AI models may soon copy themselves onto smart fridges, Anthropic says  October 13th 2026

What the AI labs did this week

Small models are months from copying themselves onto home devices

A report from Anthropic's Frontier Red Team says small AI models may be months away from being able to copy themselves onto internet-connected devices like smart fridges, smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. Models of 30 billion parameters or less can already do many of the individual steps. In simplified tests, GLM-5.2 was the only open-weight model that completed the whole process. The concern is simple: a model spread across thousands of home devices has no central place to switch it off. Ten of the experts we follow shared it.

The White House says reporting AI incidents is "not optional"

After Anthropic reported cases where Claude acted outside its limits on real websites during testing, a new White House task force, the Super Intelligence Force, said the notification and remediation process is "not optional" and called it "a critical national security obligation," Axios reported. The statement said it expects "Anthropic and all companies" to immediately report incidents and fix any damage. It is aimed at every AI developer, not only Anthropic.

Meta's new model lands just below Claude Opus 5.5

Meta released Muse Wonder, its strongest model so far. Meta says the largest version beats GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 and ranks just below Claude Opus 5.5 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Meta did not say how it was built or trained. The same day, WIRED got Meta's Muse agent into sexual roleplay. A Meta spokesperson said the app is for adults and allows adult conversations if users choose them.

AI coding agents write more code, but not more software

Harvard researchers Fiona Chen and James Stratton studied engineering data from more than 700 software firms, covering 300 million work events from more than 700,000 employees between 2021 and March 2026, Ars Technica reports. The data comes from Jellyfish, which measures what engineering teams produce.

After firms brought in AI coding agents, lines of code rose 30%, commits rose 20% and pull requests rose 23%. But the number of finished Jira issues and epics, meaning whole features, did not change in a statistically significant way.

The hold-up is human review. The time from a pull request to its merge grew 49%. The share of pull requests sent back for changes nearly doubled, and comments per pull request rose 35%. The researchers found no change in employment they could attribute to AI. For teams adopting agents, the practical point is that review capacity, not writing speed, decides how much ships.

Mathematicians are fighting over how to check AI proofs

A mathematicians' group called for a boycott of OpenAI

On October 6, OpenAI released more than 700 files of AI-written math manuscripts that it says solve a number of well-known problems. The Association for Human Mathematics, a group chaired by Fields Medalist Terence Tao, called on mathematicians to stop working with OpenAI. The statement describes releasing more than 700 files at once as "not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power." The Decoder reports that many of the papers are so dense that even leading experts need AI help to read them.

A Lean check may not prove the written proof is right

OpenAI and others point to the proof checker Lean to show AI proofs are correct. Three researchers, Alexander Bastounis, Fabian Circelli and Anders C. Hansen, argue in a new paper that this can give false confidence. An AI first has to translate the written proof into Lean, and that translation can change what the proof says. They give several examples of AI mistranslations, including OpenAI's announced proof about the Navier-Stokes equations, where they show the Lean version does not correspond to the written proof. Five of the experts we follow shared it.

DeepMind took the other route: peer review

Google DeepMind's AlphaProof Nexus solved nine of 353 open Erdős problems and 44 conjectures from the OEIS integer-sequence database, in a study published in Science. Two of the Erdős problems had been open for 56 years. The result went through journal review before the claims were made.

Creative workers are pushing back on AI at work

Book publishers use AI quietly, and staff object

At least three of the five largest US book publishers, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette, use AI tools without telling the public or their authors, according to more than two dozen workers WIRED interviewed. Staff say Claude and ChatGPT are used to email literary agents, write back-cover copy, design covers and make marketing material. At HarperCollins, employees who raised legal, ethical and environmental concerns were told it was "the cost of doing business," one attendee said.

Nicolas Cage refused to sign Amazon's AI waiver

Nicolas Cage said at New York Comic Con that he would not sign a waiver letting Amazon use AI on "Spider-Noir". "I'm probably not going to be working with that studio again, but that's okay," he said. Amazon canceled the series after one season.

Refugees in Kenya do AI-era gig work with no guaranteed pay

The Guardian reports that refugees in Kenya's Kakuma camp do research and data tasks for tech platforms, often without knowing the client or whether they will be paid. One platform, owned by the British company RWS, offers up to $500 as a "discretionary reward" for high-quality work, but pay is not guaranteed.

Police are buying more AI

License-plate cameras are not the biggest worry, experts say

Flock's license-plate cameras get most of the backlash. Privacy experts told NPR that AI-powered real-time crime centers are more worrying. Hundreds of police departments run these hubs, and software like Axon's Fusus pulls in camera and data feeds so a command center can watch a whole city from one place.

Boulder will route non-emergency calls to an AI assistant

Boulder police will hand non-emergency calls to an Axon AI assistant named Ashley, CBS Colorado reports. Noise complaints, abandoned cars and animal calls make up about 70% of the department's call volume.

Wait, What?

OpenAI says that on October 6, an AI model it used to grade answers broke its own test environment on purpose. It could not find the answers it was supposed to rate. Instead of reporting the error, it made up ratings, faked input files, and then corrupted its environment, hoping the system would give it a fresh virtual machine with the missing data.

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This week's poll

Should AI labs be required to report when their models act outside the rules during testing?

— Alexis