automation - Page 20

BYD's humanoid design patent is published, but its August debut has not happened. Kerala Police signed a traffic-robot MoU. Neither is a product yet.

OpenAI says Codex can now suggest your next message (beta, Pro), and ChatGPT dots can be created on a phone and start work in Codex. What is confirmed, and what is a staff post.

Three robotics items from 8 October 2026: a FAIR at Meta and Mila preprint on how robot "world models" scale, a reported Series A for Beijing's Livsyn Robotics, and CP AI Robotics' C1 store humanoid, which the company plans to roll out in Japanese convenience stores "as early as 2027". What each shows, and what it doesn't.

A former Tesla Optimus AI lead is reportedly building non-humanoid factory robots. AWS has published open sample code for training robot software in the cloud. Locus keeps its top AMR ranking in the Americas, and ZS Robotics brings a low-profile pallet shuttle to the US. What is confirmed, what is reported and what is company-claimed.

Scale AI and Elorian's Humanity's Sixth Sense benchmark finds people score 93.1% on everyday visual questions while the best model, GPT-6 Astra, scores 53.6%, mostly because models misread the picture. A separate preprint, not yet peer reviewed, says base models can reason almost as well as RL-trained ones when their answer starts with the right word.

Anthropic has expanded its Cyber Verification Program into three tiers, Defense, Red Team and Specialized, that relax Claude's cyber safety blocks for vetted security teams on Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Mythos 5.1. Specialized applicants are reviewed with the US government. What each tier allows, and what Anthropic's own test shows.

On 6 October OpenAI launched a Decisions API that returns yes/no probabilities, picks and rubric scores from GPT-6 Luna, and cut its API usage tiers from five to three. Perplexity released pplx-decider-v1.1-27b, an Apache 2.0 open-weight decision model. What decision models are, what each costs, and which scores are the vendors' own.

Three fired OpenAI safety researchers have reportedly urged the board to preserve the ability to monitor AI reasoning. Australia, meanwhile, has proposed making frontier AI firms prove their safety systems work, on a banking-and-aviation model. Both reported; one is a letter, the other a proposal.

Anyone can now check an image, video or audio file for SynthID watermarks from Google and partners including OpenAI, NVIDIA and Kakao, with Apple to follow. A useful check for some AI content, not a general AI detector. What a "no" result does and does not mean.

Biohub, the US DOE and NIH, with $300m from Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs and Meta, are pooling $1.8bn to generate open data for AI cell models.