Robotics and embodied AI

Google unveiled a "Universal Cart" at Google I/O, an AI shopping tool that works across retailers and Google products such as Gemini, with YouTube and Gmail planned later. Users add items while browsing Search or chatting with Gemini, then check out through Google, and the cart tracks prices, sends in-stock notifications, suggests discounts and flags potential issues with selections.

The source is a survey titled "Towards Robust and Secure Embodied AI: A Survey on Vulnerabilities and Attacks," published in ACM Computing Surveys, Volume 58, Issue 12, pages 1-36, September 2026. The provided text contains only the publication details and no article content describing its findings or methods.

Joanna Stern, former Wall Street Journal columnist and Verge cofounder, has launched New Things, a media company partnered with NBC. She is promoting her book I Am Not a Robot, out May 12th, about spending a year using AI in her life. The source says she is more bullish on wearable AI than on humanoid robots.

Google introduced Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, an upgrade to its reasoning-first model for robots, improving spatial reasoning, multi-view understanding, pointing, counting and success detection. The model adds instrument reading for complex gauges and sight glasses, a capability found in collaboration with Boston Dynamics. It is available to developers through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio, with a developer Colab showing how to configure and prompt it.

OpenAI has agreed to give the Pentagon access to its AI, and reporting suggests it could even assist in selecting strike targets. The partnership with Anduril, a drone and counter-drone maker, hints at where the technology may appear. Separately, victims have sued xAI, saying Grok was built to create AI-generated child sexual abuse material from photos of real people.

Caitlin Kalinowski resigned as head of OpenAI's robotics team in response to the company's agreement with the Department of Defense. She said surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization needed more deliberation, and that the announcement was rushed without defined guardrails. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the departure and said the agreement's red lines are no domestic surveillance and no autonomous weapons.

Security researcher Sammy Azdoufal found that a DJI Romo robot vacuum could be controlled remotely using only its 14-digit serial number. He gained access to 6,700 robots across 24 countries, including floor plans and video and audio feeds from their owners' homes. DJI has since fixed the vulnerability.

Anthropic is in heated negotiations with the Pentagon after refusing new military contract terms that would loosen the guardrails on its AI models to allow "any lawful use," including mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous lethal weapons. Pentagon CTO Emil Michael is pushing for Anthropic to be designated a "supply chain risk" if it does not comply, while rivals OpenAI and xAI have reportedly agreed to the terms. CEO Dario Amodei says the company cannot in good conscience accede to the request.

The Pentagon has set an ultimatum for Anthropic, demanding unchecked US military access to its technology, including for mass surveillance and fully autonomous lethal weapons. Anthropic may be designated a "supply chain risk" and could lose hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts. The source text is truncated, so the outcome of the negotiations is not stated.

Google is folding Intrinsic, the robotics software company that spent five and a half years at Alphabet's X before becoming an independent Other Bets company in July 2021, into Google itself. Intrinsic's Flowstate platform lets users build robotic applications without writing thousands of lines of code, and will now use Gemini models and Cloud and work closely with Google DeepMind.