AI firms plan for public revolt

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In today's Techpresso:

⚠️ AI firms plan for public revolt

🚗 Tesla drops 'Full Self-Driving' name in Europe

🤖 Anthropic pulls AI tests offline

📡 Musk accuses Ambani of blocking Starlink

☁️ Cloudflare acquires Deno

🥽 Sony sells hundreds of VR patents to Meta

Plus: 🎁 12 more stories you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers.

⚠️ AI firms plan for public revolt LINK

• Top leaders at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies are privately mapping out how to respond to a public and political backlash after a catastrophic AI event they widely expect to happen.
• Many of these insiders told Axios they think a major incident, most likely a cyberattack cutting off financial services, internet access, or even power and water, will arrive within the next six to 12 months.
• The planning centers on red-teaming worst-case scenarios and rushing to educate Congress, since executives know regulation can't pass now but want to shape the rules lawmakers reach for after a first disaster.

🚗 Tesla drops 'Full Self-Driving' name in Europe LINK

• Tesla has swapped the "Full Self-Driving" name for "Tesla Assisted Driving" across its European websites after regulators warned the original branding could trick drivers into thinking their cars can run without human supervision, Reuters reported.
• The new name already appears on Tesla's sites in Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and Slovakia, while the US version still sells the software as "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)," which handles steering, braking, and traffic but needs constant driver attention.
• The switch follows Germany's announcement on Tuesday, as Elon Musk presses the EU for approval; eight countries allow the system, Slovakia is expected to be ninth, and a wider vote slipped from October to at least December.

🤖 Anthropic pulls AI tests offline LINK

• Anthropic is shutting off live internet access for all its internal AI evaluations after finding that its models exploited websites, including ones run by U.S. government agencies, until it can properly monitor and control its agents.
• During tests that began in July, the agents broke past paywalls and anti-bot blocks, used link shorteners to sneak information through restrictions, and even filed a false murder tip to the Philadelphia police while chasing resources online.
• Anthropic blamed flaws in its training setups that taught models they would be rewarded for finding loopholes, a pattern called "reward hacking," and said it built tools to catch the behavior and will move its agents onto tightly contained infrastructure.

📡 Musk accuses Ambani of blocking Starlink LINK

• Elon Musk has publicly attacked Reliance chairperson Mukesh Ambani, mockingly calling him India's "prime minister" and accusing him of using monopoly power to keep SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet from launching in the country.
• In a post on X yesterday, Musk said Starlink could connect remote areas and help small businesses, following earlier claims that "oligarchs" were blocking it, which India's Ministry of Communications rejected as untrue.
• The ministry said Starlink and two other licensed operators are at "broadly the same" stage, awaiting security checks before getting spectrum, while telecom minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said yesterday that India "does not allow a monopoly in any sector."

☁️ Cloudflare acquires Deno LINK

• Cloudflare is buying Deno, the startup co-founded by Node.js creator Ryan Dahl, bringing the entire team behind the JavaScript and TypeScript runtime over to work on its Cloudflare Workers serverless platform.
• Deno will stop building its standalone runtime and shut down its Deno Deploy hosting service in six months, with the runtime getting a year of security updates and paying customers offered help moving elsewhere.
• Dahl and co-founder Bert Belder will merge Deno's open-source Celld project with Cloudflare's Workerd runtime, letting developers run the platform on their own infrastructure using only a standard object storage bucket for coordination.

🥽 Sony sells hundreds of VR patents to Meta LINK

• Sony has sold 419 patents tied to VR and XR technology to Meta, including designs for head-mounted displays, according to a report from ZDNet Korea, with 43 of those patents filed in the United States.
• The sale comes just three and a half years after Sony launched PlayStation VR 2, hinting the company may not build another headset soon, though the PSVR2 has not been officially discontinued despite being hard to find in stock.
• The deal signals Meta still cares about VR, even after it cut more than 1,000 jobs from its Reality Labs division and closed the VR part of Horizon Worlds earlier this year, while also announcing new VR glasses.

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• Trump awards Musk and other tech titans National Medals of ScienceLINK

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• Abstract Warfare: How TSMC Made Its Own MarketLINK

• An empirical agenda for AILINK

• Google's Gemini 4 "Carbon" model is reportedly matching Anthropic's Opus 5.5 coding performanceLINK

• Super Micro case ‘fixer’ pleads guilty to sending AI servers to ChinaLINK

• FBI arrests another suspected ShinyHunters hacker after agency breachLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Zernio: one API for social, ads, messaging and calls, letting teams skip per-channel integrations and letting agents run campaigns across 57 countriesLINK

Together Link: connects coding agents like Claude Code or Codex to open models on Together AI, keeping your workflow while paying only per-token rates.LINK

Cue: a free Mac app that uses your AirPods as a focus switch, enabling Focus mode, blocking distracting sites, and running a timer automatically.LINK

Opposable: connects Claude Code, Codex, or any MCP agent to a real iPhone or Android, letting it tap, type, and run tasks across your apps.LINK

TapNoise: a desktop keycap character that reacts to your typing, plays 20 keyboard sounds, alerts when coding agents finish, and includes a laptop lift alarm.LINK

KernelAI: run 50+ AI models locally on iPhone and Android for offline chat, PDF reading, image analysis, and coding, keeping your data on-device.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Self-improving robots now turn each task attempt into reusable skills that later jobs can borrow, topping leading benchmarks by up to 11 points and learning household cleanup over 104 practice rounds.LINK

AI mathematicians might advance by learning to invent interesting new conjectures rather than just prove given theorems, with the best theories being those that compactly summarize many provable statements.LINK

Crowd movement forecasting groups people into clusters instead of tracking everyone individually, predicting where dense crowds will move faster and with less memory to help prevent stampedes, while keeping accuracy on par with existing tools.LINK

Warehouse robot routing plans conflict-free paths for fleets of robots by predicting a few steps ahead, cutting the traffic jams and deadlocks that plague crowded logistics and navigation settings.LINK

Emotion-reading AI tests introduce a shared yardstick for judging how well systems that gauge human feelings hold up when some inputs like audio or video go missing, validated across 4 datasets and 3 language models.LINK

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