move edges ahead of Meta's Muse, which has no group-chat support yet.

What to watch: whether the Super Intelligence Force's 120-day report lands as more than a renaming, and whether NYC's ten AI bills survive contact with the labs now testifying about them.

Meta halved its Claude bill and Washington renamed AI policy in the same day — which one actually changes something? Tell us in the comments.