AI

PayPal has announced that it plans to adopt the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) to expand payments and shopping inside ChatGPT. The move will let millions of ChatGPT users pay with PayPal directly in conversations, while merchants gain access to OpenAI Instant Checkout and PayPal’s global payment network.

The integration links PayPal’s vast base of merchants with OpenAI’s emerging commerce platform. It also makes PayPal the first major payments company to implement ACP, a new framework designed to let AI systems handle shopping and checkout tasks on behalf of users.

Trellix has published its latest CyberThreat Report: October 2025, highlighting a clear rise in the use of AI-powered tools and malware by cybercriminals.

Drawing on global threat intelligence gathered between April and September 2025, the report explores how automation, geopolitics, and AI are reshaping modern attack methods.

You may have tried to forget Clippy, but Microsoft is still hanging doggedly on to the idea of character-based assistants. Having thrown everything at its AI assistant Copilot, the company is now giving it a friendly face – Mico.

As part of what it refers to as the Copilot Fall Release, Microsoft is trying to soften its artificial intelligence powered digital assistant and, by extension, people’s attitudes to it. This is the company moving towards making AI more personal, useful, and human-centered, and there is a lot of attention given to relationship.

While Google Earth isn’t as massively popular as it once was, it now has some new AI capabilities that could give it fresh purpose. The platform lets users ask questions about the planet and get answers in seconds, using natural language to uncover patterns once buried in data.

The new tools combine satellite imagery, environmental models and Google Gemini’s reasoning to help people better understand what’s happening on the planet we call home.

In an age of fragmented news, deepfakes present a real problem. YouTube is taking action to stop AI-generated videos being used to impersonate people.

The company has revealed details of its new Likeness Detection tool. For now, YouTube is targeting creators, giving them access to the tool – not only because creators are among those likely to be deepfaked, but also because the company will be hoping to be able to use their influence to hype up Likeness Detection.

Opera is expanding its recently launched AI browser with a new Deep Research Agent to perform more complex research and analysis directly in the software.

The new agent, called ODRA, joins Opera Neon’s growing lineup of built-in AI systems and is part of the Norwegian browser maker’s plan to make agentic browsing more practical for everyday use.

Not content with giving users new control over sponsored results in its search engine, Google has also started the rollout of its AI visual model – known as Nano Banana – into Search.

Accessible from Google Lens and AI Mode, Nano Banana provides easy access to artificial intelligence powered image editing and transformation. We are not talking about boring “remove the background from this photo” type stuff (although this is possible), but rather more creative ideas.

Google has introduced two AI-powered features to help users stay connected with new and trending content across the web. The updates, available in Google Search and Discover, focus on giving people quick ways to explore stories, sports updates, and links from a wide range of sources.

The first feature expands Discover’s ability to show timely and relevant topics. Users will now see short previews that summarize trending subjects related to their interests that can be expanded to reveal more information and links.

OpenAI’s text-to-video app Sora has reached over one million downloads in less than five days, according to Sora boss Bill Peebles on X.

Peebles said the milestone came faster than ChatGPT’s initial launch, despite Sora’s invite-only rollout and it currently only being available in North America.

Microsoft’s development of Copilot on Windows 11 continues, and the company has just released significant updates to Insiders which are likely to win it more fans. New connection cap abilities mean that it is possible to use Copilot in conjunction with various online services including Google Calendar and Outlook.

More than this, however, Microsoft has also added new document creation capabilities. Users are now able to quickly create a variety of documents from within their Copilot sessions, including Word, Excel, and PDF.

Two AI companion apps leaked millions of private conversations, more than 600,000 images and videos, and detailed usage data from over 400,000 users.

The exposed information included in-app transactions showing that some users spent thousands of dollars on their virtual partners, raising serious questions about data privacy in AI relationship platforms.

Invideo has become the first platform to offer unrestricted global access to Sora 2, OpenAI’s next-generation AI video model for generating cinematic, photorealistic footage from text prompts.

The partnership with OpenAI removes previous barriers such as invite codes, waitlists, VPNs, and 10-second limits, making next-generation generative video creation available to everyone. If you’ve ever wanted to see what your dog battling Godzilla at the end of the world might look like, now you can find out.

Navigation tools such as Waze and Google Maps not only help you find a route from A to B, but also provide information about road closure, vehicle breakdowns, police in the area, and hazards on the road. With this last item being reliant on reports from road users, Waze has been investigating ways to make do so easier.

When you spot a hazard on the road and want to warn others, you have had to wait until you are able to stop to do so (safely, at least). Now Waze is rolling out a feature called Conversational Reporting which lets you use your voice – and a dash of AI – to let other road users know about what you have spotted.

Thanks to what will seem like a somewhat unlikely pairing to many, it is now possible to access Spotify in ChatGPT. With the two services having partnered, you can now use tracks and podcasts to achieve things with the AI chat bot.

There are various possibilities here – from asking ChatGPT to create new playlists based on the tracks you like to receive recommendations about podcasts you may enjoy. While the ability to use Spotify in conjunction with ChatGPT is free, there are more options available to Spotify Premium subscribers.

Advertising is how Meta makes money, hence Facebook users being bombarded with ads and “recommended content”. Starting today you may receive a notification that things are about to change. Unsurprisingly, they are not changing for the better.

Meta says that it is going to “start personalizing content and ad recommendations on our platforms based on people’s interactions with our generative AI features”. What does this mean? Targeted ads, essentially.