AI News — October 11, 2026

Today's AI news in short: 5 items, each with a link to its source.

Claude Code releases eight updates between October 1 and October 8

According to a third-party changelog, Claude Code shipped eight releases from v2.1.287 (October 1) to v2.1.294 (October 8). v2.1.292 added direct installation from the plugin marketplace, and v2.1.291 fixed chat messages disappearing and permission requests being ignored. No official changelog confirmation was found.

Source: havoptic

Claude Haiku 5.5 becomes default Haiku model in Claude Code v2.1.293

With v2.1.293, Haiku 5.5 became the default Haiku model in Claude Code. Anthropic says it is on average 75% cheaper and that users can adjust its effort level. A 9to5Mac report calling it the third Claude 5.5 update in three months is consistent with this.

Source: Anthropic

Digg summary says small models dominate real-world use in Hugging Face report

A Digg summary of Hugging Face's 'State of Open Models, Summer 2026' report says small models dominate real-world usage. Qwen leads local inference, Gemma ranks second, and AI agents show growing momentum on the Hub. The summary is not the report itself.

Source: Digg

Phi-4-mini and Llama 3.2 3B added to CPU-only local LLM recommendations

A PopularAI list of recommended small models for CPU-only local use now includes Phi-4-mini-instruct and Llama 3.2 3B. They join Qwen3.5 4B, Gemma 4 E4B and SmolLM3 3B, which were already on the list.

Source: PopularAI

Google has not announced a release date for Gemini 4

Google has not yet given an official release date for Gemini 4. The July 21 start of pre-training was stated earlier and is not new information.

Source: InfoWorld

Summaries are condensed from the linked sources; follow each link for the full story.