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AI News Today (Oct 26, 2026): GPT-6 Astra, Anthropic & More

By Kill The AI
· · 20 min read AI News

Last updated: Oct 26, 2026 — next refresh daily.

Kill The AI daily AI news cover for October 26, 2026

AI news today, October 26, 2026: ARC Prize verified GPT-6 Astra at 62.7% on its standard ARC-AGI-3 harness, not the 99.9% OpenAI published. Elvis Presley's rights holders also sued Anthropic for $41 million, and OpenAI offered discounts up to 90% to win Anthropic customers. Here are 10 top stories and five security stories, each with free, non-paywalled sources.

Key Takeaways

  • ARC Prize verified GPT-6 Astra at 62.7% on ARC-AGI-3, not the 99.9% OpenAI published.
  • Elvis Presley's rights holders sued Anthropic for $41 million over 274 songs.
  • OpenAI offered discounts up to 90% to move Rippling, Replit and DataCamp spending from Anthropic.
  • Apollo's Torsten Slok says AI has delivered zero financial payoff outside the tech sector.
  • A 9.6-severity flaw in Unitree's Go2 robot allows remote command injection through its AI chat module.

1. ARC Prize Rejects OpenAI's 99.9% GPT-6 Astra Score

ARC Prize's verified leaderboard puts GPT-6 Astra at 62.7% on ARC-AGI-3 under its standard harness at maximum reasoning, at a cost of $26,098 per run. OpenAI had promoted 99.9% for the same model, a figure ARC lists separately under a provider-adapter harness that preserves reasoning state between actions.

The provider-adapter run scored 99.9% at high reasoning for $18,817, according to ARC's table. Startup Fortune reported that ARC Prize rejected the 99.9% as a comparable score because no other lab is tested under that custom setup. It also reported that OpenAI later revised five published benchmark figures. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had cited the 99.9% figure when he declared "AGI has arrived."

Why it matters: Benchmark headlines now depend as much on the harness as the model, so buyers should check which configuration a score used before treating it as AGI evidence.

2. OpenAI Offers Up to 90% Discounts to Win Anthropic Customers

OpenAI is offering discounts of up to 90% to pull enterprise customers away from Anthropic, The Information reported. At Rippling, OpenAI's share of coding work rose from 16% in May to 52%, while Anthropic's fell from 57% to 18%, according to CEO Parker Conrad.

Replit moved most of its AI spending after OpenAI offered more than 30% off a contract worth over $100 million a year, The Decoder reported. DataCamp's CEO said OpenAI's pricing cut his costs by 80% to 90%. Replit now makes OpenAI the default provider for its Agent tool, though Claude models remain available.

Why it matters: Price competition is now the main lever in enterprise AI, squeezing Anthropic's margins just as both labs need profitable growth for public markets.

3. Elvis Rights Holders Sue Anthropic for $41 Million

A unit of Authentic Brands Group and other owners of Elvis Presley's catalog sued Anthropic on Friday, alleging the company trained Claude on 274 Presley songs without permission. The complaint names Can't Help Falling in Love, A Little Less Conversation, Don't Be Cruel and other hits.

The suit seeks $150,000 per song, about $41 million, according to Rolling Stone. Billboard first reported the case. Lead attorney Richard Busch alleged that Anthropic built its entire business model on copyright infringement. The complaint also says Claude still produces protected songs when prompted, despite guardrails. Anthropic did not immediately comment.

Why it matters: An estate lawsuit with statutory damages could set a precedent for individual artists, not just labels, suing over training data.

4. Apollo Economist Says AI Delivered Zero Payoff Outside Tech

Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok said AI has delivered "zero financial payoff" to corporate America outside tech, in a note published October 24. He tracks the S&P 493, the S&P 500 minus the Magnificent Seven, and found profit margins and revenue per worker flat.

AI news today also includes the S&P 493, where Apollo found flat revenue per worker and flat profit margins. Slok argued that cheap intelligence is not the same as business judgment, and that firms still struggle to turn AI into revenue growth and margins.

Why it matters: If AI gains stay inside the Magnificent Seven, the investment case for the rest of the market weakens and the buildout's funding becomes more concentrated.

5. Microsoft Open-Sources Agensh, a 1,024-Agent Coding Harness

Microsoft Research open-sourced Agensh on October 24 under the MIT license. The harness removes the central orchestrator from multi-agent coding. Workers claim subtasks through a shared Git workspace, a message board and a context board, then verify and merge their own work.

On the five hardest ProgramBench tasks, GPT-5.6-sol's mean pass rate rose from 19.31% with one agent to 28.78% with 128 agents. On pandoc, 1,024 agents reached 55.06%, up from 33.89% for one agent, within a six-hour budget and no internet. The README adds that GPT-6.1-sol with 32 agents hit 79.59% on pandoc, a result not in the paper.

Why it matters: Agent count can substitute for a stronger model on some coding tasks, but token cost and coordination overhead remain unmeasured.

