Gemini Robotics 2.5 puts Apollo humanoids to work on Mercedes-Benz production lines

Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics 2.5 on 10 November, a vision-language-action model that turns camera images and spoken instructions into robot movement. The company says it lifts success rates by 30 to 100 percent over the previous version and finishes tasks 20 to 30 percent faster. It measured more than 200 jobs, including serving food with tongs and pipetting liquid.

The most concrete test ran on working Mercedes-Benz assembly lines in Kecskemét, Hungary, and Sindelfingen, Germany. Apptronik’s Apollo 2 humanoid used the model to lift metal brackets from bulk bins and lay them in sequencing trays in the order each vehicle needed. It completed 96 percent of attempts on a job DeepMind calls repetitive and physically taxing. A person doing the same work is close to perfect, and DeepMind calls the result a proof of concept. Alongside the model, DeepMind published ASIMOV-Jailbreak, an open benchmark of prompts that disguise unsafe requests, and said Gemini 4 Argon refuses 99.5 percent of them.

Featured source: Google DeepMind , Ars Technica .

Other Stories

Git patches six vulnerabilities, including code execution in recursive clones

Git released version 2.56.1 with fixes for six security flaws, backported to six maintenance branches. The most serious, CVE-2026-111760, allows code execution during a recursive clone. An integer truncation lets an extremely long path pass validation, then overwrites a submodule’s .git file with a symbolic link. The others cover path traversal through a server’s advertised HEAD, stack corruption while stripping GPG signatures and out-of-bounds reads in binary patches. Two more involve heap corruption in large merges and file access through fast-import streams. The project advises updating Git and any application that bundles it.

Filed from: GitHub Blog , Git 2.56.1 release .

Anthropic puts Claude inside meetings, whiteboards and spreadsheets

Anthropic launched Claude Meetings, which joins a Google Meet call as a visible participant and works while people talk. It drafts the plan under discussion, maps a timeline, answers questions in chat and pulls figures from connected apps. When the call ends, its notes and action items wait in claude.ai. It also shipped Whiteboards, which turns a discussion into a visual plan, and Sheets, for building spreadsheets in place. Meetings is in beta on Team and Enterprise plans and supports only Google Meet for now. Claude announces itself in chat and leaves when an external guest joins, unless an administrator allows it.

Filed from: TechCrunch , Anthropic .

BYD opens a solar and robotic charging station in Abu Dhabi

BYD opened a charging site in Abu Dhabi that adds solar generation, battery storage and robotic arms to its Flash Charging hardware. The arms use visual guidance and force feedback to seat the connector while the driver stays in the car. BYD says compatible vehicles go from 10 to 70 percent charge in five minutes and to 97 percent in nine. The company calls the combination a world first, a claim no independent test has checked. It says the storage system can run without a grid connection.

Filed from: TechRadar , BYD .

Serve Robotics lets outside developers dispatch its sidewalk fleet

Serve Robotics opened a developer portal that lets small businesses send its sidewalk robots on deliveries without booking through a delivery app. The company, spun out of Postmates in 2021, runs about 2,000 robots in roughly 150 neighborhoods and has carried Uber Eats orders in Los Angeles, Miami and Dallas. Developers supply pickup and drop-off coordinates, while Serve handles routing, obstacle avoidance and remote supervision. Chief executive Ali Kashani says the fleet is busiest at lunch and dinner, and that filling the hours between lowers the cost of each delivery.

Filed from: The Verge , Serve Robotics .

Apple will close its Support Community forum after 28 years

Apple put its Support Community into read-only mode and will close the forum on 20 November. A banner points users to the official Apple Support site instead. The community began in 1998 as the Apple Tech Exchange and accumulated decades of user-written troubleshooting threads. Apple has not said whether that archive will be preserved.

Filed from: The Verge , Apple Support Community .

Grok Build share links exposed thousands of live apps

Claroc, a security firm, found that share links for apps built with SpaceXSI’s Grok Build could be enumerated rather than guessed. The random words sat left of the domain instead of inside the path, so a passive DNS search turned up 43,601 links ending in grok.me. More than 35,000 opened the app and its data to anyone who clicked. The material included internal business plans, medical exam results for 3,784 workers at a Peruvian construction company and a 108-person Navy logistics roster. Twenty-four of the exposed apps belonged to SpaceXSI itself. The company began removing links after Ars Technica asked about them.

Filed from: Ars Technica .

From the Community

Developer says AI agents flagged an unregistered Maya site in Mexican lidar data

A developer writing as Pietro Miotti says he directed 48 AI agents to scan about 1,200 square kilometres of public NASA lidar imagery of Maya jungle. The agents looked for pyramids, platforms and plazas. He reports that one hilltop candidate showed a levelled plaza, an oval pyramid and a possible water reservoir. Mexico’s INAH replied that no archaeological site was registered at that location. The author states he is not an archaeologist and that the Classic-period reading is speculation. INAH has not confirmed a find or authorised fieldwork, which Mexican law requires.

Filed from: Pietro Miotti .

Ginux moves its Rust kernel into userspace for sandboxing Linux workloads

Greg Kurtzer’s Ginux project has abandoned its bootable Rust kernel for a userspace kernel that runs as an ordinary Linux process. It intercepts managed system calls before they reach the host, and each instance gets a versioned contract that emulates, mediates or denies calls. A pinned Rocky Linux 10 systemd baseline reaches the multi-user target. The repository says the standalone kernel proved an AI-directed agent could build a working kernel, but that rewriting Linux mechanisms does not reproduce its ecosystem. The author presents Ginux as a containment boundary for AI agents and calls it research software without independent certification.

Filed from: GitHub: gmkurtzer/ginux .