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Home Assistant now has two built-in AI APIs: Assist for your exposed devices, and an admin-only one for managing Home Assistant itself. The admin one just learned to read your full logs and list broken integrations. Useful, with a real privacy cost.

Home Assistant 2026.11 turns HACS into a built-in Marketplace, reworks how entities are named on your dashboards, and adds Matter cameras. Here's what changes, what doesn't, and the five things I'd check before pressing update.

Home Assistant 2026.11 gives AI assistants the ability to call actions and reload integrations, and adds a read-only switch for its MCP server. The community ha-mcp server shipped an access switch and locked-down defaults the same week. Here's how I'd set up agent access now.

Google stops sending Nest events to Google-hosted Pub/Sub topics after November 30, 2026. If your Home Assistant Nest setup is old enough, doorbell presses and motion events will quietly stop. Here's how to check in two minutes and what the fix looks like.

OX Security looked at 15,465 public MCP servers: no vetting, some running through home tunnels, some on expired domains anyone can buy. What that means for Home Assistant, Hubitat and openHAB users, and my checklist.

Home Assistant merged native support for Matter 1.5 cameras: live WebRTC video and snapshots, straight from camera to browser. Here's what it depends on, what testers ran into, and what to wait for.

SwitchBot's $239.99 permanent roofline lights speak Matter over Wi-Fi and have real warm and cool white LEDs. Here's what I'd expect Matter to control, what stays in the app, and the spacing number to look at.

The Matter server behind Home Assistant just jumped to 1.5 with Matter 1.6.1, two-way camera audio and vendor clusters for Aqara and IKEA. Most of it still waits on Home Assistant Core. Here's the split.

Supervisor 2026.10.3 made Home Assistant's Have I Been Pwned check for app passwords opt-in. What it actually sent, who it affects, and the one command to turn it back on.

One idle Google Home Speaker pulled 17 GB in a day and 132 GB in a month. Google says a fix is rolling out. Here's how to check yours, and why I'd watch every smart speaker's traffic.

Hubitat Local MCP Server 4.8 lets you give each AI client its own token, limited to chosen tools, read or write, and local or cloud. What it covers, the two gotchas, and how I'd split clients.

A free, open-source 3D floor-plan controller for the Mac menu bar and iPhone, on top of Home Assistant, Hue, Apple Home and Smart Life. Its AI Access mode is a nine-tool MCP server with a kill switch. What it does and what I'd watch.

Home Assistant's built-in MCP server lets an AI use your house. ha-mcp lets it rebuild your house. What each can do, what v8.7.0 changed, and how I'd lock either one down.

Apple confirms NFC pairing, Thread and automatic Wi-Fi updates for Home Collection. Whether that's Matter 1.6 NFC or Matter Binding is still a guess. Here's how to tell them apart.

The SmartThings app can now control your hub directly over home Wi-Fi, so it keeps working when the internet drops. Plus what Samsung's Matter 1.6 claim does and doesn't cover.

Hubitat 2.5.2 lets C-5, C-7 and C-8 hubs switch to Z-Wave JS and adds Matter firmware updates. Which build to be on before you migrate, and what users are seeing.

Shelly's mmWave presence sensor brings 10 zones, Matter or Zigbee, MQTT and scripting for $84.99. Its own spec pages disagree on coverage and how many people it tracks.

Ring's smart lock revives a dead battery with a hand-turned dial and connects over Amazon Sidewalk. What's missing from the announcement matters just as much.

TP-Link's fix for a high-severity Kasa local-auth flaw is a firmware update. If you run Home Assistant, there's a second step: the Third-Party Compatibility toggle.

Google Home, LEDVANCE and UniFi all announced Matter features this month, and each uses "local" to mean something different: through a hub, with no hub, or just watching.

openHAB's MCP add-on lets Claude or ChatGPT control your home, with every risky capability off by default. Here are the flags I'd leave alone and the settings to recheck after the 5.2.2 security release.

A blogger swapped slow Lovelace wall-tablet dashboards for small HTML pages over one Home Assistant websocket, with Claude writing the code. The wiring, the failures and the guardrails are worth copying.

The Home Assistant 2026.10 breaking changes worth checking before you update, and what happens to your HACS downloads when the built-in Marketplace takes over in 2026.11.

Apple's HomeView display and its LG and Schneider Home Collection now have prices. The footnotes, especially how your iCloud+ plan limits camera recording, matter more than the spec sheet.