Gemini 4 Argon reaches paying users; Character.AI files for bankruptcy

Two weeks after unveiling Gemini 4 Argon for vetted cyber defenders only, Google has released its new frontier model to developers through the Gemini API and to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search. Agentic coding in Google Antigravity stays limited to the Ultra plan, and free users get nothing. The API launches at an introductory $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, a rate that runs through November 30 before doubling to $4 and $20. Google says that inside the company, Argon lifted agentic code submissions by more than 35 percent while cutting rollbacks by nearly a third. A monitor that can halt runs that go off course still ships with it.

Character.AI has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and put itself up for a court-supervised sale, listing assets and liabilities of between 50 million and 100 million dollars. Disney has offered $20 million for a non-exclusive, perpetual license to some of its technology, a reversal for a company that sent Character.AI a cease-and-desist letter in September 2025 over its Disney chatbots. Disney has since hired former Character.AI chief executive Karandeep Anand as its first chief technology officer. No one has yet bid for the platform itself, and the company says it will shut down if no buyer emerges before the sale closes in late November or early December. The filing comes days after Kentucky unsealed chats from its lawsuit against the company.

Federal prosecutors in San Francisco have charged Abdulrahman Alfozan, an OpenAI engineer since July 2025, with trying to intercept conversations after a recording device was found hidden behind a television in an executive meeting room on September 30. According to the complaint, he had asked an internal tool about meeting rooms and leadership calendars, and a chatbot account tied to his spouse was asked how to build a continuous audio recorder and encrypt its memory card. Security staff later found a second device in a bag holding his wallet. OpenAI says its own models helped identify the first device. The charges are allegations, and he faces up to five years in prison if convicted.

Apple opened preorders for HomeView, a 7-inch display and speaker that ships November 13 for $299. Its camera recognizes up to six household members and shows each one their own apps, messages and calendar, and it runs the new conversational Siri, which Apple says will start in English with usage limits. Requests are handled on the device's A18 chip or on Apple's Private Cloud Compute servers. With an iCloud Plus plan it can also recognize faces, pets and packages on compatible security cameras and describe recorded clips. It goes up against Amazon's Echo Show and Google's Nest displays.

SpaceX Super Intelligence is combining its paid products into a single plan called The X Subscription, which bundles Grok chat and its API, the Grok Bot agent, the Cursor coding editor and X Premium perks such as the verified checkmark. There are five tiers: a limited free plan, Plus at $8 a month, Premium at $30, Super at $100 and Ultra at $200, with usage caps rising at each step. The newest Grok models require Premium or above. Existing X Premium Plus subscribers can switch or keep their current plan, and the upgrade option is rolling out gradually.

Apps built by prompting in Google AI Studio can now be sent straight to a private Personal Library in the Play Store, installed on your own phone and shared with a small group of friends and family without a developer account. Google does not review these private apps. A path to publish them publicly, under the normal review rules, is due in the coming months. The update starts in the US and select other markets, alongside a broader Ask Play chatbot for finding apps and a Game Finder that recommends games from your play history.

American Express introduced an Intent Intelligence Framework that records and authenticates a customer's purchase instructions before an AI agent completes a transaction, then carries that record through everything that follows the purchase. It joins the agentic commerce toolkit Amex released in April, and the company says it hopes the approach becomes an industry standard. Amex says it has not yet seen a rise in disputes from agent purchases and is building the safeguard before volumes grow.