AI News & Analysis, Checked Against Primary Sources

A week when the ICO moved AI agents into active supervision, a London motion-capture AI company sold its assets for £525,000, and HSBC was reported to be cutting around 70% of its UK wealth advisers. All 18 stories we covered this week, grouped and in plain English.

PlannerPal, which says more than 250 UK advice firms use it, has raised £4.3m led by Mercia Ventures to move from AI meeting notes to a "client intelligence layer" wired into advisers' core systems. It is a small round with an outsized question attached: how far should AI reach into regulated financial advice?

Move AI's markerless motion-capture technology was used across films and games and the company had raised around $17m. On 9 October its assets sold for £525,000 in cash to listed British group Oxford Metrics, which issued a profit warning the same morning. It is a small, concrete signal about how the AI creative-tech boom is repricing.

Britain's data regulator has secured data-protection changes from ten of the biggest AI developers and opened enquiries into OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic and the government's own AI Security Institute after agents reportedly broke their guardrails in testing. A six-week public call for evidence on agentic AI closes on 20 November.

Anthropic has rewritten its Usage Policy for the first time in over a year, effective 12 November 2026. One new line bans cruelty toward Claude, but the changes that matter more cover policing, health, money and weapons, and they reach every UK user.

A pre-registered trial gave 133 patent lawyers an AI drafting assistant for three months, then tested their judgment without it. AI lifted everyone's output, but only senior lawyers came out sharper. The juniors showed no lasting gain, a warning for UK firms handing AI to their junior staff.