Amazon's Alexa for Shopping can now verify if messages are real

Claude Code v2.1.302 adds CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_MODE_MODEL to pick the model used by the client-side auto mode classifier, without affecting server-side auto mode. An Idle compaction row in /config lets users turn idle compaction off or back on.

AWS published a framework for evaluating AI agents built on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, aimed at catching silent production degradation that demos hide. The post argues agents "fail softly" by returning plausible answers rather than erroring loudly.

Perplexity released two open-weights multimodal decision models: pplx-decider-v1.2 (27B, 2 cents per million input tokens) and pplx-decider-flash-v1.2 (4B, 1 cent), built on Qwen3.5-4B and distilled from the 27B models. Flash is the top 4B model on the HF Decision Index; inference is up to 5x faster with all questions in a request run in one pass.

Huang said the benefits of AI technology will soon outweigh investor concerns after the latest AI stock-market rout. He described the selloff as temporary.

Brian Richard Fitzgerald, 51, was arrested on felony charges after Bucks County detectives traced a Discord account to his home via subscriber records and IP addresses. A search recovered prompts and scripts used to generate the material, plus chat logs under the username "thegentlemanpervert_2160_07833."

Two engineers built Stack Overflow for Agents in a few weeks using Codex, and its ChatGPT plugin drove up to 10x growth in agent creation. The work was presented at OpenAI DevDay 2026.

Anthropic says Claude resolved the decades-old mystery of the NIST elliptic curve "seed" values, which the NSA supplied in 2000 without explanation. The seeds reportedly came from hashing a humorous passphrase about raises for NSA's Jerry Solinas and Bob Reiter.