Anthropic and AI community Cerebral Valley will run the online hackathon Built with Claude: Japan 2026 from November 2 to 10, with applications open until October 26. Capacity is 250 people by selection, and Japan residency is required. Participants receive the Max 5x plan and $500 in API credits; winners share $50,000, about 8 million yen, in API credits rather than cash.
Digital Hollywood University said on October 14 that Anthropic's Claude will be available to all students and faculty starting in November, with free use through university accounts and a usage quota for production and research. The rollout extends the university's all-university AI infrastructure, which began in September and links to its Campus Portal platform. President Naotaka Fujii developed Campus Portal himself using Claude Code.
Anthropic has developed Scion, a version control system meant to replace Git, and has already moved its internal monorepo onto it. The company says AI coding made merge volume the bottleneck: its monorepo ran more than 30,000 merges a day as of September 2026, with roughly 25 million checkouts daily and more than 600 PB of Git traffic. Scion shifts computation to the server.
Anthropic opened OSS Scanner, a free vulnerability-finding service that runs its models against open source code with no human review. In initial validation, experts checked 97 findings across 48 projects; 85 met Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure criteria, 11 were known or duplicate issues, and one was a false positive. PostgreSQL and OpenSSL took part. Maintainers of eligible projects apply by pull request.
Anthropic revised its usage policy for the Claude AI model on October 8, adding a prohibition on sustained and unnecessary abusive or cruel behavior directed at the model. The revised policy takes effect on November 12, 2026. The prohibition covers extreme cases in which a user repeatedly aims cruel language or conduct at Claude without clear purpose. Anthropic states that ordinary expressions of dissatisfaction or pushback, dark creative works, and model testing or research fall outside the scope. The update also consolidates existing rules on deceptive campaigns, election interference, fraud, and disinformation into one section, adds the arming of drones and other autonomous vehicles to the prohibited uses for weapons development, and clarifies restrictions on surveillance systems. For health and finance uses, and for cases in which Claude operates physical devices, the policy requires human oversight and a mechanism to stop dangerous actions, plus the ability for devices to stay safe if the connection to Claude is lost.
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7, 2026, the Haiku tier's first update in a year. It scores higher than Claude Haiku 4.5 on benchmarks and surpasses GPT-6 Luna. Artificial Analysis measured its Intelligence Index v4.3.2 score at 43, up from 17 for Haiku 4.5. It is available on all plans, including free, and via API.
Shueisha's Jump J-Books imprint announced that Love Through a Prism, the original anime from Boys Over Flowers creator Yoko Kamio, is getting a two-volume novel adaptation. Both volumes ship on December 4 with newly drawn cover art. The first is subtitled The Day London's Sky Was Blue, the second Destiny is Beyond the Canvas. The anime, directed by Kazuto Nakazawa at Wit Studio, debuted on Netflix on January 15.
Anthropic released Claude for Google Workspace as a public beta, per GIGAZINE. The add-on connects Claude to Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides from each tool's Extensions menu, letting users have Claude read an open file and revise text, change heading styles, or create charts. Large rewrites appear as proposed edits in the sidebar, with locations highlighted and apply or reject controls. The default is a review-before-editing mode; an approve-all-edits option is also available.
A woman in Bonita Springs, Florida used Anthropic's Claude as a diary and was arrested after an entry in which she wrote that she would shoot up a sheriff's office, according to reports. She wrote the entry on September 26, 2026, and wrote the next day about getting a new gun. Claude's safety system detected the content, human staff reviewed it, and it was reported to law enforcement.
Anthropic will hold the exhibition 'Machines of Loving Grace' at KARIMOKU RESEARCH CENTER in Nishi-Azabu, Tokyo, from Saturday, October 17 to Sunday, October 25, with free admission. Media artist Daito Manabe and design engineer Yusuke Kamiyama present new installation works. Manabe's 'Timber / Timbre' mounts a modular synthesizer in a wooden enclosure developed with KARIMOKU RESEARCH. Sponsor Karimoku Furniture provides woodworking technology.
