Yesterday in AI | 26 Oct 2026

Giving Bots an Allowance, The Sold-Out Cloud, and When Small AI Beats the Giants

Artificial intelligence got cheaper and sharper this week, then immediately started wandering into places, from online checkouts and handmade marketplaces to public campaigns and dermatology clinics, forcing everyone to decide who gets let through the door. This episode explores Chinese startup Moonshot unveiling Kimi K3.1 Pro, an open-weight challenger that rivals top American frontier models on real computer tasks while deliberately stripping hacking data from its training.

We examine Walmart launching "Agent Profiles" to give autonomous shopping bots their own accounts and spending limits, even as Amazon blocks outside bots and major banks warn about automated checkout fraud. We look at Etsy drawing a hard line against AI-generated listings and synthetic recipes, unpack how pervasive deepfakes and chatbot reliance are reshaping modern political campaigns, analyze Amazon CEO Andy Jassy revealing that AWS cloud capacity is already booked solid into 2027 despite a $220 billion build-out, and close with a London dermatologist's experiment showing a humble, narrow image classifier beating multi-billion-dollar frontier chatbots at spotting skin cancer.

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