Google says Gemini 4 Carbon goes to cyber defenders first

Google DeepMind announced Gemini 4 Carbon Wednesday, calling it “our strongest model with state-of-the-art cybersecurity and long horizon capabilities.” Google says a subset of cyber defenders gets Carbon this week, followed by additional trusted partners through its Fairwind Program. Google says developers, businesses, and consumers get it “as soon as possible.” Google says Carbon ranks first on Artificial Analysis’s index at 59 and scores 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro, a vulnerability-finding test.

Microsoft reported $92.3 billion in revenue for the quarter ended September 30, up 19%. Microsoft reported $63.9 billion in Microsoft Cloud revenue, up 30%, while Azure grew 48%. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, called it “a fast start to our fiscal year.” Nadella says Copilot daily users grew nearly 50% quarter over quarter after its biggest update to date.

Replit, the app-building platform, released ViBench 2.0. Agents start with an empty project and build a whole product one feature at a time. Replit says the best models pass every check in only 49% to 65% of builds. Replit says GPT-6.1 Sol scored 65%, GPT-6 Astra 60%, and Claude Opus 5.5 49%, with Sol costing about $12 per build versus about $90 for Astra.

Mistral AI put a Responses API in public preview. Mistral says it returns the model’s answer, reasoning, and tool calls as separate items, while its docs say it uses the OpenAI Responses format. The Grok API now accepts guidelines for text requests. The Grok docs list nsfw, violence, and profanity, and say “the only behavior is decline.”

Vercel, the web hosting company, put Vercel CI in beta on all plans. It runs only tasks affected by a code change. Vercel says its own CI became 2 to 6 times faster from git push to passing, and nearly 8 million tasks have run across its repositories and the private beta. Vercel also added virtual models to AI Gateway, letting apps pick up configuration changes without code changes or redeploys.

Claude added ready-made artifacts to Claude for Legal for contract review, regulatory horizon scans, and cite checks. Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s CEO per his bio, says voice mode is rolling out to Pro and Max users on web and Mac. Simon Willison writes that October 2026 feels like an inflection point for vibe coding games, and says one project “convinced me that Opus 5.5 knows what ‘fun’ is.” Kimi, the assistant Moonshot AI builds, now works with Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Calendar.