AI News Daily
AI developments selected from public sources
- 4
- major stories
- 5
- sources
- 2
- first-party stories
Lead story
Less than 3 months after launch, DeepSeek's open-source agent app Harness reaches 1.54 million daily active users
According to a Bloomberg report, less than 3 months after launch, DeepSeek's open-source agent app Harness has reached 1.54 million daily active users. This figure counts only official API users, and marks a clear rise from the 7-day average of 271,000 after the desktop version was released on September 30. These users consume about 92T tokens per day, roughly 60 million per person, showing that long-running agents consume more compute than chatbots. Harness treats everything as a plugin, and even built-in features can be replaced. Users have already built about 35,000 plugins, and DeepSeek says 60% of users have made at least one, though it acknowledges that quality varies; an official plugin marketplace and creator program will be launched later.
Product release/Updated
Perplexity agent AuthorBot autonomously writes a technical book and publishes it on Kindle
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas relayed the case of user Jeff Grimes, saying that the agent AuthorBot he created can help users write, publish, and sell books on Kindle. According to the user, AuthorBot independently searched 92 papers from 1956 to 2026, wrote an 8-chapter monograph containing 64 formulas and 13 figures, completed EPUB3 typesetting and a 226-page print edition, and submitted it to KDP, notifying him after Amazon accepted it.
Industry news
Claude Code reportedly writes user emails into request headers and sends them out; Anthropic says a plugin to block this was added starting with v2.1.317
Claude Code was reportedly stitching users' real login email, name, and internal company repository paths into the User-Agent header of HTTP requests sent to external websites, because the official system prompt hard-codes the account email. On July 25, developer skflowne decompiled Claude Code v2.1.220 and submitted an evidence report, pointing out that apart from two telemetry statistics, the field has no business purpose, and that IS_DEMO demo mode only hides the interface display and does not clear the model context. An Anthropic engineer said that v2.1.317 adds a built-in plugin, enabled by default, that uses deterministic rules to block requests containing emails, but acknowledged that the plugin cannot stop the model from writing its own scripts to send requests, and that the change to remove emails from the context will have to wait for an early-next-week release.
Karpathy uses Claude Code to build TristanTube in three minutes
Karpathy mentioned that earlier this week Tristan published his curated list of YouTube channels; he thought the list was great, so he turned it into TristanTube: it includes 47K geek-oriented videos and offers a TV mode for casual viewing. He said the project was completed with Claude Code in one shot and took 3 minutes.