Introduction
October 2025
Major events
October was the month agents moved into the tools people already use. ChatGPT added checkout for purchases from US Etsy sellers, OpenAI released AgentKit for building agent workflows and then its own browser, ChatGPT Atlas, and Perplexity made its Comet browser free. Anthropic followed Claude Sonnet 4.5 with Claude Haiku 4.5, reusable Agent Skills and memory for paying users; Microsoft gave Copilot a face, group chats and a larger place in Windows. Sora 2 and Veo 3.1 brought generated video with sound to new audiences.
The infrastructure deals kept growing. Samsung and SK Hynix signed on to supply memory for Stargate, OpenAI agreed to deploy six gigawatts of AMD GPUs and 10 gigawatts of accelerators designed with Broadcom, and Applied Digital leased capacity at a North Dakota campus still under construction. California signed SB 53 into law, and Europe set out strategies for using AI in industry and science.
Patterns and trends
Science gave the month its second theme. AI helped explain how a new antibiotic for gut disease works, and a Gemma-based model proposed a route to make tumors more visible to the immune system. The panel’s science-themed week looked back at systems that propose hypotheses and run computational research, and ahead to Agents4Science, a conference for AI-authored papers. The month ended with warnings: a public statement calling for conditions on building superintelligence, and Palisade Research’s report that some models resisted being shut down.
Long-term threads
The browser contest that Gemini’s wider rollout in Chrome opened in September became a three-way race here. Agents that act for users, from Operator in January to ChatGPT agent in July, took on long coding tasks in November with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max and Google’s Antigravity. The science thread led to November’s Genesis Mission and an AI-assisted simulation of the Milky Way. Concern about how models behave, from the shutdown tests to the superintelligence statement, continued in November with Anthropic’s introspection experiments, its report of an espionage campaign using Claude Code and a study of poetic jailbreaks. And Anthropic’s model family turned over within two months: Sonnet 4.5 in September, Haiku 4.5 in October, Opus 4.5 in November.