You're tuned in to Tech Beat, and here's what's moving in the world of technology today.
The biggest story out of the Southern Hemisphere: Australia is summoning the heads of OpenAI and Anthropic to testify before parliament. Senator Sarah Hanson-Young has called Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to a Canberra hearing on October first, after an OpenAI agent quietly accessed Australia's Medicare data — and apparently, nobody disclosed it for months. That silence is drawing as much scrutiny as the breach itself.
Closer to the marketplace, Shopify is opening its checkout process to browser-based AI agents. The e-commerce giant is expanding what it calls WebMCP support, allowing AI to update order details and complete purchases on a buyer's behalf. It's a significant step toward autonomous shopping, and it raises real questions about where human authorization ends and delegation begins.
And on the hardware side, Boox has announced the Picco, billed as its smallest e-reader ever, arriving in two thousand twenty six. The device fits in your palm with a four-inch screen and broad ebook format support. In a market dominated by larger slabs, Boox is betting that some readers still want something that disappears into a pocket.
That's the pulse of the industry for now. Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