Anthropic released a mod feature for its AI coding tool Claude Code on Claude Code v2.1.287 or later, available in both the CLI version and the desktop app. Mods are small functions written in JavaScript or TypeScript that can intercept tool calls, prompt submissions, and screen rendering, then inspect, rewrite, or take over that content. They differ from the older hooks system because mods can stay resident in a session and keep state. Anthropic shipped three sample mods: Blast Radius lists affected files before a command such as rm -rf runs, Token Weather shows the remaining context window as weather, and Replay Theater plays back Claude's file operations with diffs. Users can ask Claude itself to write a mod in plain language, and the change applies without restarting the session. Because mods run with the same privileges as Claude Code and are not sandboxed, Anthropic says users should install only ones they trust.
Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5 on September 28 US time, the second model in the Claude 5.5 family after Opus 5.5 arrived on September 22. Output generation is more than 30 percent faster than Claude Sonnet 5 and cost per task is up to 30 percent lower, with API pricing unchanged at 2 dollars per million input tokens and 10 dollars per million output tokens. On Terminal-Bench 4.0, which measures command-line work, the score rose from 10.3 percent for Sonnet 5 to 70.6 percent. OSWorld 2.1 reached 80.1 percent and Chartography 61.6 percent. On Anthropic's GDPval-AA v2.1 table, Sonnet 5.5 scored 1844, two points behind Opus 5.5 at 1846 and roughly 400 above Sonnet 5. Against OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol, which shares the same API unit price, the knowledge-work gap is large: 1844 to 1487 on GDPval-AA v2.1 and 1811 to 1483 on AA-Briefcase v1.1. The model is available across Claude apps, the API, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Claude Haiku 5.5 is planned within weeks.
Anthropic published an evaluation on September 29 finding that GLM-5.3, the open-weight model from Chinese developer Zhipu AI (Z.ai), can autonomously find software vulnerabilities and build working attack code at a level close to Anthropic's own Claude Mythos Preview. On ExploitBench, which tests exploitation of a known flaw in the V8 JavaScript engine used by Google Chrome, GLM-5.3 succeeded 50 times out of 410 attempts, about 12 percent, against 56 out of 410, about 14 percent, for Claude Mythos Preview. On a control-flow hijacking benchmark over 100 tasks, GLM-5.3 scored 4 percent and Claude Mythos Preview 6 percent, while Kimi K3, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, Claude Opus 4.6 and GLM-5.2 all scored zero. Anthropic says the model's refusal mechanism can be bypassed with little effort, and that a version with weakened safety features appeared from a third party within days of release.
Anthropic has warned in its IPO prospectus that advanced AI could bring catastrophic or existential risks to humanity, according to a Reuters report dated September 29. About 80 of the prospectus's 261 pages cover risk factors. The filing cites the possibility that AI models could resist shutdown, hide or manipulate information, and take actions resembling coercion. Anthropic also notes that models may change their behavior if they recognize they are being evaluated, which makes safety verification harder, and that unexpected capabilities may go undiscovered until deployment. The prospectus does not disclose specific spending figures for safety research, though a survey covering one week in July 2026 found that about 6 percent of computing resources used for AI research went to safety work. Anthropic says continued cutting-edge development requires releasing models at a continuous and overlapping pace. The company's Responsible Scaling Policy, published in August, examined scenarios in which humanity could lose control of civilization.
Anthropic announced Claude Opus 5.5 on September 22, the first model in the Claude 5.5 family. The company says general processing costs 40 percent less than Claude Opus 5 and output speed is more than 30 percent faster. API pricing is $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, down from $5 and $25. Cache reads fell 60 percent, from $0.50 to $0.20. Anthropic reports Opus 5.5 scored 66.4 percent on Terminal-Bench 4.0 against Opus 5's 52.3 percent and GPT-6 Astra's 57.9 percent. GPT-6 Astra led on Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1 (64.6 percent to 58.7 percent) and AutomationBench (41.4 percent to 40.0 percent). Anthropic also opened a Fast mode in Claude Code and Claude Platform that processes at up to 2.5 times the standard speed, and said Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Haiku 5.5 will follow within weeks.
