AI audio firm ElevenLabs has secured deals with actors Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine, who will use the company’s tech to generate AI versions of their iconic voices. The announcements, made at the inaugural ElevenLabs Summit, came as the company revealed plans to aggregate AI availability of more than 25 famous voices — including Maya Angelou, Alan Turing and Liza Minnelli — in its new Iconic Marketplace, a platform focused on “ethical sourcing and licensing of some of the world’s most recognizable voices.” ElevenLabs said McConaughey is signing on as an investor in the company. Continue reading ElevenLabs Adds Well-Known Voices to Its Iconic Marketplace

Alphabet has notched its first $100 billion-plus quarter, with revenue of $102.35 billion, a 16 percent increase for the period ending September 30. The result exceeded analyst estimates of $99.89 billion. CEO Sundar Pichai noted the results marked a 100 percent increase in Q3 revenue since 2020, when it was $50 billion. “We’re firmly in the generative AI era,” Nadella said, noting diversification “with successful businesses in Cloud, YouTube and subscriptions.” The company was onboard with the trend in increased spending, upping its capital expenditure range from $85 billion to $91 billion – $93 billion for 2025. Continue reading Cloud and AI Drive Alphabet to First $100 Billion-Plus Quarter

Google has released Veo 3.1 and Veo 3.1 Fast in paid preview, adding new capabilities to the generative video model that is already a leader in the field. Creative and technical upgrades include richer native audio from dialogue to sound effects, greater understanding of cinematic styles and better prompt adherence. The two new models are available via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI, with Veo 3.1 also available in the Gemini app and the storytelling tool Flow, which now gets native audio. Flow has generated more than 275 million videos since its release at Google I/O in May, according to the company. Continue reading Google Veo 3.1 Advances Generative Video in Flow and Vertex

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.” Continue reading Anthropic’s New Claude Haiku 4.5 is Available to Free Users

Anthropic has introduced a new general feature called Skills that lets Claude AI access specialized expertise on demand to more efficiently deploy agents in enterprise workflows. “Claude will only access a skill when it’s relevant to the task at hand,” like when working with Excel or following an organization’s brand guidelines, Anthropic explains. Skills are folders that include instructions, scripts and resources that Claude can load as needed. And users can also build their own for use across Claude apps, Claude Code, the Claude Agent SDK and the Anthropic API. Anthropic joins tech giants such as OpenAI, Google and Microsoft in efforts to make AI agents more practically useful. Continue reading Anthropic Adds Prebuilt and Custom Agent ‘Skills’ to Claude

Salesforce is reimagining Slack as a conversational AI assistant with agentic capabilities that can also serve as the gateway to third-party agents within the operating system. The upgrade, which is expected to be complete by the end of the year, will feature native AI experiences built into Agentforce for Sales, IT and HR Service, Tableau and more. Salesforce’s Slack redesign could position the app to compete with Microsoft’s Copilot and Teams as the conversational AI layer inside an enterprise’s daily workflow — the place to talk to both people and agents, accessing and interacting with a company’s data. Continue reading Salesforce Retools Slack as Agentic AI Assistant for Enterprise

Google is launching new subscription AI services that aim to help businesses build agents. Gemini Enterprise starts at a monthly fee of $30 per user for large organizations, while the $21 per person monthly Gemini Business is aimed at smaller clients. Premade Google agents are packaged with the new subscriptions to pave the way for automated software development, data science and customer engagement efforts. Access to agents from Workday and others is also provided, and they can draw on data from Microsoft, Salesforce and Box. The Google launch was announced just a few days after OpenAI revealed that tools from third-party apps can now be accessed in ChatGPT. Continue reading Google Launches No-Code AI Agent Tools for Enterprise Users

Anthropic and IBM have formed a strategic alliance that will see Anthropic’s Claude models integrated into select IBM software products, the first of which is a new AI-first integrated development environment (IDE) called Project Bob, now in private preview, which aims to help enterprise clients do things like modernize software. At its TechXchange 2025 conference in Orlando, IBM also debuted a new capability for AgentOps. The AgentOps practices unveiled at IBM Think in May was showcased here as a real-time governance and observability integration to help ensure autonomous agents don’t run amok. Continue reading IBM Previews Its Project Bob IDE, Intros Real-Time AgentOps

