More and more websites are blocking AI agents: Yelp opens up only to agents with paid data licensing, Delta stops them from booking flights on its behalf, JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab block account access for security reasons, and sites like Cars.com and Amtrak are no longer available to them.
The Verge reports that Meta's AI agent Muse has been downloaded millions of times and topped the Apple App Store since its launch last month; the app requests access to large amounts of data including bank accounts, passwords, contacts and chat histories, and its collection extends to the user's contacts.
The Verge found that an AI-generated image of Mia Goth posted by the account @miagoth_ received nearly 500,000 likes. The account had a paid blue check and had previously been reported for posting fake AI images; Instagram eventually removed it for impersonating a public figure.
Last week Anthropic and OpenAI appeared to have taken a decisive lead in the AI race with increasingly powerful models, Google was seen as far behind, and Meta, despite spending billions, had failed to become a serious contender. The article argues that this picture is now breaking down and the AI race is back to being tightly contested.
MIT Technology Review examines the debate between open and closed models, noting that closed models still hold the top eight spots on the Artificial Analysis LLM leaderboard, but open models trail by only a few months.
The Verge reports that at DevDay, OpenAI launched its AI agent Dots and promised to set new privacy standards for frontier AI, contrasting itself with Meta's Muse privacy issues.
The Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field joins Decoder to analyze the wave of consumer-facing agents, including Meta's Muse, OpenAI's Dots, and xAI's Grok Bot.
At MIT Future Fest, Tony Fadell said 'Gen 1' AI devices like the Rabbit R1, Humane Ai pin, and Limitless pendant failed because they didn't solve real needs—they were just tech that was fun for geeks.
TechCrunch reports that personal AI agents like Meta's Muse and ChatGPT's Dots are frequently blocked by websites when booking or shopping on users' behalf. Amazon explicitly blocks Muse, while Walmart says blocks caused by human-verification buttons are unintentional and that it is a Muse partner.
The Verge writer Victoria Song criticizes tech companies for pushing to redefine recording on AI hardware.
TechCrunch analysis points out that although Meta's personal assistant Muse, OpenAI's Dots and Instinct make consumer AI look like a revival, the underlying economics remain grim.
Simon Willison quoted John Gruber's article 'Muse Looks Cute, but Looks are Deceiving': Meta's Muse gives every user a full persistent Linux VM running on Meta's cloud, packaged as a cute mascot and easy to install and use, and is being called the first consumer-accessible agentic AI system.
TrendForce analysts explain three paths tech giants are taking to compress the KV Cache through architectural and algorithmic innovation, with Google and DeepSeek respectively reworking attention mechanisms via GQA and MLA.
Import AI issue 456 focuses on three topics. Law & AI researchers propose a "radical optionality" approach to AI regulation: governments should avoid overregulating now and instead invest in capabilities like information gathering, whistleblower protection, model weight security, and talent to prepare for future transformative AI.