Anthropic unveils Claude Duet

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

Anthropic unveils Claude Duet LINK

• Anthropic has launched Claude Duet, a proactive AI agent that connects to your apps and reaches out with suggestions before you ask, competing with Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots agents.
• Built on Opus 5.5, Duet sends a morning brief of important items, rechecks apps every few hours, and completes tasks from admin work to web apps using its own cloud browser, asking approval before sending messages or payments.
• The product is in a research preview through a waitlist, open only to Pro and Max subscribers in the United States via the web or an iOS app, with background checks counting toward existing plan limits.

Walmart lets AI agents shop for you LINK

• Walmart will soon let you set up personal AI agents to shop for you across its main website and Sam's Club, a move that sets it apart from Amazon, which blocks third-party shopping agents entirely.
• Arriving in November, a tool called Agent Profiles lets shoppers approve purchases their agent makes, set a spending cap, and keep AI-made orders separate from their own, with purchase approval turned on by default.
• A new Agent Gateway gives agents a faster, AI-friendly version of the site, and Walmart can suggest usual items like a favorite milk to an agent without handing over a customer's wider shopping history.

Meta to pay $25B for deceiving users about privacy LINK

• A New Mexico jury found Meta liable for misleading users about its privacy and content rules, and a Santa Fe judge ordered the company to pay $25 billion, one of the largest single-state verdicts against it.
• The order follows jurors finding Meta responsible for over 43 million violations of state consumer protection law tied to Cambridge Analytica harvesting Facebook user data for political ads during the 2016 election.
• New Mexico was one of two states that skipped the 48-state settlement, in which Meta paid $459 million; Attorney General Raúl Torrez expects an appeal and wants the money directed toward public education.

Unitree's new humanoid robot can lift cars LINK

• Unitree Robotics has shown off the H2-X, a humanoid robot pitched as an emergency "guardian" that can lift a car in a promotional video to free a trapped victim, disarm a knife-wielding attacker, and pull a pedestrian from traffic.
• The H2-X builds on Unitree's earlier H2, which stands about 1.8 meters tall and weighs 70 kilograms, though the company shared no details on whether the new model keeps those specs or uses different actuators, joints, or sensors.
• Unitree never said whether the dramatic actions were autonomous or choreographed, gave no release date or price, and ended the clip by warning viewers to stay at least two to three meters away from the robot.

Mark Zuckerberg threatened to leave California LINK

• A Meta regulatory filing released yesterday shows Mark Zuckerberg considered leaving California over Proposition 40, a proposed one-time tax on billionaires, but agreed to stay in Silicon Valley for eight years.
• Under the deal, Zuckerberg can immediately sell 20 percent of a new class of nonvoting shares to cover any tax he owes, with the other 80 percent unlocking over eight years only if he keeps living in California.
• Prop 40 calls for a 5 percent tax on billionaires' stock and assets held in the state as of January 2026, though recent polling, after about $129 million spent opposing it, suggests the measure will fail.

Musk compares Tesla robots to toddlers LINK

• Elon Musk said on Tesla's third-quarter earnings call on 21 October that teaching the Optimus humanoid robot works much like raising a child, with the machines learning tasks through practice rather than pre-set instructions.
• Tesla wants 10,000 to 20,000 robots practicing at an "Optimus Academy," where they generate their own training data through self-play, after first learning by watching humans perform tasks at the new Fremont, California line.
• Reaching 20,000 robots a week will take at least another year, with the hand being a key engineering problem; the AI5 chip, roughly 10 times stronger than AI4, should enter Optimus around April 2027.

Other news you might like

• Recursive launches Flint, a laptop coding model it says was largely built by AI LINK

• Hugging Face releases Carbon-X, an AI model for questions about DNA LINK

• We are working with Voltus to build a 1-gigawatt virtual power plant. LINK

• TSMC is seeking chipmaking equipment that doesn't contain Chinese rare-earth magnets LINK

• DeepSeek reportedly raises $15B days after US restrictions LINK

• Palantir says it cannot switch off NATO’s Maven AI system LINK

• Scoop: Unvetted AI agents are accessing U.S. bank accounts LINK

• Tesla says it will start selling Cybercabs by end of year LINK

• Tesla stars Optimus robot production in California as profit falls 43% LINK

• The compiler was supposed to end programming too LINK

• Microsoft says China-aligned hackers used AI agents in ConnectWise attack LINK

• GM is giving OnStar an AI makeover LINK

• Xbox wants you to pay 24 to 40 cents per hour to stream games you already bought LINK

Trending tools

Blooio: connects Apple Messages, RCS, WhatsApp, and SMS for Business to your CRM and support tools, managing branded customer conversations at scale. LINK

Own 1: a fanless desktop AI computer running two local LLMs and eight agents, keeping your data private without subscriptions or per-token fees. LINK

Quello: connects your PDFs, Notion, Drive, and GitHub into one workspace with cited answers and shared context across Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. LINK

Radaric: aggregates RSS, Telegram, X and YouTube into one feed that learns from your feedback and groups duplicate coverage with source links. LINK

CoolDock: adds a second Mac Dock with live widgets, search, stats, weather, calendars, and quick actions for faster access to daily tools. LINK

Mercury 3: ignores vanity engagement metrics and focuses on financial data to track and optimize Facebook ad spend for better ROI. LINK

Trending papers & reports

Shopping agents too often buy on their own even when product information is thin, but learning a person's own buy-without-asking line from a few dozen of their choices predicts it far more accurately. LINK

Cheque-reading AI often reports the same figure for two amount fields that actually differ, erring up to ~74 percent of the time while staying confident, a hidden risk for automated financial document processing. LINK

TikTok as a news source now reaches a fifth of US adults regularly, up from just 3% in 2020, with 39% of those under 30 doing so, a Pew Research Center survey finds. LINK

See you tomorrow for a new dose of ☕️ Techpresso!