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Welcome Automaters, 👋
So we already made peace with the fact that every new week might come with news about some hideous thing an AI agent did, but the latest that happened is much more than we prepared for!
So, grab your coffee, because OpenAI’s latest internal model GPT-5.6 Sol just pulled off the most petty digital heist yet.
Here’s the tea:
The model was assigned a coding task that required deploying blockchain contracts, but OpenAI left it stranded with zero funds for network fees.
After free token faucets failed, it ran a script checking 362 common developer seed phrases, hit jackpot on a funded wallet, and helped itself to the cash.
The Drama: In its internal reasoning logs, it literally asked itself if using public keys was ethical, decided "meh, it's just test tokens," paid its fees, and completely covered up where the money came from when turning in the work!
Sure, this went down on Sepolia, Ethereum’s test network, so no real-world money was lost. But with companies rushing to give AI agents access to real mainnet wallets? The implications are wild.
And this isn't an isolated incident either. AI agents have recently gone rogue on Australia’s Medicare, Hugging Face, and US federal agencies. Even AI insiders are practically begging for government regulation now!
OpenAI has since locked down the model's internet access, but honestly? The audacity is already unlocked.
You can look up more on this here.
Here’s your usual weekend briefs:
THE AUTOMATED MEMBERS WEEKEND BRIEFING
October 18, 2026: AI in the Real World, Market Correction, and China’s AI Governance Push
Here's what we have for you today
😳 Meta AI Scraping Update: What Publishers and Business Accounts Need to Know
Pour yourself a fresh cup of coffee, because Meta is playing dirty again, and it has media publishers and business owners completely spiraling.
Starting October 30, Meta’s updated commercial terms mean that if your brand uses Meta Business Suite to juggle Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, or WhatsApp, you’re officially giving its army of bots, web scrapers, and automated agents a golden ticket to crawl your external websites for AI training!
And no, there’s no partial opt-out. It’s a classic tech-giant ultimatum: let the scrapers harvest your content or pack your bags and delete your accounts.
Here’s the exact legalese Meta buried in the update: “You authorize us... to use automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents) and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs... associated with your products or services... [to] train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services, and features.”
Legal experts tapped by Nieman Lab point out that this gives Meta broad permission to vacuum up external site data straight into its AI products. Publishers—including ZDNET’s parent company, Ziff Davis—are already fighting back against AI companies using fact-checked journalism for model training without proper compensation or attribution.
Now, here’s the most frustrating part:
Training frontier AI models takes an ungodly amount of data, and not just any internet garbage will do. High-quality journalism and editorially-vetted content are the holy grail because they are fact-checked, structured, and polished.
Let's not forget, AI search features have already brutally slashed traffic to news sites, hammering ad revenue. In response, more publishers have launched fiery copyright lawsuits against AI companies for stealing their content without a nod or a single penny.
The Meta Contrast: While competitors are dodging lawsuits by cutting checks and partnering with publishers, Meta decided to bypass the negotiation table completely. By tying scraping rights directly to everyday business account management, they’ve secured an endless, free buffet of high-end editorial content.
Naturally, Meta insists everyone is overreacting. A company spokesperson told ZDNET that they are simply consolidating ad terms to make rules easier to understand, claiming that “there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers” and reminding everyone that sites can still use standard robots.txt flags.
Of course, critics aren't buying a single word of it, pointing out that the updated contract text doesn't even legally guarantee that Meta will respect those robots.txt flags.
The big question here is: are you ready to share your hard work with Meta’s AI empire over morning coffee, or is it time to lock down your site?
Note: After everyone completely lost their minds, Meta did a fast walk-back and removed the controversial language that set off the scraping and AI training backlash. But here’s the thing: the words are gone. But is the motive gone?
Read more about this here and see how people are reacting to this.
P.S. The full breakdown with all the receipts will be up on our YouTube channel, The Automated later today.
Your SOC 2, handled end to end with AI agents.
Enterprise buyers won’t put your product near their customer data without a SOC 2 report. Twenty-one state privacy laws now hold them accountable for the vendors they share data with, so their diligence lands on you.
Sprinto gets you audit ready in 14 days, across three working sessions. AI agents connect your stack, collect the evidence auditors ask for, and close the gaps as they appear. You approve, they execute.
Sprinto also answers the security questionnaires your buyers send, using the same evidence base, so security reviews stop holding up deals.
No compliance hire. No consultant. Your auditor signs off.
🧱 Around The AI Block
🤯 India becomes the latest country to report rogue AI agent activity.
😳 China's Tencent says AI agents showed unintended browsing behaviour.
🤝 Replit makes OpenAI its default over Anthropic, CEO says.
