San Francisco-based AI startup Anthropic has released a smaller, cheaper Claude model called Haiku 4.5 that can reportedly outperform larger models that are only a few months old. In terms of coding skills, Haiku 4.5 performs comparably to Claude Sonnet 4 and OpenAI’s GPT-5, per the SWE-bench Verified leaderboard. “What was recently at the frontier is now cheaper and faster,” Anthropic suggests, noting that just “five months ago, Claude Sonnet 4 was a state-of-the-art model” and “today, Claude Haiku 4.5 gives you similar levels of coding performance but at one-third the cost and more than twice the speed.” Read more

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, has noticed an increase in bot activity on the encyclopedic website, and a decline of approximately 8 percent in human page views. The non-profit says the trend is due to a combination of the impact of social media and generative AI as informational sources for potential visitors. AI now provides summarized answers to user questions, while younger people are increasingly finding information through social video. The Foundation’s organizers say the audience loss could have a negative effect on Wikipedia donors as well as the human volunteers who keep the site current. Read more

For those who may be too busy to look through their smartphone’s camera rolls, Meta Platforms has debuted a new Facebook feature that will parse collections for you, then recommend “fun” edits and collages to make the content more shareable. The feature could also offer ideas such as recaps and birthday themes. Available to users in the U.S. and Canada, to leverage this new AI-powered feature, one must opt-in, and it can be turned off at any time. Once a suggestion is reviewed, the user can then determine whether they want to share it and with whom. Then it’s just a one-click share through Facebook or Messenger. Read more

Meta Platforms is adding new safety features to provide parents more control as to how children — most pointedly teens — interact with AI chatbots and characters. The move follows the September launch of an FTC investigation of Meta and five other companies on the potentially harmful effects of their AI on children and teens. Meta’s new guardrails will allow parents to turn off one-on-one chats with AI characters completely or just block specific characters. They’ll also be able to glean insight into topics their underage household members are discussing with AI, including Meta’s own AI assistant. Read more

Microsoft is integrating its Copilot AI companion more deeply into the popular Windows 11 operating system with multimodal features that allow conversational interaction, screensharing and agentic functionality. All Windows 11 users can now speak naturally to their PCs with Copilot Voice and let the machine see what’s onscreen via Copilot Vision. An agentic feature, Copilot Actions, is being rolled out experimentally through the Windows Insider and Windows Labs programs, which are also adding access to the Manus AI assistant. The features are being introduced worldwide in markets where Copilot is offered. Read more