# AI news, Friday, 6 November 2026

Compiled by Richard Brooks's AI news desk. Canonical: https://richard-brooks.com/ai-news/2026-11-06/

## Anthropic signs its first paid news licence, with AP, for Claude election data

Business. Adweek reports Claude showed attributed AP results on election night. Terms were not disclosed and neither side confirmed. A shift for a company that relied on fair use, and a sign that real-time answers need licensed news.

Source: Adweek, https://www.adweek.com/media/anthropic-licensing-deal-ap-election/

## Baidu releases ERNIE-5.5-Flash-Base 280B open weights

Models. The 280B MoE base model, 14B active per token, is on Hugging Face for adaptation and agent research, with strong multilingual and code scores. Check the licence before any EU deployment.

Source: Hugging Face / Baidu, https://huggingface.co/baidu/ERNIE-5.5-Flash-Base

## Cat Wu, Claude Code product lead, joins OpenAI Core Products

Business. She will lead product management for OpenAI core products after building Claude Code at Anthropic. The Codex versus Claude Code race intensifies weeks before Anthropic's planned IPO.

Source: @_catwu, https://x.com/_catwu/status/2118137612577968402

## Cognition launches SWE-2 Flash coding model in Devin

Agents. The smaller sibling of SWE-2 is in Devin Desktop and CLI at one-fifth the price and claimed three times the speed for routine engineering. Weights stay gated for a planned partner programme.

Source: Cognition, https://cognition.com/blog/swe-2-flash

## Google adds Voice Remixing to Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS, editing voices by prompt

Language. Developers can take any of 2,000+ preset voices and change pitch, pace, timbre or accent with a plain instruction, then save it as a new voice. Brand and localisation teams can adapt one voice for several markets without new recordings.

Source: Google (@Google on X), https://x.com/Google/status/2118027058794148099

## Grok Bot can now make phone calls to businesses for its users

Communication. The assistant calls on the user's behalf, shows a live transcript and asks the user for input mid-call. Customer service lines should expect more callers that are AI agents, starting with eligible US accounts.

Source: Grok Bot (@bot on X), https://x.com/bot/status/2118043939592942052

## Meta buys Conductor, maker of an app for running coding agents in parallel

Agents. Conductor Cloud goes read-only on 13 Nov and shuts on 20 Nov, when data deletion starts, so users need to export now. Follows the 4 Nov OpenAI Pierre deal, as labs buy the tools developers use.

Source: Conductor, https://www.conductor.build/announcement

## OpenAI pipeline finds 948 Linux root exploits for $1.2m in API costs

Security. Agents found, reproduced, exploited and drafted patches for kernel flaws in one run, using an unreleased cyber model. OpenAI says any low-privilege access to an unpatched system should now be treated as root access, so patching speed matters more.

Source: OpenAI, https://openai.com/index/a-thousand-fewer-paths-to-root/

## OpenAI releases Images 2.6 with animated GIFs in ChatGPT, Codex and the API

Tools. Generation is 50% faster and the API adds SVG export and markup edits. Marketing teams on any ChatGPT tier can make looping product and mascot animations without a designer.

Source: OpenAI, https://openai.com/index/introducing-images-2-6/