Explainers
Glossary
Short definitions. The first time a term shows up in a story, it can point here.
- A Grok Bot link that pre-types a message is comingStaff say an upcoming update adds a prompt link that opens a Bot with your text already in the composer. It never sends on its own.
- Anthropic gives six METR evaluators employee-like accessMETR can publish its risk findings on Anthropic without the company's approval. Our four-test check, built from Anthropic's list, works on any AI lab's safety claims.
- Anthropic opens Singapore office and signs government AI MOUFifth APAC office is open and hiring; MOU covers model evaluation, skills for SMEs, and in-region Bedrock inference for regulated teams.
- Anthropic rebuilt source control for agent-scale mergesEngineering post: merges rose from about 2,500/day to over 30,000/day; Scion replaced git in five months. Not a product you can install.
- Anthropic red team: small models near self-replicating on cheap IoT boxesAnthropic ran a 26B model across 15 $55 TV boxes and projects small models could reach end-to-end replication ability in its simplified tests by the end of 2026.
- Claude finds NIST ECDSA curve seeds came from Unix timestampsAnthropic says a research model found the NIST curve seeds came from lrand48 and a clock, not a secret passphrase. Anthropic says no action is needed.
- Early evidence: Anthropic says distillation harvests fell 90 to 99 percentNew classifiers, preserved thinking and billing for blocked requests cut extracted reasoning tokens by 10 to 100 times.
- Eight states sue OpenAI over ChatGPT safety for kidsThe suits seek court-ordered changes to ChatGPT. Until a court acts, here is what parental controls can and can't do for a teen today.
- GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 leave the OpenAI API on Jan 14Hardcoded gpt-4o, gpt-4o-mini, gpt-4.1 and gpt-4.1-mini calls stop in 92 days. OpenAI says move to gpt-6-luna and start at reasoning none.
- Hark says Handoff passed 1 million browser sessions for Pro usersAdcock's figure is unaudited. Here's how people use Hark Pro and its cloud browser, and where it still stumbles.
- Hark users say it still shops on Amazon after the agent blockFour Hark users report Amazon orders going through while Grok Bot users hit Amazon's agent page. Hark hasn't explained, and what it means for your Amazon account is an open question.
- PersonalAgentBench: Dots first, Hark second, Grok Bot tied fourthmicro1's trust-focused leaderboard ranks six personal agents; Hark trails only OpenAI's Dots, and Brett Adcock says he wants first place.
- What a Grok Bot is, and when to make another oneA Bot is a named AI teammate with one job, its own memory, and a shared cloud computer to work on.
- What a Grok Bot plugin (or connector) is, and what it can reachNeeds re-checkPlugins are the structured links between your Bots and services like Gmail, Notion, Slack, and GitHub.
- What a Grok Bot routine is, and what it costs to run oneNeeds re-checkA routine tells one Bot when to do a job on its own, on a schedule or when something happens.
- What a Grok Bot skill is, and how it differs from memoryNeeds re-checkA skill is a saved method any of your Bots can reuse. Memory is what one Bot remembers about its work.
- What the Grok Bot computer is, and what lives on itEvery Bot you run works on one cloud computer with a browser, a terminal, and a shared /workspace folder.