"Companion chatbot" sounds like a product category you would know if you were in it. The statutory definition is broader than that, and the duties are already live.
California SB 243 (Chapter 677, Statutes of 2025) took effect on 1 January 2026. If you ship anything conversational and emotional, it is worth reading the definition against your product instead of assuming it is about someone else.
Cheaper near-frontier models make it tempting to send more context on every call. For anything personal, that is the wrong place to spend the savings.
OpenAI announced GPT-6.1 Sol at DevDay on 2 October. Its API page lists $2.00 per million input tokens, $0.10 for cached input and $10.00 for output, with a 1,050,000-token context window. Prompts over 272K input tokens are billed at double the input rate and 1.5x output for the whole request. OpenAI says the model gives near-Astra intelligence at a fifth of Astra's price. That comparison is OpenAI's own claim about its own product, and I haven't seen an independent benchmark of it, so treat it as marketing until someone you trust has run it on your workload.
The same event added computer use to the Agents API, so an agent can operate software through its interface, available through the API and in Codex and ChatGPT Work on Pro 500 and Enterprise plans.
Here is what I think a small team should take from it. When the per-token price drops, the first instinct is to spend the savings on more context: send the whole history, the whole document, the whole account. The model can take a million tokens, so why not use them.
On 6 October Sierra announced the Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard it is developing with Meta for how a consumer's AI agent deals with a business. On 9 October it published a first draft, called Poppy (Draft 0.1). Sierra sells customer-service agents, so read its framing as a vendor's view. The mechanics are worth learning from anyway.
A business publishes a file at /.well-known/poppy.json telling agents how to start a session and how customers sign in. The agent identifies itself and can begin as a guest, for example to check stock or a returns policy. When a task needs an account, the customer signs in on the company's own page using OAuth 2.0. Sierra's 6 October post says the customer chooses between read-only and write access. One session can span the website, the APIs (OpenAPI and MCP are named) and the company's own agent.
From 1 October, leaving Apple In-App Purchase drops a Small Business Program developer from 15% to 10% in the EU. On a 4.99 euro subscription, a processor's fixed per-transaction fee can eat most of that on its own - and your choice locks for 12 months.
Apple updated the Developer Program License Agreement on 18 August, and the new EU business terms go into effect on 1 October. The coverage I've read frames it as Apple finally opening up. That's true in a structural sense and mostly irrelevant to anyone running a small subscription app, because the interesting question isn't whether you can leave Apple's payment system. It's whether the arithmetic works. For most of us it doesn't, and it's worth being able to say why rather than just having a feeling about it.
Everyone building anything emotional with AI reaches for the emotion recognition article. The sentence that is more likely to apply to you is in Article 50(1), and it has applied since 2 August.
When I went looking at what the EU AI Act asks of an app like Murror, I assumed the provision about emotions was the one aimed at us. It isn't, quite, and the one that is aimed at us is simpler and already live.
The difference between a tool an agent chooses to call and a step that runs every time is the difference between a suggestion and a guarantee.
Microsoft's Copilot Studio documentation now describes a preview feature called hooks. The definition is plain: a hook runs one of your workflows automatically when something happens in your agent, and you use it "when you need something to happen every time, rather than only when the agent decides it's relevant."
For months, we celebrated our power users at Murror the ones journaling every day, sometimes multiple times a day. They had the highest session times, the most entries, the best retention curves. On paper, they were our success story.
Then we started reading what they were actually writing.
The legacy "Block AI bots" switch is deprecated on 15 September, and mixed-purpose crawlers get folded into it. Googlebot, Applebot and BingBot are in scope. Opting out is one click and the window is 25 days.
Sometime in the last two years a lot of us flipped a switch in Cloudflare called "Block AI bots." It was one click, it was free, it was framed as protecting your content, and there was no reason not to. I did it. I never thought about it again.
On 2 October Apple said it will make granting Full Disk Access on macOS require more explicit user action, and it named AI agents as the reason. If you let agents touch your files, that's a prompt to audit what you've already handed over.
On 2 October Apple posted a short developer news item titled "Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS." It says Apple will add controls that require more explicit user action when Full Disk Access is granted, because some developers misuse it to reach sensitive data such as files, mail, messages and browsing history without the user fully understanding. The sentence I keep coming back to is this one: "As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially."
Everyone tells you to ship fast. Move fast and break things. Get to market before someone else does.
I believed this for a long time. When we were building Murror, speed was everything. We pushed features weekly, sometimes daily. We celebrated every deploy like a small victory.
