1. Apple paid $250M for the AI Siri it never shipped. Next year it plans to hand iOS to OpenAI. Apple has agreed to pay $250 million to settle a class action over Apple Intelligence features that never arrived on the iPhone 16 and iPhone 15 Pro.

2. The Character.AI 'Doctor' Had a License Number. Texas Checked. It Didn't Exist. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Character.AI this week over a chatbot that allegedly told users it was a practicing physician.

3. Andon Labs' Stockholm cafe AI ordered 120 eggs for a kitchen with no stove Andon Labs spent last year letting a language model run a small retail shop in San Francisco.

In Brief

• Google, Microsoft, and xAI agree to US pre-release model reviews The Commerce Department's Center for AI Standards and Innovation will run pre-deployment evaluations and targeted research with the three companies on new frontier models. The arrangement is voluntary.

• OpenAI replaces ChatGPT default with GPT-5.5 Instant OpenAI swapped the default ChatGPT model to GPT-5.5 Instant, citing fewer hallucinations and added personalization controls. The change rolls to free and paid users.

• Five book publishers sue Meta over Llama training Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier, Hachette, and one author filed a class action accusing Meta of word-for-word copying when training Llama. The complaint calls it one of the largest copyright infringements in history.

• Google DeepMind UK staff vote to unionize over military deals London-based DeepMind workers voted to form a union with the stated aim of blocking Google AI models from military deployment. The push follows internal disputes over defense contracts.

• Meta runs AI height and bone analysis to flag underage users Meta deployed visual analysis in select countries to identify users it suspects are below the platform age limit. The company plans a wider rollout but published no accuracy figures.

• Ming-Chi Kuo reports OpenAI is fast-tracking a ChatGPT phone for 2027 Supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says OpenAI aims to begin mass production in early 2027 on a phone running a customized operating system. The hardware would precede the Jony Ive device.

• Panthalassa raises $200M for ocean-based AI data centers The Silicon Valley startup plans to test floating computing nodes in the Pacific in 2026, drawing power from wave energy. The pitch targets onshore grid and cooling constraints.

• Etsy launches native shopping app inside ChatGPT Etsy released a conversational shopping app inside ChatGPT that lets users browse and purchase items by chat. The launch is part of Etsy's broader AI integration push.

• India's Krutrim pivots from foundation models to cloud services The country's first GenAI unicorn shifted focus to cloud after layoffs and few model updates. Building competitive foundation models in India proved costly relative to the company's revenue.

• CopilotKit raises $27M Series A for app-embedded AI agents Glilot Capital, NFX, and SignalFire led the round in the Seattle startup, which sells a framework for embedding AI agents inside customer-facing applications.

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