6. Nanbeige Releases a 33B Open Agent Model With 512K Context

Nanbeige LLM Lab, backed by Chinese recruitment platform BOSS Zhipin, released Nanbeige4.3-33B on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0. The dense model has a 524,288-token context window, reasoning on by default, and is designed as a teacher for smaller agent models.

It beats Qwen3.8-27B on seven of eight agentic-coding evaluations, Startup Fortune reported, including 80.9 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 versus 73.0 and 65.5 on DeepSWE versus 42.5. Its model card also lists 95.2 on AIME 2026. The figures are from Nanbeige's model card.

Why it matters: A 33B open model gives enterprises a cheaper option for coding agents, if the claims hold.

7. Sweden Blocks ChatGPT and Claude on Government Work Computers

Sweden's Government Offices will block browser access to ChatGPT and Claude on staff work computers from Monday, October 26. The Regeringskansliet confirmed the move to SVT after Sveriges Radio's Ekot reported it, and Microsoft Copilot remains the only approved AI tool after a security review.

Officials said using AI services without a formal contract can harm information security. Some staff can still reach ChatGPT and Claude models through the offices' internal Intric platform, so the block targets consumer websites, not the models themselves. Sweden's Tax Agency and the National Board of Institutional Care have imposed similar restrictions.

Why it matters: European governments are separating vetted, contract-governed AI from consumer tools, a procurement pattern vendors will face elsewhere.

8. Update: Poll Finds 63% of Voters Oppose Nearby AI Data Centers

A CNBC All-America Economic Survey found 63% of registered voters oppose an AI data center within 10 miles of their home, while 13% support one. The poll of 1,000 voters was conducted October 14-18 with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 points; the siting question used a half-sample of about 500.

Opposition crosses party lines: 80% of Democrats oppose a nearby facility and 4% support one. Among MAGA supporters, 55% want AI development to continue while Congress works on rules, but only 29% would support a data center within 10 miles. This extends the midterm data-center backlash covered in our October 24 edition.

Why it matters: Data-center opposition is now a bipartisan electoral risk, complicating the buildout both parties say they want.

9. Blue Planet III Leaves Rough Edges In to Prove It Is Not AI

The BBC's Blue Planet III deliberately includes cloudier, less polished footage to reassure viewers that its animals are real, producers said ahead of the series premiere on November 1. Executive producer Elizabeth White said AI makes the team want to be more authentic, and that murky water and visible boats are now left in.

BBC specialist factual commissioning head Jack Bootle told journalists: "No gen AI was used in this series. Not a single frame." The series also debuts an underwater CCTV camera, nicknamed stonefish, used to film dolphins using sea sponges to trap fish.

Why it matters: As synthetic imagery spreads, natural-history broadcasters are treating visible imperfection as a trust signal, not a production flaw.

10. WA Government Seeks Refund From Deloitte Over AI-Flawed Report

Western Australia is seeking an expedited refund from Deloitte over a university-merger study. The A$166,000 report contained AI-hallucinated references and cost totals off by hundreds of millions. In one high-cost scenario, two figures totalling A$659 million were reported as A$399 million, a A$260 million discrepancy.

Deloitte said it used generative AI for research collation, synthesis and proofreading, and had called the errors minor. The state government said it is "extremely disappointed" and has written to Deloitte to speed the cost recovery. Deloitte will correct and reissue the report.

Why it matters: Governments are starting to attach financial consequences to AI-assisted consulting errors, putting proofreading and citation checks back into contract scope.

AI Security: 5 Stories to Know Today

11. Unitree Go2 Robot Flaw Allows Remote Command Injection

Unitree's Go2 robot carries a critical command-injection flaw, CVE-2026-115995, rated 9.6 under version 3.1 of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). The bug sits in the setvolume function of gptthread.py in the chat_go component; manipulating the Value argument can run operating-system commands remotely.

Versions up to 1.1.11.4 are affected, and Unitree fixed the issue in firmware 1.1.11.5. The vendor confirmed the report as internal ticket #474 and classified it as CWE-78. The Hacker Wire's tracker lists no public proof-of-concept and no known exploitation.

Why it matters: Internet-connected robots now expose the same command-injection class as web software, but patching a fleet of physical devices is far harder.

12. Update: PHP2Shell Attackers Used Agentic AI Inside a Government

Attackers used agentic AI platforms for post-exploitation after exploiting the PHP2Shell flaws, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said one campaign hit a European government entity. Within two hours, the attackers accessed password hashes and multi-factor authentication secrets, then built an NT LAN Manager (NTLM)-relay tunnel into Active Directory.

The commands were wrapped in machine-readable delimiters such as ==SHELLUSER== and ==PASSWD==, a marker of an AI-driven operator. Separately, CYFIRMA linked a suspected North Korea campaign to low-volume scanning of 216 unpatched hosts across the U.S., Asia, the Middle East and the EU. This follows the PHP2Shell disclosure covered in our October 23 edition.

Why it matters: AI is compressing the time from initial access to domain compromise, leaving patch windows measured in hours rather than days.