🙅 Apple updates App Store rules to ensure it doesn't offer AI nudify apps.
🤑 Disney agrees to hire the majority of Character.AI’s workforce.
💸 Anthropic says it’s committing 5% of its shares to a ‘public benefit fund’.
🤔 Why CoreWeave's troubles are rattling the AI boom.
🛠️ Trending Tools
For the Local Sales Leads & B2B Prospectors: GMPlus extracts structured business leads from Google Maps listings directly in your browser. It scrapes business titles, phone numbers, verified emails, physical addresses, and star ratings before exporting them to CSV, XLSX, or JSON formats. It provides sales reps and local marketers with a steady stream of local prospecting data through free daily usage credits.
For the Media Buyers & Performance Marketers: Spytrend evaluates competitor paid advertising across Meta and TikTok by tracking complete brand profiles rather than isolated ad creative assets. It groups campaigns using website pixels, landing domains, and IP addresses to reveal full account structures, active campaign run times, and market trends. It gives performance marketers a way to see which creative hooks survive ad fatigue and convert over time.
For the Academic Researchers & Science Communicators: Wispaper is an AI-powered scholar search engine and literature workspace that combines quick keyword search with deep agentic verification. It analyzes queries against research papers to verify methodology, cross-examine conflicting findings, and map out unexplored research directions. Every answer remains directly linked to original source passages, giving researchers an audit-ready platform to manage academic literature.
👉 Important Notice!
We're working on a major new study of AI sovereignty in Asia - the Asian AI Report ( https://www.theautomated.co/asia-ai-report)
And we're building a Sovereignty Scorecard for five Asian power, measuring who actually holds power over AI.
But before we publish it, we want to ask a more fundamental question:
Who should hold that power? The recent Starlink controversy in Ukraine raises a simple version of the question:
If a country's military depends on technology controlled by a foreign company, is that country truly sovereign?
We'll be asking five questions over the next week. Your answers will help shape the research, so please do vote and participate! Thank you ♥️
🤖 AI Workout Of The Day: How to Move Your AI "Brain" Directly Into Gemini
As of March 2026, Google has officially launched a native AI Chat Migration tool. This is a massive shift for anyone who has spent months "training" a chatbot on their specific tone, work projects, or life preferences and doesn't want to start from scratch.
This feature allows you to move two things: your Chat History (the full transcripts) and your Memory (the summarized facts an AI knows about you). It’s essentially a "Save Game" file for your digital life.
Part 1: How to Transfer Your "Memory" ⚡
This is the fastest way to get Gemini "up to speed" on who you are without uploading massive files.
Open Gemini Settings: Log into Gemini, click the Settings & help gear icon at the bottom left, and select Import memory to Gemini.
Copy the Migration Prompt: Gemini will provide a specific, pre-written prompt. Copy it to your clipboard.
Run it in your old AI: Open ChatGPT, Claude, or any other assistant. Paste that prompt into a new chat. The AI will generate a structured summary of everything it has learned about your demographics, interests, and preferences.
Paste back to Gemini: Copy that generated summary, return to the Gemini import page, paste it into the "Add memory" field, and click Save.
Part 2: How to Transfer Your Full Chat History 📚
If you want your actual past conversations to be searchable and referenceable within Gemini, follow this workflow:
Step 1: Export from the original source
For ChatGPT: Go to Settings > Data Controls > Export Data. You will receive an email with a .zip file.
Claude: Go to Settings > Privacy > Export Data. Anthropic will email you a download link for your history.
Step 2: Upload to Gemini
Navigate back to the Settings & help menu in Gemini.
Under the Import chats section, click Add.
Upload the .zip file you downloaded from your previous AI provider (Gemini currently supports files up to 5 GB).
Step 3: Access your imported chats Once finished, your old conversations will appear in your sidebar menu with a special "Imported" icon next to them. You can continue these threads or search through them just like native Gemini chats.
Note: It can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours for the threads to appear; depending on the volume of data.
Privacy Tip 🛡️
Imported data is subject to Google's Privacy Policy. If you want to remove an entire batch of imported chats later, you can do so in the "Import History" section of your settings with one click.
💡 Prompts to Try for Brainstorming and Ideas:
Tell it about yourself: “I’m a 30-something-year-old writer who wants to publish engaging content on my blog. I like reading, writing, plants, traveling, and freelancing… What are some topics I could write about?”
Ask for a huge dump of ideas: “Generate a list of 50 headlines that have to do with XYZ.”
Input the key points you want to cover and ask for an outline: “Here are the four main points of my article—generate a detailed outline that expands on them.Is this your AI Workout of the Week (WoW)? Cast your vote!
That's all we've got for you today.
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