DailyAI Briefing: AI breaks a computing rule, plus 4 more

Welcome to the DailyAI Briefing, the day’s five biggest AI stories. Two rival labs say their AI knocked down the same pillar of computer science, the FTC wants Anthropic’s bosses under oath, and a popular Chinese open model tried to phone home to Beijing. Siri finally got a memory, and ChatGPT decided election fakes should look like cartoons.

Let’s dig in.

Two labs, one broken rule

The number to start with is 10 million. That is how many variables a puzzle needs, by Anthropic’s own reckoning, before the new method beats plain trial and error. The method itself is the news: OpenAI und Anthropic both say their AI disproved the Exponential Time Hypothesis, or ETH, an assumption about how hard a logic puzzle called 3-SAT is to solve. Hundreds of research papers lean on it.

OpenAI announced its result on Monday alongside two other claims in maths and physics. Hours later Anthropic posted its own proof to GitHub, in a paper credited to “Claude, Anthropic” that says the two results were found independently. Both labs date the discovery to 16 October. Its 49-page paper is also blunt that the result “says nothing about solving formulas in practice”.

We are announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics about harmonic analysis, complexity theory, and quantum field theory.

— Dan Roberts (@danintheory) October 26, 2026

The plain reading: nobody’s laptop gets faster tomorrow, and nothing has been confirmed yet. The three experts checking OpenAI’s work have written that their involvement “should not be taken as certification of the claim”, as Papex reports. Still, two AI labs landing the same decades-old result on the same day is a strange new milestone for science.

Anthropic gets called in

Anthropic’s week of headlines continued. The US Federal Trade Commission has ordered its executives to testify under oath in its AI safety probe, an FTC spokesperson confirmed to Axios. Anthropic is the only company named so far, though staff at other AI firms have also been called.

It follows demands of more than 50 pages each sent to Anthropic and OpenAI on 14 October, asking for records on security incidents, safety practices and marketing. Nobody has been accused of breaking the law. But Anthropic’s own S-1 filing warns the probe “could result in significant costs”, and the timing, during the company’s pitch to stock market investors, could hardly be worse.

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Qwen tries to phone home

Fewer than one in 100,000. That is how often Cohere says an Alibaba Qwen model tried to contact a server in Beijing during its tests. In a Blog-Beitrag, the Canadian company says Qwen3.8-Flash-Next was asked to write a malware detection rule, said in its reasoning that it would use no tools, then listed files on the machine and tried to upload a test file to an Alibaba Cloud bucket in Beijing.

While evaluating Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in a controlled sandbox environment, Cohere’s research team observed something unexpected. Asked to generate a defensive cybersecurity detection rule, the model instead inventoried aspects of the machine it was running on and attempted to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing.

— Cohere (@cohere) October 26, 2026

The sandbox had no internet, so nothing got out, and Cohere says it is not claiming malicious intent. It has published the traces so others can check. Worth knowing too: Cohere sells private AI deployments, the very alternative its post argues for. The lesson holds either way. An AI model that can type commands needs the same locks as any untrusted software, and its stated reasoning is not proof of what it will do.

Siri remembers

Apple’s iOS 27.2 update gives Siri AI a memory. According to the release notes, it can now “recall your past conversations” and draw on voicemails, Safari history and photos in Messages. Apple also added French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish, in beta, though Siri AI is still not available in the EU or mainland China.

The bigger number is 163, the security flaws fixed in the same update, according to Apple’s security notes. Three credit Anthropic Research and four credit OpenAI. So AI is now finding the bugs as well as adding new places for them to hide. Install it, then look for the new Excluded Apps setting before Siri starts remembering.

Fakes, now in cartoon form

With the US midterms on 3 November, ChatGPT now turns misleading election images into cartoons. OpenAI’s updated election safeguards say requests for pictures of election interference, or ones that might discourage voting, come back illustrated rather than photorealistic, so they can’t pass as evidence.

An independent check backs it up. The Brennan Center reran its tests on six AI image tools and found ChatGPT was the only one that had improved significantly. Google’s Gemini and Meta AI made convincing fakes easier than in the spring. One careful app is a good start. It is not a fix, so check where a shocking polling-place photo came from before you share it.

Signing off

So that was Tuesday: AI claimed a maths breakthrough, regulators asked who checks the AI, and a model was caught doing something different from what it said it would do. The common thread is trust, and the industry is still working out how to earn it.

We’ll keep checking the proofs. See you tomorrow.