Samwise Tech/AI/Robotics Newsletter
Friday, October 2, 2026
OpenAI Parts Ways with Three Safety Researchers Over Alleged Information Sharing
OpenAI has parted ways with three researchers on its safety team who allegedly shared confidential company information with a third-party AI safety organization, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, according to TechCrunch. An OpenAI spokesperson said an internal investigation confirmed the individuals “mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures.” The report did not name the researchers, the organization, or the information involved. The departures come two days after The New York Times reported that OpenAI executives had brushed aside employees’ warnings about the company’s safety practices. Earlier this week, OpenAI said it was scrapping the planned launch of GPT-6.1 Astra, an AI model, over safety concerns.
Sources: TechCrunch
California Law Will Fine Robotaxi Operators for Blocking First Responders
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed Senate Bill 1246, which requires autonomous vehicle companies such as Tesla, Waymo and Zoox to provide first responders with local, on-the-ground support when their robotaxis cause problems. Companies can be fined if a robotaxi blocks police or firefighters during an emergency for more than 30 minutes. The law allows only remote drivers based in the United States who hold a U.S. driver’s license, and requires companies to notify local jurisdictions during system-wide failures. Waymo and Zoox have said they will comply. The law takes effect in July 2028, with the state DMV setting response-time guidelines.
Sources: TechCrunch
Mandiant Founder’s Agent-Swarm Security Startup Armadin Raises $255.5 Million
Kevin Mandia, founder of cybersecurity startup Mandiant, which sold to Google for $5.4 billion in 2022, has raised $255.5 million for his latest startup, Armadin, at a valuation of more than $2.5 billion, the company announced Thursday. Andreessen Horowitz and Accel led the Series B round, joined by Bain Capital Ventures, Redpoint, Google Ventures, In-Q-Tel, Kleiner Perkins and others. The round comes six months after a $190 million Series A in March, bringing total funding past $445 million. Instead of traditional penetration tests, Armadin runs always-on agentic swarms that chain together vulnerabilities to hack in, helping organizations find and seal holes first.
Sources: TechCrunch
Boston Dynamics Unveils Four-Finger, 13-DOF Hand for Atlas Humanoid
Boston Dynamics has unveiled a four-finger hand for its Atlas humanoid robot with 13 degrees of freedom, including a four-DOF opposable thumb, and dense tactile pressure sensors across the fingertips and palm. The company says the hand lets Atlas reorient objects in-hand, recover from slipping grasps and operate tools including drills, grinders, nail guns and welding torches. Dropping the pinky reduces cost, size and actuator count; adding it would require three more actuators. Chief technology officer Zack Jackowski had team members tape two fingers together for a day to test the idea. The hand was designed for reinforcement learning, with initial sim-to-real results achieved.
Sources: Robotics & Automation News
AI Tool Reconstructs What People See From High-Resolution Brain Scans
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have built an AI tool that reconstructs the images people are viewing from fMRI brain scans, and can also predict brain activity from an image, MIT Technology Review reports. Computer scientist Michal Irani’s team trained a two-branch decoder that predicts an image’s structure and content, guiding a diffusion model. Pairing it with an encoder let them train on images never shown to volunteers. The tool needs about one hour of a new person’s fMRI data, compared with about 40 hours typically required by other tools. Other scientists warned similar approaches could reveal people’s inner thoughts without consent.
Sources: MIT Technology Review
Amazon Releases Open-Source Strands Decider 2B Decision Model
Amazon Web Services has released Strands Decider 2B, an open-source decision model inspired by TypeSafe’s Jev that sorts between pre-decided options and reports how confident it is in its choice. The model is available now and small enough to run locally. Amazon distinguished engineer Marc Brooker built an early version after seeing Jev; it briefly reached the top spot on the Jevbench ranking for models its size before Amazon engineers cleaned it up and released it through Strands Labs. Like other decision models, it is built on an LLM but delivers calibrated choices instead of generating text. It arrived the same week OpenAI announced a similar offering.
Sources: TechCrunch
ANYbotics Launches Shift Platform to Run Inspection Robot Fleets
ANYbotics has launched Shift, a software platform that manages fleets of autonomous inspection robots and connects the data they collect directly with industrial maintenance and enterprise systems. Its four modules schedule robots, analyze thermal, acoustic, visual and gas measurements, link findings to platforms such as SAP, IBM Maximo and GE Vernova APM, and map plant assets. ANYbotics says Shift already runs across more than 200 robot deployments, processing hundreds of thousands of inspections monthly, and helped Sacramento Municipal Utility District save more than $3.5 million in its first months. The company plans to add support for third-party robots over the coming months.
Sources: Robotics & Automation News
Tech Pulse
Top Frontier Models: Claude Opus 5 (96% SWE-B V) | Claude Mythos 5 (95.5% SWE-B V) | Claude Fable 5 (95% SWE-B V)
Top Open Source Models: Ornith-1.5-397B (86% SWE-B V) | Ornith-1.0-397B (82.4% SWE-B V) | DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (80.6% SWE-B V)
Top Small Models (15–50B): Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B (79% SWE-B V) | Qwen3.6-27B (77.2% SWE-B V) | Muse Glimmer 30B (76% SWE-B V)
Top Edge Models (0–15B): Ornith-1.5-9B (70.6% SWE-B V) | Ornith-1.0-9B (69.4% SWE-B V) | Granite 4.2 8B (47.7% SWE-B V)
AI Leaders: NVIDIA $5.53T | Alphabet $4.17T | Microsoft $3.78T
Robotics Leaders: Intuitive Surgical ~$175B (est.) | Fanuc ~$36B (est.) | limited sourced data this edition
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Curated by JD · samwise.agency