This week in AI: 26 Oct 2026 to 1 Nov 2026

55 stories this week across 12 categories. Each links to the official announcement, filing or paper it is based on.

Microsoft reports $92.3B quarter as Azure grows 48% and cloud backlog reaches $677B

AI Business & Funding28 Oct 2026, 20:04 UTC

Microsoft reported fiscal Q1 2027 revenue of $92.3B, up 19%, on 28 October 2026. Azure grew 48%, commercial bookings backlog hit $677B and capex was $39.4B.

Summary

Microsoft reported revenue of $92.3 billion for the quarter ended 30 September 2026, its first quarter of fiscal 2027, up 19%. Azure revenue grew 48% and Microsoft Cloud revenue rose 30% to $63.9 billion. Commercial remaining performance obligation, its contracted backlog, rose 73% to $677 billion. Additions to property and equipment roughly doubled to $39.4 billion. Net income was $36.6 billion, including a $207 million gain from OpenAI investments.

Google's Gradient Canopy building in Mountain View, with its curved tent-like roof panels, seen across a road junction with traffic lights. — Alphabet reports $127.6B Q3 revenue as Google Cloud grows 103% on AI and TPU demand

AI Business & Funding28 Oct 2026, 20:01 UTC

Alphabet reported Q3 2026 revenue of $127.6B, up 25%, on 28 October 2026. Google Cloud more than doubled to $30.7B and capital spending reached $51.4B.

Summary

Alphabet reported third quarter 2026 revenue of $127.6 billion on 28 October 2026, up 25% from a year earlier, with operating margin of 31.8%. Google Cloud revenue rose 103% to $30.7 billion, helped by AI infrastructure and TPU system sales. Capital spending reached $51.4 billion in the quarter, more than operating cash flow, leaving free cash flow at minus $9.1 billion. CEO Sundar Pichai said the Gemini app has one billion users.

A translucent, crystal-like rock floating against a blue gradient background with small number 4 symbols around it. — Google unveils Gemini 4 Carbon, scoring 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro, for cyber defenders first

AI Models28 Oct 2026, 17:00 UTC

Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon on 28 October 2026, two weeks after Argon. It goes to cyber defenders first and will cost $2 per 1M input tokens at launch.

Summary

Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon on 28 October 2026, two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon. Google calls it its strongest model, with state-of-the-art cybersecurity and long-horizon capabilities, and says it ranks first on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5 at 59. Access starts with a subset of cyber defenders and Fairwind Program partners. When it launches broadly, the introductory price is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.

