Afternoon edition — Thursday 12 November 2026

Google opened pre-orders on 12 November for Intelligent Eyewear, glasses with Gemini built in, designed with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster and engineered by Samsung. They go on sale in stores and online on 10 December, for Google accounts in the United States and South Korea.

Warby Parker's three styles start at $395 and Gentle Monster's six designs at $449, with prescription options. Google says the frames weigh about 41 grams, have a 12-megapixel camera, open-ear speakers and up to nine hours of battery life, and work with recent Pixel, Samsung and iPhone models.

Users say "Hey Gemini" or tap the frame for help about what they see, Maps directions and Translate speech translation across more than 70 languages. Google says camera images sent to Gemini are not kept in Gemini history or used for training or ads, and that bystanders' faces are blurred automatically before Gemini processes them; a light shows when the glasses record.

At Baidu World 2026 in Beijing on 12 November, founder Robin Li launched Token Exchange, a platform where companies buy and call models from many suppliers through one API. Baidu says it runs admission tests, including model fingerprint checks, to keep out swapped models, and gives suppliers credit ratings. Pandaily reports that Baidu says the API supports both OpenAI and Anthropic protocols.

Baidu also released two models on its Qianfan cloud platform: ERNIE Lightning, a reasoning model first built for Baidu Search, and ERNIE-Wizshot-ME, which turns a still portrait into a 4- to 15-second 1080p talking video. Pandaily reports a list price of 0.7 yuan per second for the video model.

Baidu claims Token Exchange already averages more than 700 billion tokens a day from over 100 supply resources; its own product page still shows lower figures, 200 billion tokens and 70 models.

Amazon Web Services released AWS Emulator on Wednesday 11 November, a free tool that imitates AWS services on a developer's own machine so applications can be tested offline. AWS engineer Matthew Goldberg writes that every line of its code was written by autonomous agents and that his team has not written or reviewed any of it. No earlier edition carried this release.

Goldberg says three teams of agents build it: one writes tests checked against the real AWS cloud, one finds discrepancies and one fixes them. The New Stack reports it covers 438 AWS API models across more than 200 services, is written in Rust and runs on Linux, macOS and Windows without an AWS account. The code is on GitHub under the CC0 public-domain licence.

Chinese AI companies are trying to rent Nvidia-powered computing capacity at data centres outside China, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters in an exclusive report on 12 November. They fear the scandal around Jensen Huang could push Washington to restrict their remote use of advanced processors, which US export rules do not currently block.

According to the sources, a major Chinese cloud provider has discussed locking in overseas Nvidia capacity, some companies have contacted data-centre operators to reserve it, and smaller labs are looking at providers in Southeast Asia. The companies worry the affair adds momentum to the Remote Access Security Act, which passed the US House 369 to 22 in January and awaits the Senate.

Separately, Investing.com, summarising a report by The Information, says the Commerce Department is preparing to finalise a rule blocking Chinese firms' remote access to advanced AI chips through data centres in other countries, extending controls to seven more countries including Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Reuters reports that Alibaba shares fell as much as 7.1% in Hong Kong on Thursday.

AI cloud company Nebius reported third-quarter revenue of $980.8 million, up 571% from a year earlier, with adjusted EBITDA of $465.8 million and a net loss from continuing operations of $37.5 million. It spent $7.3 billion on equipment and other assets in the quarter.

Reuters, via CNA, reports that Nebius now expects 2026 revenue at the low end of its $3 billion to $3.4 billion range because some third-party data-centre capacity slipped to the first half of 2027, and that it raised 2026 capital spending to about $27 billion, from $20 billion to $25 billion. For 2027 it forecasts $12 billion to $13 billion of revenue and $40 billion to $45 billion of spending, most of it to be covered by customer prepayments and asset-backed financing, Reuters reports. Its shares fell nearly 12% before the market opened.

The European Commission's Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/2487, adopted on 10 November, was published in the EU's Official Journal on 11 November. It sets common rules for how national authorities set up and run AI regulatory sandboxes under the AI Act, where companies can develop and test AI systems under supervision before putting them on the market. EUR-Lex lists 1 December 2026 as its date of effect. No earlier edition carried it.

Small and medium-sized firms, including start-ups, get priority and free access to the authorities' guidance and supervision, though exceptional costs can be recovered; other companies can be charged full cost. Authorities must answer applications within three months, and every project ends with an exit report that other EU authorities must recognise as evidence of the work done.

The regulation states that taking part in a sandbox is not an approval: the exit report does not have the legal effect of a declaration of conformity.

France's armed forces ministry said on 12 November that it will create an international centre to support the use of AI in defence, due to open in summer 2027, Reuters reports. An official told reporters the ministry hopes NATO will recognise the centre.

Reuters reports that funding and international members are not yet settled, and that other countries have been invited to a conference next week to hear the plans. A Presse Agence notice of 10 November announcing the briefing names the project the International Center for AI in Defence (ICAID) and places it in Rennes.