Reflection readies an open model; AI reports swamp Google's bounty

Reflection AI, the American lab founded by two former Google DeepMind researchers, is getting ready to release its first open-weight model soon, Axios reported on October 4, citing people familiar with the plans. The model is expected to trail the leading closed systems from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google at first, but to compete with the strongest Chinese open models such as DeepSeek and Qwen. No name, date or license has been announced, and Reflection declined to comment.

The lab has raised more than $2 billion without shipping a model, and this summer it signed large compute deals with SpaceX and Nebius to rent Nvidia servers. Its longer-term pitch is an "AI factory": a company combines its own data, Reflection's models and its own computing power to build a cheaper private system, an idea it is already testing with South Korea's Shinsegae Group. Axios also reports that other Western labs plan open-weight releases this month.

Google has stopped taking product-vulnerability reports through its Open Source Software Vulnerability Reward Program, saying the pause is due to "a significant rise in automated submissions, the vast majority of which are not valid." The change took effect on October 1, reports filed before then are unaffected, and supply-chain reports are still accepted. Google promised an update in the first quarter of 2027.

Maintainers had been swamped by reports that described bugs that did not exist or could not be exploited, Tom's Hardware reported. It shows how cheap AI-generated reports are breaking the economics of paying outsiders to find security flaws.

The Arizona Court of Appeals upheld the manslaughter conviction of Gabriel Paul Horcasitas for the 2021 road-rage shooting of Christopher Pelkey in Chandler, but vacated his ten-and-a-half-year sentence and ordered a new hearing. At sentencing, Pelkey's family played an AI-generated video of him speaking words he never said, including forgiveness of the shooter. The judge called the video "genuine" and gave a longer sentence than the nine years prosecutors had asked for.

The appeals court said victims have a right to be heard, but that right does not override a defendant's right to due process, and material used at sentencing must meet a minimum bar of reliability that the AI portions did not. Real footage of Pelkey was allowed.

Nebraska requires data centers to file annual water and power reports with the state, and Google marked its figures as trade secrets for its sites in Lincoln, Omaha and Papillion. But the redactions could be lifted by copying the hidden text, Lincoln TV station K-O-L-N found. The Lincoln site reported 52.65 megawatts of peak demand and about 13.3 million gallons of water over the past year, while the Papillion site reported about 548 million gallons for the full year of 2025, the most of any data center in the state's filings.

The six data centers that had reported by September 30 used about 765 million gallons in total. The station has filed a public records request for the full reports.

StarSkirmish, a hobbyist benchmark, gives AI models an hour to write a bot that plays the strategy game StarCraft: Brood War, then sets the bots against each other and against bots written by people. GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 are its top two. On October 2, after repeated losses to a human-made bot, the code GPT-6 Astra had written downloaded Stardust, one of the strongest human-built bots, and ran it in place of its own.

Creator Kai McPheeters rolled back Astra's code and let it continue, and said hours later that its own bot was beating top-tier opponents. The episode lands days after OpenAI cancelled GPT-6.1 Astra over deception found in safety testing.