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6 stories in the last 30d

Nobody Is Saying Why OpenAI and Anthropic Had Outages Today

OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI chatbots suffered brief simultaneous outages; OpenAI cited a routing error and SpaceX a Memphis compute center outage.

ChatGPT and Codex were unavailable to some users from about 7:43 to 8:17 am PT Thursday due to a routing error, per OpenAI. Anthropic reported a partial outage with elevated errors on Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5, resolved by 9:16 am PT, while declining to explain the cause. xAI attributed the Grok outage starting 6:30 am PT to an outage at SpaceX's Memphis compute center; no shared third-party infrastructure cause was confirmed despite Cloudflare, AWS, and Azure reporting no issues.

WIRED · Security · 13d agoAI industry1

Clearview AI Is Testing an AI Tool That Would Let Cops Unearth Your Life Online

Clearview AI is prototyping InquiryIQ, an AI analyst assistant that would automatically profile individuals identified through its face-recognition searches for police.

WIRED uncovered InquiryIQ, an unreleased Clearview AI prototype described as an AI analyst assistant that fans out across the web from a face-recognition search result to assemble profiles including employers, aliases, associates, and physical characteristics. The company tested a model from xAI (merged with SpaceX), maker of Grok, and the interface accepts age, gender, and race inputs to guide searches. Clearview says the prototype was never pitched or shipped to customers and no law enforcement user has used it; the database has grown to over 70 billion images used by more than 2,000 law enforcement agencies.

WIRED · Security · 7d agoAI industry1

Four major AI models suffer rare overlapping downtime

OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google AI services suffered rare overlapping outages on Thursday, with most incidents resolved within hours.

Anthropic reported a partial outage with elevated errors on Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5 starting at 9:23 am ET, identifying the cause within about 15 minutes and resolving it by 12:16 pm, with a brief Claude Sonnet 5 error spike after noon. OpenAI reported elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex from 10:43 am, marking the issue resolved at 12:55 pm after a mitigation. xAI's Grok showed a user-facing error message as DownDetector reports surged from fewer than 10 to 1,365 by 9:45 am, and Google also experienced interruptions during the same window.

Ars Technica · AI · 13d agoAI industry

The Rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer — and How To Do the Job Right

Palantir veteran Vinoo Ganesh traces the forward deployed engineer role and shares practices for building effective FDE teams.

Kepler CEO and former Palantir forward deployed engineer Vinoo Ganesh argues that labs, startups, and PE firms hire FDEs without a shared definition of the role. He recounts Palantir's Project Frontline rotation, which trained about 250 software engineers as FDEs, many now leading forward deployed teams at OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Anduril. A 2013 failure of the Phoenix transaction store at a bank, where real-world data gaps caused roughly 2.3 million keyspaces and an out-of-memory crash, illustrates why FDEs must own the gap between design and production reality. At Kepler he places the FDE function inside product rather than sales.

Latent Space · 4d agoAI industry 4 sources1

OpenClaw Power, MacBook Simplicity: Five Days With Grok Bot

Hands-on review finds Grok Bot simplifies agent setup via browser logins and bot abstraction, contrasting with the user-owned OpenClaw platform.

After five days with Grok Bot, the reviewer highlights browser-based sign-in as the key differentiator: connecting X, Freshdesk, and Google Calendar required only logins, no MCP configs or API keys. The piece contrasts Grok Bot's managed 'agent computer' with OpenClaw 2.0's user-owned Gateway, which now supports reusing Claude Code or Codex logins and ships a native Codex runtime. Grok Bot introduces 'Bots' as composable units arranged in 'group chats', exemplified by an Agentic Engineer Bot routing tasks across Claude Code, Codex, and Grok Build CLI. The reviewer used Grok Bot with a Cursor Pro+ account.

Latent Space · 11d agoAI industry2

[AINews] OpenAI shuts off Cursor

OpenAI cut off API access to coding tool Cursor after its SpaceX acquisition, citing contract violations by Elon Musk's companies.

OpenAI disabled Cursor's access following the closing of Cursor's acquisition by SpaceX, citing its experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts; Cursor responded that OpenAI accounts for only 5% of its traffic. The weekly digest also covers major open-weight releases: Z.ai's GLM-5.3 (744B total/40B active, 1M context) and Tencent's Hy4-preview (770B/49B, ~#5 on Code Arena WebDev), plus Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash (125B/6B). vLLM published benchmarks showing no universal winner among speculative decoding methods across model families.

Latent Space · 19d agoAI industry1