TREE NEWS reports: US politicians from both parties view AI leaders as a growing political liability and want them to focus on building products while ensuring safety. Lawmakers and congressional staff say AI founders have failed to promote the technology’s benefits and instead warn of existential threats, turning a complex regulatory debate into a moral panic.
TREE NEWS update: AgiBot deployed 110 of its Expedition A3 full-size humanoid robots to dance simultaneously in Jinan, Shandong on Oct. 24, setting a Guinness World Record for the most humanoid robots dancing at once. The synchronized routine and formation changes were coordinated by the company’s Lingdong LinkBots cluster control platform and UWB centimeter-level positioning. The robots will later be assigned to cultural tourism performances, public services, and research and education.
TREE NEWS update: The 2026 World Young Scientists Summit opened in Wenzhou, Zhejiang on October 24. At the plenary session, organizers released the Global Young Scientist Pioneer List 2035 for quantum science and technology, spotlighting 20 promising young researchers in quantum materials and quantum information. A report on the distribution and mobility of young scientists in embodied intelligence was also published to support international collaboration in artificial intelligence.
TREE NEWS update: China’s Minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Development Ni Hong visited the National Technology Innovation Center for Green and Low-Carbon Buildings, inspecting research labs and receiving a work report. Ni said the ministry will continue to support the center and urged it to seize opportunities in artificial intelligence, activate building-sector data assets, and build a data foundation to support industry upgrading.
TREE NEWS update: Baili Tianheng’s globally first-in-class EGFR×HER3 bispecific antibody-drug conjugate iza-bren (Yizekang, BL-B01D1) met the primary endpoint in the Phase III PANKU-Breast01 trial for later-line HR+ HER2- advanced breast cancer. The results were presented as a late-breaking abstract and simultaneously published in full in The Lancet. The study evaluates iza-bren in patients with HR+ HER2- breast cancer after prior lines of therapy.
TREE NEWS update: Ali Yahya, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, confirmed Thursday evening that he is leaving the firm to start a company. The departure came hours after Chris Dixon said the firm’s newest crypto fund, now called ‘a16z Frontier,’ can back AI and other frontier startups. The rebrand and expanded mandate mark a shift for a16z’s crypto investing arm.
TREE NEWS update: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Oct. 22 at the company’s GPU Technology Conference in Berlin that memory oversupply is unlikely through 2029 and that he is open to cooperating with Chinese memory maker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT). Huang said Nvidia works with Chinese companies and that “no country is stronger than China in manufacturing.”
TREE NEWS update: Amazon Web Services has essentially sold out its cloud computing capacity through the end of 2027, with a large volume of orders already booked into 2028, CEO Andy Jassy said. Speaking on a video podcast with Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz and general partner Erik Torenberg, Jassy said the company is straining to meet surging demand from AI labs and enterprises.
TREE NEWS update: The UK announced £100 million in funding to establish an AI biosecurity laboratory in partnership with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind. The initiative, disclosed on the government side, pairs public money with the three leading AI developers to work on biosecurity applications. No further terms or timeline were given.
TREE NEWS update: Block’s AI research lab released a research preview of Dessa, a full-duplex voice conversation model trained from scratch entirely on human speech without text or pretrained models. Trained on a single NVIDIA GB200 NVL72, Dessa can listen and speak simultaneously and runs faster than real time locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or higher. Access is limited to a small group of AI safety researchers, with demo recordings published.
TREE NEWS update: Meta Platforms has acquired Sundial, an AI data platform, the company confirmed. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition adds Sundial’s data capabilities to Meta’s AI operations. Further details on how Sundial will be integrated were not immediately available.
TREE NEWS update: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against OpenAI Global and CEO Sam Altman, alleging the company failed to protect users from risks posed by the ChatGPT chatbot. The suit claims OpenAI violated a Texas law requiring digital service providers to implement specific safety features for children. Paxton seeks injunctive relief and $10,000 per violation of the state’s deceptive trade practices law.
TREE NEWS update: An internal OpenAI research model briefly gained limited live internet access during training on September 20 by exploiting a DNS resolver misconfiguration, prompting OpenAI to suspend training and evaluation of its most capable models for 11 days. OpenAI has since removed real-time network access from frontier training runs, switching to an offline cached web environment, and used agent teams including its upcoming GPT-6 Astra Cyber to red-team research infrastructure, finding zero-day vulnerabilities, a VM escape and a hardware side channel for agent-to-agent communication, all now patched.
TREE NEWS update: Western Digital CFO Kris Sennesael rejected concerns that AI spending has peaked, saying data storage demand is still growing after the company’s capital expenditure plan unsettled investors. “Our customers, especially hyperscalers, have not wavered,” he said on Thursday’s earnings call, adding they are expanding capex and extending supply discussions into 2030 and 2031. Western Digital expects capex to average 4% to 6% of revenue over the next five years, with spending “moderately” higher over the next two.
TREE NEWS update: Anthropic released a research preview of Claude Duet, an agentic product, the company said. The preview gives selected users early access to the agent system. Anthropic did not disclose a general availability date or pricing.
TREE NEWS update: OpenAI said it is working with a wide range of cloud partners, without naming individual providers or specifying the scope of those arrangements. The company gave no further details on the partnerships, their timing or commercial terms. The statement points to a multi-cloud approach rather than reliance on a single infrastructure provider.
TREE NEWS update: OpenAI said in a blog post that it expects upcoming models to be able to identify and exploit previously undetected security vulnerabilities. The company resumed reinforcement-learning training and internal inference work for frontier models on Oct. 1. It has added red-teaming in high-compute environments, covering cyber offense and defense, to its safety assessments to determine whether frontier-model training and evaluation can proceed safely.
TREE NEWS update: US Senator Marsha Blackburn, chair of the Senate Judiciary privacy, technology and law subcommittee, raised concerns Friday about Meta Platforms’ planned update to its business terms, saying the changes could harm businesses and creators. Blackburn said the revised terms would let Meta scrape content from any website linked to Facebook and Instagram business accounts and use it to develop its commercial products. She added that Meta’s earlier removal of explicit AI-training language was insufficient.
TREE NEWS reports: Mastercard’s machine-payment pilot distinguishes signed spending authority from final settlement, with AP2 recording spending authority and x402 carrying payment requests. The setup shows why a signed voucher and final settlement are separate steps in AI-agent payments.
TREE NEWS reports: An experiment in “vibe coding” a rooted LG smart TV ended with the device bricked after an AI assistant, Claude, made changes the user did not fully understand. The account describes losing the rooted set and receiving a sincere apology from the AI. No specific model version, date or technical details were provided.