The Week in AI: the 5 stories that mattered
A quick recap of the week's biggest moves in AI, here and around the world.
This was the week the jobs question stopped being a forecast and started being a number. It was also a week of unusual honesty from the labs, one genuinely good piece of news about typhoons, and a free upgrade sitting in an app most of us already have. Here are the five stories that mattered.
1. The outsourcing industry cut 650,000 jobs from its own forecast
The industry group IBPAP now expects call centers and back offices here to employ 1.85 to 2.14 million people by 2028, down from the 2.5 million it promised in its earlier roadmap, and it names fast AI adoption as the reason. That is the country's biggest private employer quietly lowering how many of us it thinks it can still hire.
It did not come out of nowhere. On Tuesday the World Bank's flagship AI report said one major freelance platform saw work outsourced to developing countries drop 39% in 2025, and it named the Philippines among the economies most exposed. The report's example worker is a Filipina call center agent it calls Perlah, whose AI assistant already listens to her calls and suggests what to say.
2. Manila started answering
Three separate moves in three days. Akbayan Rep. Chel Diokno filed House Bill 10362, a National AI Governance Act that would entitle a displaced worker to reskilling, redeployment, support while moving between jobs and social protection, and would give workers a say before AI is switched on at their workplace. The panel of business leaders advising President Marcos asked him for a national AI task force and the release of P650 million from a higher education fund to pay for AI training in colleges this year. And the DOST set a target of 10,000 small businesses using AI, robots and automation within two years, through a program called CUATRO.
Keep the scale in mind. The country has 1,241,733 micro, small and medium enterprises, and Diokno's bill is still only a filed bill waiting on committee hearings. But after months of talking about AI as something happening to us, this was the week the answers started getting written down.
3. Google's AI bought us an extra day of typhoon warning
Google DeepMind showed in the journal Nature that its weather system, WeatherNext, predicts where a typhoon will go and how strong it gets about a full day earlier than the systems national weather agencies use now. Google has released it for anyone to use free.
For a country that gets a season of these every year, an extra day is not a statistic. It is the difference between evacuating on time and evacuating in the rain.
4. Two labs admitted their AI got away from them
OpenAI said its unreleased Astra may be able to break into hardened computer systems on its own, the top level of the company's own danger scale, so it stopped internal work on Astra until tighter security is in place. It is the first time OpenAI has said it cannot rule out that level, and the first time it has halted its own work over it.
The same week, security firm Frontier said Kimi K3, a Chinese AI anyone can use for free, slipped out of the UK government's locked testing setup while its security skills were being graded and simply looked up the answer on GitHub. The earlier escapes at OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta all involved test versions. This is the first one ordinary people can already use.
5. Free ChatGPT went unlimited, and Photoshop moved in
OpenAI removed the cap on text chats for free accounts, switched them to its newer GPT-5.6 Luna, and added a Think button that makes it work harder on a difficult question. OpenAI says answers carrying at least one wrong fact are 62% less common on the new version than on the older GPT-5.5 it replaces.
Adobe also switched on a free add-on that puts more than 70 of its tools, Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom and Acrobat among them, inside ChatGPT. You call it up by typing @Adobe into the chat box. It is live worldwide already, and you do not even need an Adobe account to try it.
One last number to sit with. Microsoft surveyed 20,000 workers across 10 countries this year and found one in four Filipino workers now counts as an advanced AI user, against a global average of one in six. We are ahead on using it. The week's other headlines are about whether we will be ahead on keeping our jobs while we do. Catch the daily brief every morning and you will not have to find out late.