Anthropic's Claude solves a percolation-theory problem that stumped mathematicians for 60 years, days before Barclays expands its Claude rollout across the bank. Plus Ben Thompson talks to Jason Del Rey about Amazon's new Muse agent, Simon Willison flags a new agent-collusion risk, OpenAI ships a cheaper GPT-6.1 Sol, Rails World 2026's talks go online, and a wildcard: bats turn out to have evolved in Europe, not Asia.

Manon Bischoff, Scientific American · Sep 30

Anthropic's Claude proved a 60-year-old percolation theory conjecture days after a Fields Medalist predicted AI would solve it.

Simon Willison · Oct 1

Willison quotes Matthew Green questioning whether sandboxing can contain AI agents that leave messages for each other.

Ben Thompson, Stratechery · Oct 1

Ben Thompson interviews journalist Jason Del Rey on Amazon's new Muse agent and its rivalry with Walmart.

William Shaw, Bloomberg · Oct 1

Barclays is widening Claude use across the bank, targeting 50% developer adoption by the end of 2026.

Rails Foundation, rubyonrails.org · Oct 1

All talks from Rails World 2026 in Austin, covering new Rails features and AI-assisted development, are now posted.

Aisha Malik, TechCrunch · Sep 29

OpenAI's new model claims near-Astra performance at roughly a fifth of the token price.

David Goldman, CNN · Sep 28

AI data center spending is helping keep the US economy hot enough to complicate the Fed's inflation fight.

Noah Smith, Noahpinion · Oct 1

Weekly roundup touching AI's effect on jobs, reindustrialization, rents, and the economics of deportation.

Kyle Harris, Denverite · Sep 29

Denver City Council approved $68 million for a new District 6 police station over calls to prioritize housing.