AI assistants promise to make calls, clean up and build for you

The big theme this week is AI that acts instead of just writing. It is often called an AI agent: a program that carries out a task on its own on your behalf. The question is how much of it already works and how much is still talk.

Promises of a helper that gets things done

Elon Musk says his Grok Bot can call companies, ask for something on your behalf and send you a summary. However, SpaceXAI has not documented the feature, and pricing and rollout are unclear. The same goes for his suggestion to ask Grok Bot to remove your number from spam call and spam text lists. The feature is not official, and there is no independent test of whether it works. One of the posts also points out that the tool is not official from xAI.

It is tempting, because nobody likes spam calls. But if you are considering giving an AI your phone number and letting it speak for you, wait until someone has shown that it actually works.

More down to earth is Google's news: Interactive apps you have made in the Gemini app can be exported to Google Sites in a few clicks. The app ends up in a private draft that you can edit, publish and share. There are no big promises here, just a concrete shortcut.

What it costs and who pays

Pricing is the other common thread. Anthropic's Claude is available for free and in paid plans from USD 20 a month. For developers, DeepSeek's news is interesting: Two tools can search the web and fetch web pages, and server-side tool calls via DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code and Codex are free until November 1, 2026. In other words, the free period is about to run out.

Kling AI shows that access often requires more than an account. Here, businesses need an API key, a kind of password for programs, and must buy resource packs. The key must be guarded carefully. Even the free app has a price: On October 21, 2026, OpenAI expanded ads in ChatGPT to 26 new countries, so they now appear in 89.

It can also run at home

The counterpoint to paywalls is AI that you run yourself. A copywriter got a small language model running locally on a 10-year-old mini PC with no graphics card. It worked, but the answers took a long time, and the smallest model made mistakes. And FLUX 3 Image Klein, an open image model from Black Forest Labs, can both create and edit images. Hugging Face has measured speed and memory usage, but on powerful data center cards. Open models are on the way, then, but they are not free in time and equipment.

What you can do

Try the official, documented tools first, such as Claude's free plan or the Gemini export to Google Sites. Be skeptical of promises that rest only on a post, and do not hand your phone number to a feature nobody has tested. Keep an eye on November 1 if you use DeepSeek's tools, and expect that free may turn into paid or into ads.