AI Watch, Tuesday 13 October 2026Meta places Muse Wonder just behind Claude

Statements from former staff of AI labs are multiplying this autumn, La Tribune reports. The latest come from three safety researchers laid off by OpenAI, whose accounts point to the absence of any real oversight of the sector. These documented departures, also relayed by Le Monde, put a face on the growing concerns over the internal governance of models.

The creator of Linux has published a series of eight kernel patches produced with Claude Code, Anthropic's programming assistant, Frandroid reports. In 2024, Torvalds still described AI as "90% marketing". The move stays measured: he keeps control of the review and integrates only what his judgment validates.

Airbus and Kratos have completed the first European flight of the U740 Valkyrie, a combat drone meant to accompany piloted aircraft, Clubic reports. The aircraft will receive a European mission system equipped with AI and targets combat service entry by 2029.

Microsoft unveiled Maia 300 on Monday, the third generation of its in-house chip dedicated to inference (the cost of running a model once it is trained). The company announces performance seven times higher than the previous generation and a rollout in its data centres from 2027, at the scale of several gigawatts. By making its own chip, Microsoft seeks to loosen its dependence on Nvidia's graphics processors and to control the whole chain, from hardware to software.

Microsoft's CEO warns against blind trust in the most advanced AI models, Siècle Digital reports. He argues they should be treated as potentially compromised from the design stage, and that a human must be able to interrupt a task at any moment. The warning echoes that of Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, who judges AI today less regulated than milk or washing machines and calls for fast regulation.

A loop of circular financing is fuelling the AI boom and recalls, according to Bloomberg, the 2008 financial crisis. On the Big Take podcast, journalist Shawn Donnan describes an arrangement in which the same players finance one another: chipmakers, cloud providers and labs trade capacity and stakes, which inflates the headline figures and amplifies global imbalances. The same day, Asian tech stocks were falling and the IMF warned that the world economy is approaching the limits of its resilience. Willy Lee, of the Neostellar fund, puts nearly $200 billion of American venture capital deployed in the first half, more than 74% of the estimated total for the previous year. The comparison with 2008 holds as a warning signal, not a settled diagnosis.

The American company Raven, formerly GeoSpy, offers law enforcement the ability to identify the exact home where a photo was taken, from a single interior shot, 404 Media reports. The system cross-references visual clues, an appliance, a layout, a view through the window, with listings published on Airbnb or Zillow to find the address. First sold as a geolocation game, the tool is now aimed at police surveillance. The shift raises a direct privacy question: an innocuous image shared online becomes data that locates. No public safeguard governs, at this stage, the use of these identifications.

Measured by country of manufacture, China supplies only about 5% of the equipment and materials bought by the American semiconductor industry, according to a Semiconductor Industry Association report relayed by the South China Morning Post. But its grip on certain rare earths needed to make chips exceeds 90%. The bulk of purchases, 95% of the roughly $27 billion spent each year, comes from companies based in the United States, Europe and Japan, which masks the real dependence on a few critical inputs. The figure arms the debate on export controls and industrial resilience.

The Chinese state telecom operator has tripled the capacity of its largest intelligent computing hub, located in Hohhot, the South China Morning Post reports, citing the Inner Mongolia Daily. Total power now reaches 20,100 petaflops, triple its previous capacity. The expansion extends Beijing's effort to strengthen its digital infrastructure and support its AI ambitions, by concentrating computing in the north, where energy and land cost less.