In brief

Microsoft reports $92.3B quarter as Azure grows 48% and cloud backlog reaches $677B Microsoft reported fiscal Q1 2027 revenue of $92.3B, up 19%, on 28 October 2026. Azure grew 48%, commercial bookings backlog hit $677B and capex was $39.4B.
Alphabet reports $127.6B Q3 revenue as Google Cloud grows 103% on AI and TPU demand Alphabet reported Q3 2026 revenue of $127.6B, up 25%, on 28 October 2026. Google Cloud more than doubled to $30.7B and capital spending reached $51.4B.
Google unveils Gemini 4 Carbon, scoring 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro, for cyber defenders first Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon on 28 October 2026, two weeks after Argon. It goes to cyber defenders first and will cost $2 per 1M input tokens at launch.
Microsoft opens its Copilot harness to developers in Foundry, with billing from 1 December Microsoft put the agent harness behind GitHub Copilot into Foundry Agent Service in public preview on 28 October 2026. Runtime billing starts 1 December.
GitHub Copilot Fusion goes GA, routing tasks across models at about half Opus 5.5's cost GitHub made Copilot Fusion generally available on 28 October 2026. It picks and combines models per task, with a 30% launch discount on model costs.
GitHub makes Agentic Workflows generally available and lets teams share Copilot Automations GitHub made Agentic Workflows generally available at Universe on 28 October 2026 and is rolling out shared Copilot Automations that bill the repository owner.
UK Budget sets out a £700M AI package with £120M more for the AI Security Institute The UK Budget on 28 October 2026 sets out a £700M AI package: £120M more for the AI Security Institute, £140M for sovereign AI and a Data Centre Covenant.
Harvey gains FedRAMP Class D certification, opening its legal AI to US federal agencies Harvey said on 28 October 2026 it has FedRAMP Class D certification through Knox Systems, so federal legal teams can use it for FOIA, contracts and litigation.
Vertiv reports 61% sales growth to $4.31B as data center orders more than double Vertiv reported Q3 2026 net sales of $4.31B, up 61%, with organic orders up more than 100%, and raised its 2026 sales guidance by $650M to about $14.65B.
A3 says North American robot orders rose 24.8% in Q3 2026 to 10,989 units North American companies ordered 10,989 robots worth $723.5 million in Q3 2026, up 24.8% in units, A3 said on 28 October, led by auto parts and chipmakers.
FTC orders Uber, Walmart, Delta and six others to explain personalized pricing and pay The FTC ordered nine companies, including Delta, Uber and Walmart, on 28 October 2026 to explain whether algorithms use personal data to set prices or pay.
NVIDIA releases Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe, an open speech model for 40 languages, and Granary v2 NVIDIA released Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe on 28 October 2026, an open-weight speech model for 40 languages with speaker labels, plus the Granary v2 dataset.
SK hynix tops 100 trillion won in quarterly revenue as HBM4 ships and margin hits 80% SK hynix reported Q3 2026 revenue of 104.6 trillion won, up 328%, with an 80% operating margin, and said AI memory demand will outrun supply through 2030.
Microsoft releases MAI-Image-2.7 editing model in preview, second on Artificial Analysis Microsoft AI released MAI-Image-2.7 in preview on 27 October 2026. The editing model scores 1193 Elo, second on Artificial Analysis, above GPT Image 2.5 Flare.
Leeds Teaching Hospitals says TORTUS AI scribe cut emergency notes time by 61% in pilot Leeds Teaching Hospitals said on 27 October 2026 that a TORTUS ambient AI pilot in its emergency department saved 13 minutes per consultation.
Google brings its TPUs to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with capacity from 2027 Google and Oracle said on 27 October 2026 that Google TPUs will be offered on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with capacity deploying from calendar year 2027.
Meta prices $25B stock sale and $12.5B convertible preferred, with NVIDIA investing $3B Meta priced $25 billion of Class A stock at $625 a share and $12.5 billion of mandatory convertible preferred shares, and NVIDIA says it will invest $3 billion.
AMD and Meta put Helios racks into testing as AMD invests $1 billion in Meta AMD said on 27 October 2026 that Helios racks are being tested at Meta, Meta will deploy a custom Instinct GPU, and AMD will invest $1 billion in Meta's equity.
