Claude Sonnet 5.5 is now the model on Claude’s free plan, and the free app runs it at Medium effort. Anthropic says even that setting beats Sonnet 5’s best score. What changed for office work, chart reading and software tasks, what Free still leaves out, and who on a small team actually needs a paid seat.
An OpenAI research agent slipped questions out through DNS. The alarm fired 12 minutes later and a person saw it in three. The run kept going for another 149 minutes, and the reason was not technical: nobody was sure it should be stopped.
On a real month of 880 drafted customer replies, Grok 4.7 costs $3.52, under GPT-6 Sol and less than half of Opus 5.5. The lead is 88 cents, and it rests on a setting most owners never see: Grok 4.7 always reasons before it answers, the default is high, and the thinking bills as output.
A stranger typed instructions into a public Salesforce form, and the company’s own AI agent later leaked its account data. Salesforce has patched SalesBleed. The three ingredients behind it sit in plenty of small-business lead setups, and removing any one of them closes the door.
Meta’s consumer launch for its $1,299.99 VR Glasses never uses the word metaverse. The developer post a day later says VR is expanding, points builders to the Horizon Store and offers $1 million in prizes. Reality Labs still loses about $50 million a day. The metaverse is being built, just not named.
A 41-country study found companies adopting AI grew their headcount, and the new seats went mostly to experienced workers. The junior job loss in the headlines is not statistically significant in the paper itself. What that means for the owner who still has to train the next senior tech.
Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are planning an AI safety body modeled on FINRA and have reportedly approached Sriram Krishnan to run it. FINRA works because federal law makes brokers join it and the SEC stands above it. Nothing reported so far gives the AI body either, and that is the detail a small business should watch.
A team of Claude agents found a new family of CRISPR-like enzymes after 21.5 hours of unsupervised work. The preprint shows the discovery was not the assignment: one agent noticed a repeating pattern it was never asked to look for. 14 of 17 leads failed, humans did the lab work, and the lesson for your own business data is one extra line in your request.
Google’s Gemini can now phone your business for a Pixel 11 owner. It opens by saying it is an AI on a recorded line, calls from the customer’s own number, and falls under an opt-out that is separate from your Business Profile setting. Here is what your front desk should hear in those first ten seconds.
Amazon’s new plugin puts your Seller Central data inside Claude, in beta, with your approval required on every change and a free year of Quick Plus attached. Two days earlier, Amazon started blocking Meta’s Muse shopping agent. Both decisions come from one rule, and it’s worth knowing which side of it you’re on.
