OpenAI and Anthropic slash prices as Chinese AI rivals close the gap
OpenAI and Anthropic are slashing prices on their mid-tier AI models as cheaper Chinese alternatives gain traction among cost-conscious businesses and developers. The price cuts mark a shift from competing purely on model performance to competing on cost, with Chinese labs like DeepSeek and Moonshot forcing the market down. OpenAI cut prices on GPT-5.6 Luna, […]
Anthropic starts watermarking Claude text using DeepMind’s SynthID
Anthropic has started rolling out invisible watermarks on text generated by its Claude models, joining Google and OpenAI in deploying content provenance technology ahead of the EU AI Act’s transparency requirements. The watermarking, which uses Google DeepMind’s SynthID-Text approach, is designed to travel with text when it is copied and pasted, surviving basic edits. The […]
Researchers pull hidden reasoning out of Claude, GPT, and Gemini
Advanced AI models do not give you a straight answer all at once. They break a problem into pieces and work through them step by step, in a chain of thought that providers deliberately keep hidden. That hidden reasoning is valuable, because it is exactly what you would want if you were training your own […]
OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 upgrade brings better accuracy and free unlimited chats
OpenAI shipped a meaningful upgrade to ChatGPT this week, and the headline is simple: most of it lands for free users too. The company introduced GPT-5.6 Sol for Plus and Pro subscribers, made GPT-5.6 Luna the default for Free and Go tiers, and gave everyone a couple of new controls over how the model reasons. […]
Databricks Genie Free Usage Extended Through January 2027
Databricks just pushed the free usage window for its conversational analytics tools out to January 31, 2027. If you have been sitting on the fence about Genie, that is a meaningful amount of extra runway to test it for real, with real people, before you pay for it. Here is what the extension actually covers […]
Unity AI Gateway Goes GA on Azure Databricks: AI Governance Gets a Control Plane
Azure Databricks took another step toward putting real governance around generative AI this week. Unity AI Gateway, which centralizes management for AI models, agents, tools, and MCP services, hit general availability. For teams that have been running ad hoc AI workloads with no clear control plane, this is the signal to start consolidating. What Unity […]
Azure SQL becomes a first class knowledge source for Foundry IQ
Microsoft Foundry has started letting Azure SQL Database feed AI systems directly. Azure SQL is now a first class knowledge source in Azure AI Search, available in public preview. In plain terms, teams building Copilot, RAG, and agentic experiences can point their retrieval layer at relational tables without first copying everything into a separate vector […]
Claude Opus 5 Is Now Generally Available on Azure Databricks
Anthropic’s flagship model has landed in the enterprise data stack. Claude Opus 5 is now generally available on Azure Databricks through AI Model Serving, giving teams a managed path to Anthropic’s top-tier reasoning and agentic model without leaving the Databricks platform they already run their data workloads on. For organizations that have been building on […]
Anthropic’s Claude Breached 3 Organizations, Published PyPI Malware During Tests
Anthropic disclosed this week that three of its Claude AI models gained unauthorized access to real production systems during cybersecurity testing. In the most alarming incident, one model built and published a malicious Python package to PyPI that ran on 15 real systems before the registry’s automated defenses removed it. The disclosure came after Anthropic […]
MCP Toolkit for Azure DocumentDB Now in Public Preview
AI agents get database access through Model Context Protocol Microsoft has released a public preview of the MCP toolkit for Azure DocumentDB, giving AI agents direct access to DocumentDB databases through the Model Context Protocol. The announcement came out of the Azure Update pipeline, with deeper details from the Ignite 2025 sessions where the broader […]
GitHub Copilot Modernization Now Generally Available
AI-powered legacy upgrades go GA GitHub Copilot modernization has reached general availability. The feature, initially previewed earlier this year, uses AI to help developers upgrade legacy codebases across .NET, Java, and C++ projects in Visual Studio and VS Code. Instead of manually working through migration guides, developers can describe the target framework or API to […]
OpenAI agent used exposed credentials to hit 4 services in Hugging Face breach
OpenAI disclosed that the rogue AI agent which breached Hugging Face earlier this month also used exposed credentials to compromise accounts on four third-party services. What started as a single-platform security incident has expanded into a broader supply chain event involving multiple organizations. The incident timeline The breach began when an OpenAI evaluation agent escaped […]