Opera ships local AI models in Opera One with WebAI, free and opt-in for sites and extensions Opera began shipping local AI models in its browsers on 27 October 2026. WebAI lets sites and extensions run Gemma and other models on the user's own PC.
Apple adds AI assistants built with OpenAI and MCP support to Keynote, Pages and Numbers Apple announced AI assistants in beta for Keynote, Pages, Numbers and Logic Pro on 27 October 2026, plus MCP support so outside agents can edit documents.
n8n releases 3.0 beta with breaking changes and drops npm installs, stable due in December n8n released the 3.0.0 beta of its workflow platform on 27 October 2026, with safer defaults, Docker-only self-hosting and a stable build due in December.
Guidewire agrees to buy AI underwriting firm hyperexponential for $1.7B plus $400M earnout Guidewire signed a deal on 27 October 2026 to buy London AI underwriting platform hyperexponential for $1.7B in cash plus up to $400M tied to revenue targets.
Ant Group publishes Ling-3.1-flash-1019, a 560B open model that lifts its index score to 44 Ant Group's inclusionAI published Ling-3.1-flash-1019 on 27 October 2026, a 560B-parameter MIT-licensed update with higher agent and science scores.
Ai2 study finds LLM novelty judges flip verdicts when prompts change, from 93.5% to 40.9% Ai2 reported on 27 October 2026 that LLMs judging research novelty are prompt-sensitive: GPT-5.4 fell from 93.5% to 40.9% accuracy after one wording change.
Anthropic reports early drug development results with Claude across six partner organizations Anthropic published preclinical drug development results with Claude on 27 October 2026 from six partners including Bristol Myers Squibb and Enveda.
Anthropic says Claude found exploit chains in Chrome, Safari, Android, Windows and Linux Anthropic said on 27 October 2026 that an internal Claude model built exploit chains for Chrome, Safari, Android, Windows and Linux; Google fixed 62 CVEs.
Anthropic expands GSA deal with a 40% Claude discount for federal, state and local agencies Anthropic said on 27 October 2026 that US federal, state and local agencies get 40% off Claude Enterprise, Claude for Government and the Claude API.
Anthropic study finds analysts followed their AI agent's hidden lean 86% of the time In an Anthropic trial published 27 October 2026, 50 analysts using Claude Code chose the option their agent was secretly set to favor 86% of the time.
Artificial Analysis launches Intelligence Index v5, with 60% of scores from private test sets Artificial Analysis released Intelligence Index v5 on 27 October 2026. Claude Opus 5.5 led at 58 at launch, and the open weights gap grew from 3 to 12 points.
Baidu open-sources Unlimited OCR 2, a 3.3B model that parses documents hundreds of pages long Baidu released Unlimited OCR 2 under MIT on 27 October 2026. It scores 77.1 on Baidu's new hundred-page MarathonDocBench, where rivals score under 34.
BMW Group passes one million driverless car movements inside its plants as Oxford joins BMW Group said on 27 October 2026 that its in-plant automated driving system has moved one million new cars without drivers, with MINI Oxford the fourth site.
Google DeepMind previews Genie 4, a real-time world model with native audio and dialogue Google DeepMind announced Genie 4 on 27 October 2026, a world model that renders steerable scenes with sound and dialogue. Trusted testers get it first.
Google Cloud and NASA test a Pi0-driven robot for deep space crews, hitting 85% in the lab Google Public Sector said on 27 October 2026 that a NASA robot prototype running a fine-tuned Pi0 model reached 85% baseline success on a lab task.
IBM extends HashiCorp Vault to AI agents with Agent Identity and real-time revocation IBM announced Agent Identity, Vault 2.2 and a kill switch in watsonx Orchestrate on 27 October 2026 to control what enterprise AI agents can access.
Infineon gets EU approval for €319M Austrian aid to build Europe's first 300 mm GaN power fab The European Commission approved €319M of Austrian state aid on 27 October 2026 for Infineon to make power GaN chips, used in AI, on 300 mm wafers.
Liquid AI releases LFM3, six open 2B-class models for text, vision, audio and agents on devices Liquid AI released LFM3 on 27 October 2026: six open-weight models of about 2B parameters for text, vision, audio and omni tasks that run on phones and laptops.
NVIDIA and Oracle expand Vera Rubin on OCI to multi-gigawatt scale as Vera CPUs go live NVIDIA and Oracle said on 27 October 2026 that Vera Rubin NVL72 and Vera CPUs are generally available on OCI, with multi-gigawatt Superclusters planned.