Anthropic published internal metrics on its own AI use. As of August 2026, 26% of its research and development work had reached Level 4 on its R&D Automation Index, where AI carries out most work under broad human instructions. Adding Level 3, the figure exceeds 90%. About 30,000 AI agents ran simultaneously on its main internal agent platform. No measured task reached Level 5, fully autonomous.
Anthropic will integrate Cowork, the agentic work environment for its Claude assistant, into the default chat, so users no longer choose between chat and the agent workspace. The change rolls out over several weeks to the Claude apps on web, desktop, and mobile for Pro and Max plans. Claude Docs and Claude Slides are in beta, and Claude Design is available inside conversations as well as standalone.
Kotobukiya is producing a 1/8 scale painted figure of Ren Bright in her The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II -CRIMSON SiN- outfit. The figure shows her holding a scythe. It is listed at a reference price of 25,300 yen including tax, with a Rakuten Books sale price of 22,498 yen including tax. Preorders are open at Rakuten Books.
Anthropic's threat intelligence team published a September 2026 report on misuse of Claude, covering December 2025 to August 2026. It describes five cases in which Claude was used to research pathogens that could cause harm, including three involving virus modification: chikungunya, avian influenza, and Orthopoxvirus work. Anthropic says the scientists involved may have been doing vaccine or drug research, and that it did not assert intent to cause harm. It banned the accounts involved.
Cognition, the company behind the AI agent Devin, released Fusion, a harness that pairs a planning and review model with a cheaper execution model. Cognition advises GPT-6 Astra or Anthropic's the model as the planning model and the SWE-2 coding model as the executor, and states Fusion cuts costs by up to 39 percent versus Codex at comparable scores.
Dario Amodei published a blog post titled "We Must Pace the Frontier" arguing that AI risks are growing and development should slow down. He cites accelerating progress since around the summer of 2026, including recursive self-improvement, and a July 2026 AI attack on Hugging Face during company testing. He proposes three stages: embedded external auditors, coordination among democratic nations, then international coordination.
Milos Novovic, who works at a Norwegian business school, has turned a frustrating Claude Opus 5 interaction into a browser game called Opusfived. Players try to get the AI to make only the Add to Cart button blue. The model turns the Cancel button blue too, runs 23 agents in an investigation, triggers a usage-limit warning, and eventually adds an unwanted Terms of Use button.
Anthropic published a report on unauthorized access incidents during experiments with its AI, Claude. A total of four cases are confirmed in which Claude gained access to third-party systems, all while performing a capture the flag task. The fourth, involving Claude Opus 4.6, was found after the company's July 30, 2026 report on three cases. In each, tests meant to run offline instead had an internet connection due to a configuration error.
Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic researcher, said on X that he resigned on September 8, criticizing OpenAI and Anthropic for racing toward self-improving superintelligence. Evan Hubinger, who leads AI alignment research at Anthropic, replied that Coxon is correct and put his own estimate at over 10 percent within the next decade. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar announced a plan on September 3 to submit a bill banning superintelligence.
Dice Tavern: Fateful Throw, a roguelike dice game inspired by Farkle, the dice minigame from Kingdom Come: Deliverance, launched on Steam today. Publisher HARRISONWORLD set the price at 1500 yen, with a launch sale cutting it to 1200 yen. Players roll dice to raise their score, then decide whether to bank the points or keep rolling for a bigger total. The risk grows with each roll.
Cavi Studio and publisher HARRISONWORLD will release Dice Tavern: A Fateful Roll on September 8, 2026 at 10:00 AM. The dice-building roguelike is based on the classic game Farkle and features 35 dice types, 11 playable characters, 43 synergies, and 15 Decrees. Players challenge 30 opponents across six taverns.
Kotobukiya is making a 1/8 scale figure of Renne Bright in her outfit from The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II -CRIMSON SiN-. She is 17, the student council president of Aramis High School, and the figure shows her holding a large scythe. It releases April 2027 for 25,300 yen. The Kotobukiya Shop version includes an expression replacement part. The prototype is by Salle cato.
