The week in AI: Oct. 13-⁠21, 2026

Anthropic commits 5% of its shares to a public benefit fund

On October 18, Anthropic committed 5% of its shares to the new Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, an entity it wholly owns, with up to 2% more for every 50% rise in value at the board’s discretion. The fund may explore options like direct payments to groups affected by AI. It needs stockholder approval, and “universal basic income” is not Anthropic’s framing.

Anthropic@AnthropicAI

We’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit.

It will start off with 5% of our shares. For every 50% increase in the company’s value over a set baseline, we can contribute up to an extra 2%, subject to our board’s discretion.

In total, this means that roughly 20% of Anthropic’s shares are committed to the public good. Our co-founders have already pledged to donate 80% of their equity, and around half our employees are donating a portion of their equity as part of a donation matching program we’ve run since our founding.

In the post below, we share more details about our new fund.

anthropic.com/news/public-benefit-fund

Musk says he’ll give every kid in America a SpaceX share

Musk made the pledge hours after telling Anthropic to give its shares directly to the public. The shares come from his own stake; the White House says the gift will go through Trump Accounts, and estimates put its total value at more than $10 billion. Who qualifies and when has not been announced.

Elon Musk@elonmusk

Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America.

This will be the first of many.

Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump

A BIG THANK YOU to our legendary friend, @ElonMusk, for his incredible generosity in giving SpaceX Stock to millions of American children through TRUMP ACCOUNTS! This is exactly what was envisioned when we created TRUMP ACCOUNTS — Bringing together the GREAT PRIVATE SECTOR, Elon and so many more, to invest in our children, by far our greatest and most important asset, and give every American Child a piece of the American Dream. Thank you Elon! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Musk: “Maybe we should start a competitor to Amazon”

Musk wrote this on October 15, quoting a user who said Amazon was blocking Grok agents from placing orders. Amazon hasn’t confirmed any such block, and no concrete plan was announced.

Elon Musk@elonmusk

Maybe we should start a competitor to Amazon 🤔

nick @thecsguy

amazon is blocking grok @Bots from ordering, and elon's answer is just have your bot buy it somewhere else.

one of my grok bots only handles my amazon returns, so i'm watching this one closely.

would you switch stores for your bot? 🛒

Elon, i think its time for an X Shop? 👀

Claude cracked a decades-old mystery behind NIST’s curves

Anthropic says Claude found, in under half an hour, that the unexplained seed numbers behind widely used NIST elliptic curves came from an ordinary random-number generator seeded with 1997-98 timestamps. Cryptographer Filippo Valsorda, who set the bounty, verified it himself, making a hidden NSA backdoor far less plausible.

Two critical PHP flaws went unnoticed for 14 years

On October 21, PHP patched two flaws affecting versions released since 2012 that can lead to remote code execution on servers. Calif and Wiz found them with help from models like GPT-5.6 Sol and Gemini 4 Argon. W3Techs says 69% of sites with a known server-side language use PHP; exploitation requires specific conditions.

Google opened Gemini 4 Argon to paying users

On October 13, Google made Argon available in the API, AI Studio and the Gemini app. In Google’s own table, Argon beats OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 in finance, legal, automation and long-context tests, but trails in some coding and science tests.

Google broke open one of quantum computing’s biggest bottlenecks

On October 15, Google said a new method cut errors about 40x when preparing special “magic states” on its Willow chip, reaching at least 99.99% fidelity. The result holds for the roughly 8% of attempts that passed every check.

Google Quantum AI@GoogleQuantumAI

Published in Science today: Magic state cultivation works in practice on our Willow processor. We achieved a 40x error reduction, compared to without cultivation, and 99.99% fidelity. Learn how this addresses a critical resource bottleneck: goo.gle/4yr8V0H

Tesla’s new Roadster drove upside down and turned in midair

Tesla unveiled the new Roadster on October 15 at SpaceX’s Texas test site: it clung to a backward-curving ramp, launched off, turned in midair and landed using cold-gas thrusters developed with SpaceX. Musk says production starts in 2028.

Tesla@Tesla

Real life, baby

AI might not be such a black box after all

In an October 15 essay, Goodfire’s Nick Cammarata argued that, in preliminary audits of Qwen3-32B, about 90% of neurons have one main job. He calls it “an informal research essay and working hypothesis”, and researchers like Neel Nanda say it doesn’t change the big picture.

Nick@nickcammarata

interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had

with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works

already-clean.goodfire.com

Xbox formed a team to explore what agents mean for games

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced Xbox Labs on October 13. Pointing to games being rapidly decompiled, ported to new hardware and remixed into other games, she wrote that the team will explore giving old games new life and turning players into creators.

A simulated fruit fly brain is flying through AI-generated worlds

On October 17, Odyssey said it placed a fruit fly brain inside its world model, Odyssey-3, and that the fly now flies through imagined worlds by itself. The company hasn’t said which brain model it used or how it was connected, and there’s no paper or code.

Odyssey@odysseyml

We placed the fruit fly brain inside Odyssey-3, a frontier world model.

The lil’ guy is now flying around totally imagined, simulated worlds all by itself 🫶

A mod built with Claude Code turns Red Dead Redemption 2 into a living world

In enRAGE, released by nicklovin99 on October 17, every NPC has a name, family, memories and grudges, and eight factions, including the U.S. Army, fight each other and remember what the player did. Claude Code helped write its scripts; no AI runs inside the game.

Open-source DigUp searches a Mac by what’s inside the files

Abdur Rahim’s MIT-licensed app runs Google’s EmbeddingGemma 2 on-device to search inside photos, videos, audio, PDFs and code. It took off after Google’s Gemma account shared the video on October 13; Windows and Linux versions are in beta.

Abdur Rahim@_ARahim_

Search your Mac by what's in your files, not what they're called.

DigUp runs @GoogleDeepMind's new EmbeddingGemma 2 on-device: describe a video moment, a podcast minute, a PDF page, a photo or code, in any language, and dig it up.

github.com/ARahim3/DigUp

Free and open source. @googlegemma

A Mac app that converts files with a drag and a Shift

In Leap Studio’s Tangerine, users drag a file and tap Shift to pick a format; the developer says it offers 275 conversions and works entirely offline. The app came out in September, and an October 17 video hit 1.9 million views. There’s no AI inside.

thameem@th2049

convert files with just drag + shift

Shenzhen turned traffic-light poles into drone bases

Shenzhen traffic police say 65 drone docks were installed on signal poles in Futian; the drones take off automatically, patrol, warn drivers by loudspeaker and photograph parking violations. The system has run since March, and the footage went viral again on October 15.

A bride gave her groom an RTX 5090 at their wedding, and he cried

In a wedding clip from China that spread on social media on October 16, a bride hands her groom an ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090. The claim that it’s worth $12,000 rests on a single gray-market listing; retail prices in China are around $5,500-6,400.

RTVisual@RT_Visual_on_X

Chinese bride gifts her partner a flagship GPU at wedding — he breaks down in tears

She handed him an ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 that costs around $12,000

Nearly half a million dollars of RTX 5090s vanished at Brazil’s biggest airport

Brazilian distributor Oderço says two pallets of ZOTAC RTX 5090s worth R$2.5 million at cost (about $470,000) disappeared at São Paulo-Guarulhos Airport. The airport reported the loss to authorities; theft hasn’t been confirmed, and the number of cards wasn’t disclosed.