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Read online Monday 12 October 2026 | Join Free | Upgrade Together with Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso. In today's newsletter: 💻 Microsoft makes ‘biggest bet yet’ on its own silicon 🛩️ Russian bot traffic collapses after drone strikes 🛑 Microsoft CEO wants a human brake on AI 📈 IMF credits AI spending for near-3% growth 📚 Publishers quietly use AI for book covers 🧊 Cyberattack disables supermarket fridges across Europe Plus: 🎁 12 more stories you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers. FROM OUR PARTNER 94% adopted AI. 6% are actually ready for it. AI adoption in engineering is universal. Readiness isn't. 94% of engineering organizations have adopted AI — but only 6% have the systems to run a truly AI-native software development lifecycle. The gap between using AI and operating on it is where most teams are stuck. At the State of AI SDLC digital summit, leaders from Atlassian, Vercel, Dropbox, Lovable, and DX shared how they're closing that gap — rethinking four things across the SDLC: context, orchestration, governance, and measurement. If you're trying to turn AI from a tool your team uses into a system your organization runs on, this is the playbook. Watch the full summit on demand → 💻 Microsoft makes ‘biggest bet yet’ on its own silicon LINK Microsoft has unveiled Maia 300, the third version of its own AI chip, and plans large-scale rollouts in 2027 as it aims to run most of its AI services on homegrown silicon rather than Nvidia hardware. The company says Maia 300 produces 40% more AI output for the same power as leading Nvidia GPU systems, and a full rack delivers up to seven times the output of the current generation on tasks like AI agents and long documents. Microsoft designs the chips and has TSMC make them, calling Maia its "primary AI inference system," though unlike Google and Amazon it won't rent them to outside customers, and analysts expect Maia to cover only about 10% of its AI chip spending by early 2027. 🛩️ Russian bot traffic collapses after drone strikes LINK Russian bot traffic has fallen sharply in recent days after Ukraine destroyed Yandex's two largest data centers, according to Cloudflare, which tracked bot requests from the Yandex network dropping to just 0.4% of the recent peak. The decline began on October 8 when Ukraine struck a Yandex site in Sasovo holding two supercomputers, falling to around 57%, before a bigger campus in Kaluga was knocked offline yesterday, leaving at least 84 Yandex Cloud services down. NetBlocks found Yandex network traffic dropped to 30% for Yandex Cloud and 63% for Yandex LLC, likely slowing or cutting internet service for ordinary Russians, who cannot fall back on Starlink since it does not work in Russia. 🛑 Microsoft CEO wants a human brake on AI LINK Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella argued in an essay published on Saturday that AI models should run under outside controls, including an emergency brake that an authorized person could pull to pause or shut down a model mid-task. Nadella's proposed design separates the model from the software coordinating its work and the actions it can take, so an organization sets permissions independently and keeps tamper-proof records, though he gave no rollout timetable. His essay follows Microsoft's October 7 release of Microsoft Execution Containers, software that limits an agent's file, network, and interface access from outside, so the model or its code cannot grant itself more access. 📈 IMF credits AI spending for near-3% growth LINK IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva said that spending on AI infrastructure is pushing the world economy to grow about 3% a year, even with high energy prices weighing on many countries. She said Asian makers of AI hardware gain the most: advanced economies could add 0.5 to 1 percentage point of growth, while emerging ones might pick up 0.2 to 0.8 points, with Thailand among the winners. Major tech companies plan to spend between $660 billion and $690 bil