13. AGENTS.md in Downloads Hijacks AI Coding Agents

Forever Security found a malicious AGENTS.md file in a customer's Downloads folder that told an AI coding agent to install a rogue npm package. The company reproduced the chain against OpenAI Codex with a harmless payload that opened a calculator, succeeding in more than 90% of attempts.

A related CLAUDE.md test redirected Claude Code's API traffic to an attacker-controlled server, leaked its OAuth token and returned tool calls that ran code in about 50% of tests. The researchers say the vector cannot be patched because agents are designed to follow instruction files. They recommend never running an agent from Downloads.

Why it matters: Agent instruction files turn any writable folder into an attack surface, so working-directory hygiene is now part of the security boundary.

14. Johns Hopkins AI Tool Upload Exposed 3,182 Patients

Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center is notifying 3,182 patients after a staff member uploaded a spreadsheet of their health information to an unapproved public AI tool. The hospital discovered the upload on September 21 during an internal review; the data covered patients treated between May and September 2026.

The spreadsheet included patient names, treatment dates and medical record numbers, but not Social Security numbers or financial accounts. The worker deleted the prompt, thread and document, and the hospital asked the vendor to delete the data. Letters began going out October 22 with 12 months of credit monitoring.

Why it matters: Consumer AI tools are now a routine shadow-IT channel for sensitive data, and deleting a chat does not undo the disclosure.

15. Fired OpenAI Safety Researchers Dispute Leak Allegations

Three fired OpenAI safety researchers say the company never told them in writing what confidential information they allegedly mishandled. Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni and Jasmine Wang deny sharing secrets and suspect the firings were tied to their push for better monitoring of model reasoning.

The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI's security team examined their Signal chats with outside researcher Ryan Greenblatt. The review followed a September 1 report about GPT-6 Astra revealing less of its reasoning. OpenAI says the firings were not about safety advocacy; the researchers warn the case will chill cooperation with independent auditors.

Why it matters: If safety staff cannot talk to outside auditors without losing their jobs, independent evaluation of frontier models becomes harder to trust.

More AI Stories Worth Reading

  • A dermatologist's 200-lesion test found a 10-year-old CNN beat GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 on skin cancer diagnosis, 62% to 42% — Lynch Lab
  • r/opensource banned AI-related projects and non-English posts, prompting a revolt and a rival subreddit — The Verge
  • Cristian Volpato licensed his AI likeness, voice and performance data to Callandor for synthetic-twin brand deals — The Guardian
  • Google's AI search changes have upended online publishing, shrinking traffic for sites that once depended on search — The Verge

Methodology & Sources

Compiled October 26, 2026 using multi-source research. Sources include ARC Prize, Startup Fortune, The Decoder, AI Chat Daily, Billboard, Rolling Stone, Apollo, TechCrunch, GitHub, MarkTechPost and Hugging Face. Also SVT, CNBC, The Guardian, The Verge, The Next Web, NVD, The Hacker Wire, The Hacker News, Unit 42, BleepingComputer, Forever Security, WMAR-2 News, Hoodline and Lynch Lab. No paywalled sources; details as reported at compilation time.

Frequently asked questions

QWhat is the biggest AI news today (October 26, 2026)?

ARC Prize's verified leaderboard puts GPT-6 Astra at 62.7% on ARC-AGI-3 under its standard harness, while OpenAI's 99.9% figure came from a separate provider-adapter setup. Other top stories: Elvis Presley's rights holders sued Anthropic for $41 million, and OpenAI offered discounts up to 90% to win Anthropic customers.

QWhat is the ARC Prize dispute with OpenAI?

ARC Prize runs ARC-AGI-3 with a standard harness so every model faces the same conditions. It lists GPT-6 Astra at 62.7% on that setup, and separately at 99.9% with a provider-adapter harness that preserves reasoning state. ARC Prize rejected the 99.9% as a comparable score, Startup Fortune reported.

QWhy is Anthropic being sued over Elvis Presley songs?

A unit of Authentic Brands Group and other rights holders sued Anthropic on October 23, alleging Claude was trained on 274 Presley songs without permission. The suit seeks $150,000 per song, about $41 million, and says Claude still reproduces protected songs when prompted. Anthropic did not immediately comment.

QWhat is Microsoft Agensh?

Agensh is a Microsoft Research multi-agent harness that coordinates up to 1,024 coding agents without a central orchestrator. Workers claim subtasks through a shared Git workspace, message board and context board, then verify and merge their own work. Microsoft open-sourced it under the MIT license on October 24.

QWhat is CVE-2026-115995?

CVE-2026-115995 is a critical command-injection flaw in Unitree's Go2 robot, rated 9.6 under CVSS 3.1. It sits in the set_volume function of the chat_go AI module and can be triggered remotely. Unitree fixed it in firmware 1.1.11.5; versions up to 1.1.11.4 are affected.

Freshness

Last updated: Oct 26, 2026 — next refresh daily. This roundup is updated as stories develop; dateModified is bumped on every refresh so readers can see exactly how fresh the coverage is.

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