AI news, Tuesday 13 October 2026

Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta and OpenAI differ on AI regulation in questioning by UK MPs

At a hearing of the UK Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee, the four AI developers set out different views on how binding AI regulation should be and what obligations they would accept. They did agree on the need for external scrutiny and safety testing. All four said they would give the UK's AI Security Institute access to unreleased models, provided they are legally allowed to.

UK angle: UK MPs questioned the labs, and the firms committed to giving the UK AI Security Institute access to unreleased models if legally allowed.

Around 400 scientists, including Hinton and Bengio, call for international body to oversee advanced AI

Around 400 scientists from 34 countries, including AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, have signed an open letter calling for an international body to set containment standards and track security incidents for advanced AI systems. They say frontier models should initially be air-gapped and subject to independent oversight.

MI5 chief warns AI is 'supercharging' security threats to the UK

MI5 director general Sir Ken McCallum has warned that AI is already supercharging some security threats to the UK, notably the cybersecurity contest between attackers and defenders. He also raised concern that terrorists could use AI to develop bioweapons or create new pathogens, and that lower-sophistication actors may gain a capability uplift.

UK angle: Warning comes from the head of MI5 about threats facing the UK.

Anthropic warns small AI models could be months from self-replicating across connected devices

Anthropic says small AI models could be months away from replicating themselves across internet-connected devices. It says such a system would be hard to shut down because there is no central point to switch off. The company reports that in simplified tests, GLM-5.2 and stronger models achieved end-to-end replication, and it projects autonomous replication by the end of 2026 if improvement continues at past rates.

Character.AI files for bankruptcy and agrees to sell some assets to Disney for $20 million

Chatbot platform Character.AI has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US. It has agreed to a $20 million deal under which Disney would act as a stalking-horse bidder for some of its intellectual property, and the company expects a sale by late November or early December. Its chief executive blamed significant legal, regulatory and operational headwinds.