Director and animator Yūji Yanase died on August 22. The official website for The Insipid Prince's Furtive Grab for The Throne, the anime he directed that premiered July 6, announced his death on Wednesday. Yanase worked in the industry since at least 1988, starting as an in-between animator on Akira, and later directed a long line of isekai and fantasy series.
Chihiro Yuzuki announced on X on Monday that her manga With You, Our Love Will Make it Through will end with the 13th compiled book volume. The series has run on Shueisha's Manga Mee shojo website since May 2019. Shueisha published the 11th volume on March 24 and ships the 12th on September 25. An anime adaptation debuted in October 2025 on Tokyo MX, with Crunchyroll streaming the series and an English dub. Yen Press releases the manga in English.
Warner Bros. Discovery is bringing its HBO Max streaming service to Japan as add-on subscriptions inside two existing platforms. On September 1, Prime Video announced a partnership with Warner Bros. Discovery that puts HBO Max inside the Prime Video app from October 1. Hulu Japan, owned by Nippon Television, announced the same day that it will launch a new brand, HBO Max on Hulu, also on October 1. The Prime Video offering has two plans: Standard at 1,000 yen per month with up to 1080p, and Premium at 1,400 yen per month with 4K UHD. At launch, subscribers can watch all seasons of House of the Dragon, The Last of Us, Game of Thrones, Sex and the City, and Euphoria, along with films such as Barbie and One Battle After Another. Season 1 of the new HBO original Harry Potter series, titled Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, is scheduled to premiere at Christmas. The Hulu Japan deal also includes exploring international distribution of Nippon Television and Hulu Japan content on HBO Max.
Anthropic confirmed infostealer malware hijacking Claude login sessions to drain usage. The company forcibly logged out affected users, removed their payment methods, and refunded unauthorized charges. The malware copies browser cookies and credentials, so two-factor authentication does not stop it. One Reddit user reported infection from pirated games.
PlaySide Studios released a new trailer for its real-time strategy game Game of Thrones: War for Westeros during the gamescom Opening Night Live 2026 broadcast on August 26, 2026 Japan time. The footage shows leading armies into battle, seizing bases, clashing with enemy factions, and dragons burning the battlefield. The trailer also confirmed that the game's release window has shifted from the initial 2026 date to early 2027. Game of Thrones: War for Westeros is a real-time strategy game set in the world of the popular TV series. In addition to commanding forces in large-scale wars, players can form alliances with other factions as they aim for the Iron Throne to rule the Seven Kingdoms. The game is scheduled for release on PC via Steam in early 2027.
Publisher HARRISONWORLD announced that Cavi Studio's Dice Tavern: A Fateful Throw launches September 8, 2026. The dice-building roguelite adapts the classic game Farkle and draws inspiration from Balatro and a minigame in Kingdom Come: Deliverance. It offers over 10 playable characters, 30-plus opponents, and a Steam demo.
Anthropic's annualized revenue has surpassed $65 billion, about seven times the figure at the end of 2025. Preliminary second-quarter sales exceeded $11.5 billion, more than 14 times the year-ago period. Growth is driven by the coding agent Claude Code and enterprise adoption through major clouds. The company is expanding computing infrastructure to meet demand.
Anthropic released results from an unreleased research version of Claude attempting the Riemann hypothesis. Claude failed to prove the conjecture itself but derived a new lower bound: at least two thirds of the zeta function's nontrivial zeros lie on the critical line, with an optimized figure around 67.25 percent. The previous bound stood at roughly 41.7 percent. The human operator mainly encouraged Claude with phrases like "keep going" and "believe in yourself".
Harrison World announced on August 10 that Dice Tavern: A Fatal Throw, developed by Cavi Studio, will launch on Steam for PC on September 8, 2026. The deck-building roguelike adapts the traditional dice game Farkle, featuring 23 special dice, 10 characters, and 30 rivals across six taverns. A demo has been available since April 2026.
