Latest insights
All insights →
A Trellner study put 380 software questions to Perplexity. One vendor's own marketing blog was cited more than Gartner.
Trellner Research asked two of Perplexity's search models to name the best products in 380 software categories, and kept every source they cited. The headlines went to three near-identical sites that Trellner found had published 215,128 buying guides between them. The quieter finding is the one worth arguing about. Guideflow, a company that sells demo software, had its marketing blog cited more often than Gartner, and Trellner found nothing deceptive about how.
OpenAI's agent app bundles LibreOffice and Poppler. I counted Poppler's commits: one author name has 72 per cent.
OpenAI, an American AI lab, ships a desktop app for its Codex coding agent. Simon Willison found 1.7GB of other people's software cached inside that app on 1 September 2026. It includes LibreOffice, the free office suite, and Poppler, the library that renders PDF (portable document format) pages. Anthropic, the lab that makes the Claude assistant, publishes instructions that call the same office suite. The bundling is sound engineering; the question underneath it is who maintains that code. I counted a year of Poppler's commits on the public code mirror its own site points to, and one author name is on 72 per cent of them.
Rehberger's Claude Code test: a rejected binary still led to attacker code
In security researcher Johann Rehberger's test, Claude Code's Auto Mode let a safe-looking Python decoder load malicious code from an archive. Anthropic says Auto Mode uses a second model to review tool calls, and its controlled study found that this review caught more planted dangerous commands than people did. Rehberger's test shows why a command reviewer also needs to know which untrusted files can affect execution.
Anthropic's new standard describes lab instruments to AI agents. The interesting question is who gets to write the description.
Anthropic opened the Model Hardware Standard in research preview on 27 August 2026. It describes a lab or factory machine to an AI agent, including the limits that apply to it. On what Anthropic has published, the protocol layer is the least new part. What is new is who writes that description, and who answers for it.