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The ugly economics of consumer AI

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After this week, you could argue that consumer AI is making a comeback. Meta’s personal AI assistant, Muse, and its plush-like mascot Jolly, has been a surprise hit. OpenAI’s Dots, released just yesterday, appears to be chasing the same cartoony personal assistant idea. And the up-and-coming Instinct assistant reached a $10 billion valuation on the strength of its agentic errand-running, focused on booking travel, making restaurant reservations or cancelling subscriptions. The bull case is easy to make. Agentic AI has finally gotten reliable enough to handle everyday tasks. Companies are…

TechCrunch AI · 30 Sep 2026 · 19:24 CESTRead story →Join free ↗

Automation & Agents

Meta disputes claim that Muse read a user’s private messages without permission

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Meta is refuting a journalist’s claim that its AI agent Muse read the user’s private messages without permission. Following an earlier report from Inc. columnist Jason Aten that detailed the issue, Meta VP of Communications Andy Stone pushed back, making it clear that the company does not believe its product did this without the user’s consent. “The Messages integration in the Muse app for Mac is entirely opt-in,” Stone wrote on X in response to the claims made by the piece. “You have to enable both Full Disk Access and…

TechCrunch AI · 30 Sep 2026 · 18:24 CESTRead story →Join free ↗

Business use

Google's early attempt to pay websites for AI answers is struggling

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Many sites see just one-tenth of one percent of their advertising revenue from AI payments. Google’s shift to AI-powered search has upended the way the world’s largest search engine generates web traffic, rankling large and small publishers alike. In recent months, the company has experimented with paying publishers when their content appears in AI answers, but a new report claims the payouts in this pilot program are miniscule. That has publishers in the program, as well as those watching from the sidelines, feeling skeptical. According to The Information, Google has…

Ars Technica AI · 30 Sep 2026 · 18:03 CESTRead story →Join free ↗

Automation & Agents

DoorDash launches an AI agent you can text to order food

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DoorDash announced on Wednesday that it’s launching a text-to-order AI agent that lets users place orders through Apple Messages. The new tool allows users to send prompts like “order my usual,” and the agent will understand that they mean their Friday night order. DoorDash says users can also ask for a specific dish and request a local recommendation. The agent will then search local spots and suggest a cart based on the prompt, and even text photos of the food it recommends. When ordering for

TechCrunch AI · 30 Sep 2026 · 18:00 CESTRead story →Join free ↗

Robotics

Destro AI’s secret sauce is getting robots and humans on the same page

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The best path to successfully deploying a robot is not building one at all, according to Destro, a startup that came out of stealth Tuesday with an $8 million seed round. Most new robotics companies are focused on finding the right form factor or developing an AI model that can put metal hands to work. Destro has instead built an AI intelligence layer that lets robots work effectively in logistics settings, in part by also telling the human workers what to do. “A lot of robotics companies started from robotics…

TechCrunch AI · 30 Sep 2026 · 18:00 CESTRead story →Join free ↗

Unclassified

Instinct’s new product recommendations are giving some users the ick

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The buzzy AI startup Instinct has just revealed a new potential revenue stream: product recommendations. Unfortunately for the company, the rollout is already rubbing some users the wrong way. Overnight, the AI agent began pushing product suggestions to users as part of a new feature called Instinct Selections, an effort to curate personalized lists for users in areas like dining, travel, and shopping. Founder Noah Shinn announced the feature’s debut later Tuesday, explaining that the idea is to partner with “local chefs, designers, architects, travel guides,” and others to bring…

TechCrunch AI · 30 Sep 2026 · 17:56 CESTRead story →Join free ↗

Safety & Security

Google figures out how to watermark AI-designed proteins

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Intended to help with biosecurity, it works with a popular AI protein design tool. AI-based tools seem to be causing security threats on a nearly daily basis, in part because we’ve been slow to recognize potential threats. One area where we seem to be ahead of the game, however, is in biosecurity. As with most things biological, utility goes hand in hand with threats. We’ve developed increasingly sophisticated tools for designing proteins and seen some major successes, such as AI-designed enzymes that can digest plastics or block venom proteins. But…

Ars Technica AI · 30 Sep 2026 · 17:54 CESTRead story →Join free ↗

Automation & Agents

All the latest news on Meta’s cute, creepy Muse AI agent

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Meta launched a new Muse AI agent it claims can help you with everything from firing off emails to buying stuff online. Muse can be surprisingly effective at delivering on those promises — if you’re willing to trust Meta with your data and hand Muse your credit card. Since the launch, Meta’s also announced plans for a Tamagotchi-like Muse Charm device for its cuddly AI mascot. Tech YouTuber Matt Robb says that Muse gave out his home address to a total stranger this weekend, after authorizing the bot to handle…

The Verge AI · 30 Sep 2026 · 17:18 CESTRead story →Join free ↗

Models & tools

MIT Transit Lab to develop an AI platform for public transit agencies

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Google.org announced on Sept. 15 that the MIT Transit Lab is a recipient of $2.1 million in funding — one of only 15 projects selected in the worldwide Google.org Impact Challenge: AI for Government Innovation. The funding from Google’s philanthropic arm will support NGOs, social enterprises, and academic institutions as they integrate artificial intelligence-powered solutions across topics like health, resilience, and economy. The Transit Lab’s winning project, the Public Transit Intelligence Hub (PTIQ), aims to unify public transportation agencies’ real-time monitoring, operations control, and passenger communication systems into a single…

MIT AI NEWS · 30 Sep 2026 · 17:15 CESTRead story →Join free ↗

Introducing SynthID Bio

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Today, we’re introducing SynthID Bio to bring watermarking technology to synthetic biology. SynthID Bio embeds an imperceptible signature directly into the biological code, ensuring the watermark is verifiable not just on a digital model but on the synthesized, physical protein itself – all while preserving its biological function in laboratory testing. Generative AI is helping scientists address critical biological challenges, from predicting the structure of proteins (AlphaFold) to designing entirely new proteins (AlphaProteo, and ProteinMPNN), and more recently, developing new bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria. Yet these tools also present…

Google DeepMind · 30 Sep 2026 · 17:03 CESTRead story →Join free ↗

Education

This game-playing AI is the new champ at Stratego

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Images for download on the MIT News office website are made available to non-commercial entities, press and the general public under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license. You may not alter the images provided, other than to crop them to size. A credit line must be used when reproducing images; if one is not provided below, credit the images to "MIT." A new AI system that excels at challenging games with hidden information could someday help human decision-makers select ideal strategies to outfox opponents in complicated situations like…

MIT AI NEWS · 30 Sep 2026 · 17:00 CESTRead story →Join free ↗

Google reportedly tests paying publishers for AI search results

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Google has launched a pilot program that pays publishers for their contributions to its AI-powered search features, according to a report from The Information. The pilot program reportedly includes around 100 publishers and comes as Google faces scrutiny over the impact of its AI features on web traffic. Digiday first reported on the pilot program, which began less than a year ago. As part of the test, Google is reportedly paying participating publishers for how much their content contributed to AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search, as well as…

The Verge AI · 30 Sep 2026 · 16:55 CESTRead story →Join free ↗