Under Oath Before All 51 NYC Council Members, Four AI Labs Would Not Put a Number on Catastrophic Risk
On October 5, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta testified under oath at a rare New York City Council Committee of the Whole on ten AI bills. Three of the four came only after a subpoena threat; SpaceXAI ignored an actual subpoena. Speaker Julie Menin called the companies' answers on risk and liability 'troubling at best.'
HackerRank Makes Its Chakra AI Interviewer Generally Available After 500,000 Beta Interviews -- and Starts Scoring 'AI Fluency'
HackerRank's Chakra, generally available from October 5, folds the recruiter screen, take-home and engineer follow-up into one AI-led session in a real code repository, and scores how candidates direct an AI assistant as well as what they produce. Snowflake, Snorkel and Capgemini tested it. Humans still make the hire.
India's Auditor General Puts BHASHINI Translation Into Its Audit-Report Workflow -- With Controlled Access and Human Oversight
On September 30, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India and MeitY's Digital India BHASHINI Division launched CAG-BHASHINI Anuvaad, a customised AI translation system for official CAG documents and audit reports, built around consistent terminology, controlled access and data sovereignty.
GitHub Trending: tester-army's e2e Lets an Agent Drive Your App Tests -- Then Replays Them With No Model Calls
On October 6, tester-army/e2e led GitHub's daily trending list with 1,398 new stars. Alongside it, text-to-cad and OpenMontage show developers packaging whole professional workflows -- mechanical CAD and video production -- as skills a coding agent can run.
Framework Watch: Claude Code 2.1.290 Closes Symlink and Deny-Rule Gaps; LangGraph 1.2.13 Fixes Time-Travel Forks and Stale Interrupts
Claude Code 2.1.290, released late on October 5 (UTC), fixes a batch of permission and file-access gaps -- symlinks swapped mid-read, deny rules missed behind shell prefixes, wildcard expansion in 'read-only' commands -- and adds org-level approval ceilings for plugin hooks. LangGraph 1.2.13, the same day, fixes checkpoint forking and stops reporting interrupts that were already answered.
Trend Watch: Trump's 'Super Intelligence Force' Is Chartered to Prevent Overregulation -- With the FTC Chair Investigating the Labs as a Vice Chair
On Sunday, October 4, Trump named DNI Jay Clayton to chair a new federal 'Super Intelligence Force', with the FTC chair, the Pentagon CTO and the OPM director as vice chairs. Its reported charter pairs responding to AI threats with 'preventing overregulation,' and Clayton has dismissed a coordinated slowdown. The next day, New York City's Council put the labs under oath.