What changed in AI today

• Friend 2 costs $249, $100 more than the original, and runs on OpenAI's latest language models.
• The reviewer found the pendant's personas, including Sage, felt samey despite different names and personalities.
• Creator Avi Schiffmann says the next update will merge users into one shared Friend, with privacy trade-offs acknowledged.

Why it matters for marketers: Content teams using AI companions should note that personas may not differ meaningfully, and that shared-entity designs raise privacy questions for audiences.

• Survey of over 5,400 Americans: 73% of men said they knew Sam Altman; 53% claimed to know Murati, Milner and Dalton.
• Milner and Dalton do not exist; 40% of women also claimed to know them, and 38% said they recognized Murati.
• Men answered more AI factual questions correctly, but both sexes erred at similar rates; women more often said they were unsure.
• Men were named in AI headlines over 14 times as often as women; three-quarters of quoted experts were men.

Why it matters for marketers: Content teams relying on expert quotes or audience knowledge claims should check sourcing balance and avoid assuming confident responses reflect accuracy.

• Tech Against Terrorism tested 134 AI models with over 200 prompts, three times each, in its Counter-Terrorism AI Benchmark report.
• Only two models passed completely; 81 failed, including many closed-weight models from large companies.
• Abliterated versions of new open-weight models now appear online in under three days on average, down from more than 24 days in 2024.
• Meta's Llama 3.1 8B scored 97 out of 100, while its abliterated version scored just 3.

Why it matters for marketers: Content teams and brand-safety staff should treat open-weight model deployments as a moderation risk, since guardrails can be removed quickly after release.

• Engineer Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, charged with using a device to intercept oral communications, per Justice Department release.
• Device was reportedly found plugged into a TV's USB port in an executive conference room, installed around September 28.
• OpenAI says it used its AI models to trace the device to a specific employee, who was fired and referred to the FBI.
• Alfozan appeared in federal court Tuesday after being arrested Friday; OpenAI reports no sign of model weight or customer data access.

Why it matters for marketers: Marketers and content teams handling confidential launch or strategy materials should review how sensitive meeting rooms and insider access are secured.

• Anthropic's Liam Booth-Smith said voluntary commitments are not enough and rules should be binding.
• OpenAI's Tom Duff Gordon backed a statutory framework, starting with mandatory incident reporting.
• Google DeepMind and Meta declined to back new legislation, with Meta pointing to existing UK regulators.
• UK AI Security Institute testing of frontier models relies on companies choosing to hand them over.

Why it matters for marketers: Marketers using frontier AI tools should expect policy debate in Britain to center on whether safety rules stay voluntary or become law.

• By March 2026, AI content violated Wikipedia's core principles so often that writing with large language models was banned outright.
• Remaining permitted AI roles are restricted to translation and minor proofreading, according to the source.
• A Princeton study found about 5 percent of nearly 3,000 new English Wikipedia articles from August 2024 held substantial AI content.

Why it matters for marketers: Content teams relying on AI-drafted reference material should expect Wikipedia to reject or strip such text, so sourcing plans need human-written backups.

• Lantern Production Consultants reportedly received around $20 million since last year from Think Big, per federal filings reviewed by WIRED.
• Summit Ridge Media Group got about $13 million from American Mission between December 2025 and September 2026, per the same records.
• Campaign Legal Center filed an FEC complaint in May alleging the super PACs failed to disclose actual payment recipients.
• Nevada's secretary of state reportedly could not locate records for the businesses; the FEC lacks the quorum needed to rule on complaints.

Why it matters for marketers: Content and ad teams working with political clients should expect tighter scrutiny of vendor disclosures, since undisclosed payees now face complaints even without FEC enforcement.

• Musk posted a screenshot on X showing his Lego order number, payment amount, addresses, and partial card digits.
• A user reportedly used the exposed order number and email to get Lego's chatbot to cancel the order, then Musk said it was not canceled.
• Another user reportedly used the same details with Lego's assistant Sophia to raise the order to 400 sets and change the delivery address.
• Visa reportedly saw a 40 percent rise in malicious bot-initiated transactions in the US in the second half of 2025.

Why it matters for marketers: Marketers deploying AI shopping agents should review chatbot verification and order-change safeguards, since exposed order details alone allowed account tampering.

• Muse Wonder costs $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens via the Meta Model API.
• Wonder Full is limited to Muse Code subscribers and is not served through the API.
• Meta says Wonder scores higher on MemoryBench than Fable, Opus, or Astra, per its own testing.
• Models were reportedly trained at Meta's Prometheus data center in central Ohio.

Why it matters for marketers: Content teams building long-running assistants may get a stronger memory option, but pricing is comparable to rival frontier models and Meta's benchmark claims are self-reported.