Anthropic's 5% pledge, Harness2 lands — AI News Oct 19

Anthropic pledges five percent of its shares to a new public benefit fund ahead of its November IPO, as CEO Dario Amodei warns of a crisis of trust in AI; an outside safety watchdog gets employee-level access, and law firms are drafting the rules for agents that negotiate deals Disney absorbs Character AI's team out of bankruptcy for twenty million dollars, after child-safety legal exposure sank the company Google open-sources Harness Two, a recursive agent framework that upgrades the eight files around a frozen model with zero fine-tuning Security: a trailing-dot filename let Copilot in Visual Studio rewrite protected configs (severity eight point eight); Ledger's Agent Intent puts a hardware wallet between your agent and your money Plus: OpenAI's Rosalind goes free for academic labs, Meta drops news-scraping terms, Microsoft exits Nscale's UK site, SteerTTS runs on CPU, and MIT's model reads crystal structures Follow AI Engineering Briefing and leave a rating — it's how new listeners find the show.