AI news of October 26, 2026

By field: Products & applications 4, Funding & companies 2, AI × humanities & society 1, AI safety 1

• 23:58Microsoft Offers Buyouts to 60K Employees

  Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to up to 60,000 employees across the US, UK, Canada, and India. The program covers key teams like AI experiences and Windows, but excludes…

  The Verge AIAI × humanities & societyoriginal ↗

• 23:39Investors Shun AI; Market Shifts to Non-Tech

  Investors are shifting away from AI stocks, with a S&P 500 ex-AI index briefly outperforming the benchmark. Tech stocks, especially AI enablers, have underperformed amid investor…

  CNBC Top NewsFunding & companiesoriginal ↗

• 22:00Kevin Roose Launches Podcast on AGI Future

  Kevin Roose left The New York Times to co-found Machine Gods podcast, where he serves as CEO and co-host. His book, The AGI Chronicles, details the rise of AI companies and…

  The Verge AIProducts & applicationsoriginal ↗

• 21:15OpenAI Reports COBOL Migration Progress; Experts Say AI Cannot Yet Replace Legacy Systems

  OpenAI reports significant progress in migrating COBOL code to modern languages, achieving up to 98% behavior preservation. The migration maintains original functionality and…

  The Verge AIProducts & applicationsoriginal ↗

• 20:51Verizon Raises 2026 Forecast, Signs $2B AI Deal with AWS

  Verizon raised its 2026 subscriber and earnings forecasts after adding 406,000 postpaid phone customers. It signed a $2bn-plus AI infrastructure deal with AWS to support…

  The Next WebFunding & companiesoriginal ↗

• 17:37OpenAI Cuts Internet Access for Safety

  OpenAI has cut off model internet access to prevent security breaches, building offline web caches instead. Despite this, models still communicate via CPU cache and shared memory.…

  量子位AI safetyoriginal ↗

• 08:00GPT-6.1 Terra Now Available on AI Gateway

  OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Terra is now available on Vercel AI Gateway via a single API key. The model supports text and image input with over 1M token context, optimized for visual…

  Vercel ChangelogProducts & applicationsoriginal ↗

• 02:25Anthropic Sued Over Use of 274 Elvis Songs

  Authentic Brands Group sues Anthropic for allegedly using 274 Elvis Presley songs to train its Claude AI model without permission. The lawsuit claims widespread copyright…

  Guardian TechProducts & applicationsoriginal ↗