AI news
Language
Block unveils Dessa, a speech model trained only on human conversation
Audio in, audio out, with no text step, so tone, pauses and interruptions survive. It runs on a high-end MacBook but is a waitlisted research preview with no benchmarks yet, so voice and interpreting buyers can watch it but not plan around it.
Agents
Cursor agents can now click and type in any desktop app
Agents can test what they build, for example in the iOS Simulator, and may switch the feature on themselves. Anyone running Cursor on a work machine should close sensitive apps and watch the first runs.
Models
Moonshot releases Kimi K3.1 Pro, with open weights promised by 4 November
The 1M-token model scores 65.7% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 against 66.4% for Claude Opus 5.5, and is listed at $2 per million input tokens. Open weights would put near-frontier coding on hardware a firm controls.
Security
OpenAI now trains its frontier models with no live internet access
After a 20 Sep DNS breakout, OpenAI set its own agents to attack its sandboxes and they found unknown flaws. Any firm giving agents network access should assume capable models will probe every gap.
Policy
UK sets out AI security package, including a £100m AI Biosecurity Lab
OpenAI and Anthropic add up to £200m in model credits, the AI Security Institute gets £120m more and a £60m National Cyber Shield will use agentic AI. Full detail comes with next week's Budget.