ZeroSlop — October 15, 2026
Today: Nvidia, worth $5.5tn, donates $250m to UK for AI…; Tree Appreciator; Harmonic Security Raises $50 Million for Workforce AI…
12 stories worth knowing about today — AI breakthroughs, launches, and innovations making a difference.
1. Nvidia, worth $5.5tn, donates $250m to UK for AI safety research
The Guardian Tech
Pledge spanning five years from world’s most valuable firm comes as concerns about AI agents have risen The $5.5tn (£4.1tn) US chipmaker Nvidia is donating $250m worth of computing power to the UK to support AI safety research. The donation from the world’s most valuable company comes as the UK gove…
2. Tree Appreciator
Simon Willison
Tool: Tree Appreciator Another game experiment with Claude. This one used the default Claude iPhone app (chat mode, not Claude Code mode), where I prompted Claude Opus 5.5 Max with: Build a three js game called “Tree appreciator” - it shows you two algorithmically generated trees and the game mechan…
3. Harmonic Security Raises $50 Million for Workforce AI Protection
SecurityWeek
The cybersecurity startup plans to expand engineering and go-to-market teams in the US and UK. The post Harmonic Security Raises $50 Million for Workforce AI Protection appeared first on SecurityWeek ….
4. Zenzap raises $44M for its AI chat app that aims to replace WhatsApp in the workplace
TechCrunch AI
Zenzap is used by organizations including Starbucks and Taco Bell….
5. Scimplify raises $25M to challenge China’s grip on critical materials with AI
TechCrunch AI
Scimplify’s annualized revenue run rate has tripled to $200 million as it eyes U.S. expansion….
6. Tool and target: US law enforcement grapple with AI-enabled terrorism and anti-tech extremism
The Guardian Tech
From the FBI to local police departments, US authorities are increasingly warning of would-be terrorists using chatbots to plan attacks and anti-AI extremist threats In May 2025, a 25-year-old man detonated a car bomb outside a Palm Springs fertility clinic, killing himself and injuring four others….
7. Dutch Tax Authorities Cancel Microsoft 365 Cloud Rollout, Turn Toward Open Source
Slashdot
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The Netherlands’ Tax and Customs Administration has abandoned its planned Microsoft 365 public-cloud rollout. Why? The reasons were clear at the Open Source Summit Europe conference, where the Linux Foundation (LF) released the 2026 State of Open Sourc…
8. The Silent Failures in Agentic Data Science
arXiv CS.AI
arXiv:2610.14115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models have significantly lowered the barrier to writing code. Naturally, this has also led to the development of data science agents that promise automating the design and execution of data science from task formulation to model develo…
9. Should SLMs be in the Driver’s Seat? A Study of Local Models as Interpreters in Cloud-Written Agent Programs
arXiv CS.AI
arXiv:2610.14209v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The most accurate agents executing user-provided tasks are driven by large, cloud-hosted models, which solve them by reading the private data of the user. Agents powered by models small enough to run on edge devices keep that data local, but yield far…
10. llm-gemini 0.35
Simon Willison
Release: llm-gemini 0.35 I added support to llm-gemini for the new Gemini 4 Argon model, made available today via the Gemini API and for customers of their $100/month subscription plan. Here are the low, medium and high pelicans . As expected, they are all excellent: Gemini has a track record of pro…
11. Quoting Geoffrey Huntley
Simon Willison
If the agent isn’t using my diagnostics library, I could introspect and update AGENTS.md, but there’s still a delta, and it’ll drift. Instead, I write a pre-commit hook that checks the git diff for direct calls to observability modules that bypass my diagnostics module. Boom: fail the commit, inject…
12. Amp puts AI agents to work beyond code with OpenAI models
OpenAI News
See how Amp pushes the frontier of what agents can do with GPT-6 Astra, Ultrafast, GPT-Live-1, and Sign in with ChatGPT….