Tech briefs

Thursday, October 22, 2026

Spoken brief

    Six stories from roughly the last day. Summaries only; follow the links for the full reporting.

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    Anthropic launches Claude Duet, a proactive work agent

    Anthropic opened a waitlisted research preview of Claude Duet, a standalone app on iOS, Android and claude.ai where Claude works as a proactive agent on its own cloud computer, sends a morning brief, and keeps working while you're away. It's built on Opus 5.5, connects to more than 6,000 connectors and plugins, and can buy things through Stripe's Link and Shopify's Shop Pay, but it asks before sending, paying, signing or deleting, and it won't trade securities or move money between accounts even with approval. It's starting with US Pro and Max subscribers and is aimed at work more than personal errands.

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    PHP2Shell headlines a rough day for internet security

    PHP shipped fixes on October 21 for two critical flaws, nicknamed PHP2Shell, that can let attackers take over web servers without logging in, and the NSA told organizations to patch right away or take systems offline until they can. The fixed versions are PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35. The same day, LiteLLM said its version 1.107.0 packages on PyPI and some Docker tags carried a credential stealer, and certificate authority eMudhra disclosed weak keys in eight intermediate certificates that browsers have since blocked.

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    Tesla starts Optimus production as profit falls 43%

    Tesla began early production of its Optimus humanoid robot on a Fremont line that used to build EVs, calling these its first production-quality robots, and Elon Musk said the ramp will be "bumpy" on the way to 20,000 a week by the end of 2027. Third-quarter net income fell 43% to $787 million on roughly flat revenue of about $28 billion, as spending on Optimus and AI climbed. The stock fell more than 3% after hours.

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    Meta creates a new stock class to keep Zuckerberg in California

    Meta will issue a new non-voting Class C stock in January 2027, effectively a two-for-one split, so it can raise money and pay employees without diluting Mark Zuckerberg's roughly 60.6% voting control. The deal followed Zuckerberg telling the board he was weighing a move out of California over Proposition 40, a one-time 5% tax on billionaires that's on the November 3 ballot. He can sell 20% of his new shares right away to cover a possible tax bill, and he committed to stay a resident wherever Meta is headquartered for eight years.

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    GitHub explains how it's scaling Git for the agent era

    Git traffic grew exponentially over the past year, and GitHub has been moving almost all of its repositories to Azure along the way. A new engineering post describes how per-reference quorums will bring over the rest, and how object storage lets reads scale independently of writes.

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    Physicists hold a single antimatter particle for months

    Northwestern University physicists captured a single positron, the antimatter twin of the electron, from radioactive decay, cooled it to nearly absolute zero, and held it in a near-perfect vacuum in a controlled quantum state for the first time. It behaved like an artificial atom with energy levels they could control and observe. The technique could allow the most precise test yet of the symmetry between electrons and positrons.