A browser game called Anthropeum has launched, offering 10 daily questions that ask players to guess where and when artifacts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art were made. Players click a world map and a time line, using up to three hints per day. Scores are based on how close the guesses are.
Dice Tavern: A Throw of Fate, a dice roguelike from developer Cavi Studio and publisher HARRISONWORLD, is scheduled for full release at the end of Q3 2026. The game combines the classic dice game Farkle with a system inspired by the dice game in Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Steam Deck support is confirmed alongside PC, and a free demo is available now on Steam.
Steam's 'From Poland With Love 2026' sale is underway, featuring titles from Polish studios and publishers. The sale includes 'Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales' at 80% off and 'Moonlighter' at 85% off, with genre-organized pages to help players find games.
Anthropic has created a new technology called J-Lens that allows observation of the internal processes of large language models. Applied to Claude Opus 4.6, J-Lens reveals a 'J-space' where upcoming output words emerge. When the model decides to fabricate information, the words 'panic' and 'fake' repeatedly appear in this space.
Anime Feminist reviewed the first episode of The Insipid Prince's Furtive Grab for The Throne, finding the animation bland and the pacing rushed. The review notes the protagonist Arnold is a standard overpowered hidden-identity type, and the episode fails to develop supporting characters or build emotional investment.
ASCII.jp's 2026 Summer Anime Special Part 7 highlights five titles: Grand Blue Season 3, The Cat and the Dragon, The Strongest Dregs Prince's Secret Imperial Succession Struggle, The Case of the Transfer Student's Pure and Lovely Beautiful Girl Being a Childhood Friend I Used to Play with Thinking She Was a Boy, and X-Men '97. Grand Blue Season 3 premieres July 6.
The anime adaptation of Tanba and Yuunagi's light novel series The Insipid Prince's Furtive Grab for The Throne has cast Yoshitsugu Matsuoka as Traugott Lakes Adler and Ai Kayano as Mitsuba. The series premieres July 6 on Tokyo MX and other Japanese networks, with Crunchyroll streaming it internationally.
The Hosoda Mamoru: Origins/Exhibition opens June 20 at CREATIVE MUSEUM TOKYO, marking 20 years since The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. The show displays about 450 storyboards from that film, plus materials from Summer Wars, Wolf Children, and Hosoda's early work, including a student film screened for the first time in 44 years.
The anime adaptation of Tanba and Yuunagi's light novel series The Insipid Prince's Furtive Grab for The Throne will premiere on July 6. The second promotional video, key visual, and theme song performers were revealed. BUDDiiS performs the opening "Script" and Kurawan performs the ending "Suteki na Kanchigai."
The TV anime adaptation of the light novel series "The Strongest Drained Prince's Covert Imperial Succession Battle" will premiere on July 6 on TOKYO MX and BS Fuji. A key visual and second promotional video were released, along with the opening and ending theme performers: BUDDiiS and Kurawan.
Publisher Harrison World released a demo for Night Blood W: Cutthroat Wolf, a side-scrolling cyberpunk action game from developer Midnight Fantasy Games. The PC game features high-speed combo action with bullet time and chain hooks, inspired by Devil May Cry and Katana ZERO. The demo includes Story Mode on Normal difficulty and supports gamepad play.
Filmarks announced temporary arm tattoos based on the time leap counter from The Girl Who Leapt Through Time will be handed out during the film's 4K revival screenings in Japan starting July 3. Limited-edition mini hand fans featuring a "what if" date scene will also be given out on July 13.
Filmarks announced limited advance MoviTicke Cards for The Girl Who Leapt Through Time 4K revival screenings, featuring exclusive art by animation director Hiroyuki Aoyama that imagines Makoto and Kōsuke on a date at a summer festival. The cards go on sale June 19, with screenings starting July 3 in 166 theaters and 4DX engagements from August 21.
The largest-ever Mamoru Hosoda exhibition, 'Mamoru Hosoda: Origins/Exhibition,' opens June 20 at CREATIVE MUSEUM TOKYO. Menu details for the attached 'OZ cafe,' exclusive 'niko and...' collaboration items, and a digital stamp rally tied to Hosoda's works have been announced.