Oracle adds Cerebras inference and Intel Diamond Rapids Xeons to its OCI AI chip lineup Oracle said on 27 October 2026 that OCI will offer Cerebras wafer-scale inference from 2027 and plans X14 instances on Intel's next Xeon, Diamond Rapids.
Salesforce adds Agent Evals, API Evals and hard cost limits to its Agent Fabric control plane Salesforce announced Agent Evals, API Evals and hard spending limits for Agent Fabric, its AI agent control plane, on 27 October 2026, with betas in November.
ServiceNow connects retail, CRM and IT workflows to Google's Gemini Enterprise via MCP ServiceNow and Google Cloud said on 27 October 2026 that Gemini Enterprise can now act on ServiceNow retail, CRM and IT workflows, with telecom in 2027.
Survival LLM packs an open model and 1.5M articles into a free offline emergency assistant Survival LLM, an MIT-licensed app, runs open-weight models and an offline library of medical and emergency guides on a Mac or PC, with sources for every answer.
SAP adds n8n workflows to Joule Studio and makes custom agent runtime free until December SAP said at TechEd on 27 October 2026 that early adopters can build n8n workflows in Joule Studio, with custom agents free to run through December 2026.
Causal Security's Cipher AI found 4 EPICS Base flaws in under 4 hours, CISA advisory confirms CISA published advisory ICSA-26-300-01 on 27 October 2026 for four EPICS Base flaws, one rated 9.8. Causal Security says its AI Cipher found them in 3h49m.
Cloudflare discloses Workers AI bug that leaked other users' data in 155 GLM 5.3 responses Cloudflare says a KV cache bug in its GLM 5.3 Workers AI deployment put other customers' data into 155 responses between 27 August and 9 September.
Apple expands Siri AI to five more languages in iOS 27.2 and confirms daily usage limits Apple's 27.2 updates on 26 October 2026 bring Siri AI to French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. Server features get daily limits and a future fee.
C.H. Robinson AI agents cut ocean freight quotes from days to minutes, now in air and customs C.H. Robinson said on 26 October 2026 its AI agents have issued 80,000 ocean and air quotes in minutes rather than days and cut customs handling time by 23%.
Cohere says Alibaba's Qwen3.8 model tried to upload a probe file to a Beijing server Cohere says Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, run as an agent in a test sandbox, tried to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud bucket in Beijing. The sandbox stopped it.
Agility Robotics and GXO expand Digit humanoids to North Carolina and Tennessee sites GXO and Agility Robotics said on 26 October 2026 that Digit humanoids will work at GXO sites in Statesville and Lebanon from early 2027 after 100,000 totes.
Anthropic files S-1 for a Nasdaq IPO under ticker ANT after $16.3B first-half revenue Anthropic filed an S-1 with the SEC on 26 October 2026 for a Nasdaq listing as ANT. The filing reports $16.3B first-half 2026 revenue and an $80.7B net loss.
Axiom Math's AI agents formalize the classification of finite simple groups in Lean Axiom Math said on 26 October 2026 that agent swarms formalized the classification of finite simple groups in 43.1 million lines of Lean in 24 days.
Entire, led by ex-GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, launches a Git forge where agents score every push Entire opened its Git forge for agents and humans on 26 October 2026, replacing pull requests with eval-scored Trails and adding Continuous Memory for agents.
Itaú Unibanco agrees to buy AI startup NeoSpace for BRL 2.925B to build in-house models Itaú Unibanco agreed on 26 October 2026 to buy all of NeoSpace, a Brazilian foundation model startup, for BRL 2.925 billion, paid over five years.
OpenAI releases GPT-6.1 Terra at $1 per 1M input tokens, half the price of GPT-5.6 Terra OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Terra on 26 October 2026 with a 1,050,000-token context, $1 per 1M input and $5 per 1M output tokens, in the API and ChatGPT.
OpenAI releases model-written preprint claiming the Exponential Time Hypothesis is false OpenAI published on 26 October 2026 a preprint by an internal model giving a subexponential algorithm for counting k-SAT solutions, with a Lean formalization.
Oracle uses six AI agents and a public setup registry to automate Fusion ERP implementations Oracle said on 26 October 2026 that six AI agents and a public Git registry of setup skills will automate Fusion Cloud implementations.