- Products
Gemini 4 Hydrogen now powers Google Search for all users worldwide. Google calls this the biggest model upgrade to Search so far and says it brings better handling of multi-part questions, broader query fan-out and more tables and visual answers.18 Google says Search will now link to a wider range of sites than before.18
- Products
Anthropic now lets companies self-host Claude Managed Agents. Companies can run the whole service, including agents, session history and credentials, in their own cloud or data center, though every model call still goes to a provider such as Anthropic, Bedrock, Google Cloud or Foundry.19, 20 Access goes through Anthropic's account teams, nothing migrates from the hosted service, and webhooks and scheduled runs are not supported.19
- Models
Nature Computational Science highlights Google's open MedGemma models. The MedGemma family includes 4B and 27B multimodal models, a 27B text-only model and the MedSigLIP image encoder, and it outperformed its Gemma 3 base models across a range of benchmarks.21 A MedGemma 4B model fine-tuned on only 10% of the task data beat a Gemma 3 model fine-tuned the same way.21
- Models
Indian lab Chariot released a text-to-speech model for 11 Indic languages and English. Chariot-1-TTS-Multilingual offers more than 50 voices, code-mixing within a sentence, voice cloning from a few seconds of audio and pronunciation that depends on context.22, 23 Chariot reports a 7.60% character error rate in Hindi, and its comparisons with ElevenLabs, OpenAI and others are its own.22
- Policy & legal
New York has opened its RAISE Act registration portal for large frontier AI developers. Large developers have until January 1 to register, and the law then requires them to publish safety frameworks and report critical incidents within 72 hours.24 The new DIGIT office will enforce it, with fines of up to $1 million for a first violation and $3 million for later ones.24
- Policy & legal
The EU has adopted common rules for AI Act regulatory sandboxes, which take effect December 1. Implementing Regulation 2026/2487 says exit reports must be recognized across the EU but carry no conformity status, and participants stay liable for harm to third parties.25, 26 SMEs and start-ups get priority access and free core supervision.25
- Industry
United Airlines is blocking unauthorized third-party AI agents from booking flights. United cited account security and FAA and DOT rules that require a person to confirm bags hold no banned items, and the restriction also covers travel agencies and aggregators.27, 28 Agents can still show United flights and fares, but a person must finish the booking.29
- Funding & deals
LangChain raised $300 million at a $3 billion valuation. CapitalG led the round, and the company plans to nearly double its headcount to 850 by the end of 2027.30 LangChain earns revenue from LangSmith, its paid suite for versioning, tracing and maintaining agents in production.30
- Dev tools
Copilot Chat in Visual Studio now runs on the same engine as GitHub Copilot CLI and VS Code. In Microsoft's test of 157 C# tasks with the same model, the new engine solved 124 and the old one solved 103.31, 32 Developers can also send new instructions while a task is running.31
- Industry
Asian markets were mixed Friday as investors weighed the Nvidia leadership change. SoftBank Group fell 5.2% and SK Hynix fell 2%, while Taiwan's Taiex rose 1.7%.33 On Thursday, AMD gained 5.9% while Nvidia fell more than 4%.33
- Models
Liquid AI released LiquidCodec, a 74M-parameter streaming speech codec, with open weights. LiquidCodec powers the LFM3-Audio and LFM3-Omni models, and Liquid AI reports encoding at about 361 times real time and decoding at about 87 times on one CPU thread.34, 35 GGUF builds for llama.cpp are available for edge use.34
- Products
Zoho rebuilt Zoho Campaigns with WhatsApp messaging and support for MCP agents. The update puts email, SMS and WhatsApp in one workflow and lets compatible AI agents use its tools and data within the permissions users set.36 Paid plans still start at $4 a month.36
- Policy & legal
Claude declined to keep helping with a Pokémon fan game, and its developer has objected publicly. The developer behind Pokémon Arena 2D says he spends up to $2,000 a month on tokens, and he shared messages in which Claude refused to build the game from Pokémon sprites.37 Kotaku reports that Anthropic recently added limits on helping with work based on other companies' IP.37
- Policy & legal
Huang's exit could lead to tighter US export controls on AI chips sold to China. The South China Morning Post reports that the resignation comes as lawmakers debate the annual defense authorization bill, with calls growing to restrict China's access to advanced chips.38
- Industry
OpenAI's quarterly revenue reportedly reached $10 billion for the first time. Revenue rose almost 50% from the second quarter, but the adjusted operating loss grew to $10.9 billion, according to reports cited by The Next Web.39 Anthropic reported $16.96 billion in revenue for the same quarter, though the two companies count revenue differently.39
- Products
iOS 27.3 lets Siri AI control much more of Apple Notes. Siri can now create, edit, lock, tag and format notes, scan documents and manage checklists.40 Third-party apps may get similar controls when app skills launch next year.40
- Industry
New reporting describes how Nvidia's ties to Megaspeed developed. Defector, summarizing earlier reports, says Nvidia changed how it reported geographic revenue after investigators began looking at Megaspeed, and that Singapore had earlier accounted for 22% of Nvidia's business.41 Reuters also reported a relationship between Huang and a second Nvidia employee, without naming the person.41