Google is bolstering its AI-powered coding agent Jules with the introduction of Jules Tools — a lightweight, Command Line Interface (CLI) that is rolling out with a preview look at a new Jules public API. The features allow you to integrate Jules more directly into systems and workflows by plugging into the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline as well enabling real-time collaboration by integrating with third-party applications like Slack. The move comes as competition among companies building AI coding assistants intensifies, becoming a key component of the future of software development. Continue reading Google Polishes Jules with New CLI and Preview of Public API

Anthropic has released its latest frontier AI model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, built for high-performance coding and building complex agents. Anthropic claims it is “the best coding model in the world” and “the best model at using computers,” with substantial gains in reasoning and math. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is distinctive in that it can build “production-ready” applications and is not limited to prototypes, Anthropic says, describing it as a major gain over previous models. The new model also excels in research as well as enterprise basics like cybersecurity and finance, per Anthropic. Continue reading Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5 Good at Coding and Collegiality

OpenAI is taking ChatGPT beyond the question-and-answer phase with the introduction of ChatGPT Pulse, which has agentic abilities, proactively doing research to deliver personalized updates based on chats, feedback, and connected apps like calendar. Users can curate the results by indicating what’s useful. ChatGPT will be working while you’re not, delivering up to 10 “briefs” designed to help start your day. Available in preview to ChatGPT Pro users on mobile, OpenAI plans to “learn and improve from early use before rolling it out to Plus, with the goal of making it available to everyone.” Continue reading OpenAI’s Agentic ChatGPT Pulse Aims to Help Start Each Day

OpenAI and Anthropic — rivals in the AI space who guard their proprietary systems — joined forces for a misalignment evaluation, safety testing each other’s models to identify when and how they fall short of human values. Among the findings: reasoning models including Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, and OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini resist jailbreaks, while conversational models like GPT-4.1 were susceptible to prompts or techniques intended to bypass safety protocols. Although the test results were unveiled as users complain chatbots have become overly sycophantic, the tests were “primarily interested in understanding model propensities for harmful action,” per OpenAI. Continue reading Anthropic and OpenAI Report Findings of Joint AI Safety Tests

Netflix has issued partner guidelines outlining use of generative AI in content workflows. The guidelines emphasize circumstances in which the use of generative AI requires advanced written approval, such as altering a character or performance, any inclusion of generative AI in the final product or using AI in a way that materially impacts union work. Fabricated content that could be “mistaken for real events” is to be avoided. Use of AI for “ideation” is deemed generally acceptable if done within guidelines. Allowing models to train on input or output of material destined for Netflix is off-limits. Continue reading Netflix Publishes Partner Guidelines for GenAI Production Use

This week, DeepSeek-V3.1 dropped on Hugging Face. Media outlets immediately began citing benchmark scores that rival proprietary systems from OpenAI and Anthropic for a system that is available via a permissive license, facilitating wide access. The 685-billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model has 37 billion active parameters and is designed for efficiency. It builds on DeepSeek-pioneered processes like multi-head latent attention (MLA) and multi-token prediction (MTP) to optimize inference, enabling high-performance computing on both enterprise servers loaded with H100 GPUs and consumer hardware like a Mac Studio or comparably powered PC. Continue reading DeepSeek-V3.1 Offered with Improvements in Speed, Context

Hisense Channels is a new FAST service launched by TV manufacturer Hisense and Xumo, the streaming joint venture between Charter Communications and Comcast. Boasting in excess of 200 premium channels from content providers including Scripps, Stingray and Radial Entertainment, Hisense Channels is debuting on Hisense smart TVs, where viewers can access it from the TV’s homepage screen — no need for a subscription or download. The move is an expansion of the existing partnership between Xumo and Hisense, which is interested in simplifying content discovery with built-in streaming access. Continue reading Xumo Powers Hisense Channels’ 200 FAST Content Offerings