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IBM announced the release of Granite 4.2, an update to its open-weight family of 3B, 8B and 30B language models. The three models are available under the Apache 2.0 license through platforms including Hugging Face, GitHub, Ollama and IBM watsonx. Granite 4.2 adds the option for models to reason through a problem before producing an answer, while still letting users turn off that mode for simpler tasks.

There’s a pattern emerging in corporate America. A company announces a bold AI strategy, markets respond favorably, and soon after, the company makes layoffs dressed up as efficiency gains. Employees aren’t fooled, and neither are customers. That gap between what companies say about AI and what they’re actually doing is breaking down trust. And for enterprise leaders, it’s becoming a problem they need to address.

A federal judge has blocked the Pentagon’s effort to blacklist Anthropic, handing the AI company a major legal victory in its dispute with the U.S. military over the acceptable uses of AI. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin ruled that the Department of Defense acted unlawfully when it designated Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk.

Mike Vizard sits down with Clare Liguori, senior principal software engineer at Amazon Web Services, to unpack why this update matters more than a typical protocol revision. Enterprises are wrapping existing APIs in MCP servers so agents can reach ticketing systems, HR policies, operational data and internal business services directly.

The Chinese AI models are gaining popularity with more than just people with small budgets. As we know, China’s low-priced, open-weight AI models have more fans than American models as their quality approaches the top frontier-level models. We’ve been thinking that most of this rise in popularity came from individual developers and companies with tight budgets. We were wrong. Now, Chinese AI models are gaining a more direct path into Western corporate systems.

Anthropic recently explored a $7 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor startup MatX before pivoting toward potential partnership discussions. The move, as reported by Reuters, highlights the escalating push among top-tier AI developers to build proprietary hardware and reduce their reliance on third-party chipmakers.

OpenAI is reportedly developing an always-on feature for its coding tool, Codex, allowing the artificial intelligence (AI) agent to operate indefinitely without human supervision until explicitly put to sleep. According to technical analysis originally reported by Wired, code referencing an unreleased “persistent mode” has surfaced in OpenAI’s repository for Codex.

Anthropic has unveiled the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), a framework to enable AI agents to operate physical equipment, extending agentic AI beyond software applications and into real-world environments. Released as a research preview, MHS provides a common method for connecting AI agents with programmable hardware. The standard supports equipment ranging from robotic arms and microscopes to liquid handlers and quantum computing systems.

NVIDIA Corp. has abruptly pulled back from a controversial financing program that offered credit backing to artificial intelligence (AI) cloud providers in exchange for a share of their revenues, following internal concerns over potential antitrust exposure and friction with prospective partners. Introduced in July as the AI Compute Partnership, the initiative was intended to help smaller cloud firms secure loans for costly NVIDIA hardware.

OpenSearchCon North America 2026 brings together the teams building AI-ready search, observability, and security. A lot has changed since the OpenSearch Project debuted in 2021. AI agents are now querying data, calling tools, and making decisions inside production systems.