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Microsoft opens preorders for the $5,999 Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, with 128GB of unified memory to run local models with 120B+ parameters, shipping in November (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge)

Anthropic integrates its Cyber Verification Program and Project Glasswing into a new, expanded version of CVP, with three tiers and access to its latest models (Anthropic)

Meta, Walmart, Stripe, and others publish the Personal Agent Protocol to standardize and secure interactions between AI bots and businesses (Kate Rooney/CNBC)

Flai, which makes AI tools for car dealerships to manage phone calls, emails, and texts, raised a $27M Series A led by Base10 Partners (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)

Sources: Meta and Microsoft are working to cut their employees' use of Claude; Meta employees using Claude Code have dropped to ~30K from ~60K earlier this year (The Information)

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon and representatives from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and Meta testified at a New York City Council hearing on AI safety (Bloomberg)

Sources: Schneider Electric is in advanced talks to buy US engineering software firm PTC for ~$20B, its largest acquisition; a deal could come as soon as Monday (Financial Times)

Sources: Apple and Google pitch state bills with self-attested age checks and no private lawsuits; Meta backs ones making app stores, not platforms, verify ages (Owen Dahlkamp/Politico)

In an X reply, Elon Musk says that SpaceX will rename its AI unit SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, following Trump's push to replace "artificial" intelligence with "super" (Chandni Shah/Reuters)

Sources: AI czar Jay Clayton to chair the WH's AI task force, called "Super Intelligence Force", to pen a report on AI's risks and opportunities within 120 days (Alex Leary/Wall Street Journal)

NYT Connections hints and answers for Sunday, October 4 (game #1211)