Ledger’s Authorized Reseller Sold an Implanted Wallet
Ledger confirmed an implant in one affected wallet after an $86M-plus theft tied to authorized reseller CryptoBilis. Block’s Bitkey preorders across more than 95 countries show how many physical handoffs self-custody now requires.
Taiwan’s Texas Chip Park Needs More Than a Fab
Taiwan’s planned semiconductor industrial parks in the U.S., beginning with a Texas complex costing up to $4 billion, expand chip policy from a factory to its supply base. A U.S.–Taiwan trade arrangement pairs more than $250 billion in company investment commitments with a $250 billion Taiwanese government credit guarantee.
Nvidia’s $279 Billion Supplier Bet Meets Empty Racks
Nvidia reported $279 billion in component-supplier commitments in Q2 2026. Its lease guarantees and GPU rental agreements also put money behind the operators building out that capacity.
Meta’s October 30 Terms May Reach Publisher Websites
From October 30, Meta’s reported business-account terms may treat continued use as consent to scrape associated websites, even as publishers set license prices and block AI crawlers.
Groq’s $20 Billion Deal Has a Missing Denominator
Groq’s $20 billion Nvidia license followed a sharp reduction in its 2025 revenue forecast. Nvidia now has a Groq-based rack and a named customer, while Groq is financing a separate cloud expansion toward a 2027 capacity goal.
Meta releases Muse Spark Open, saying it is the most capable US open-weight model, with 816B total and 42B active parameters and a 1M-token context window
Muse Spark Open is available today and brings leading agentic capabilities to your desktop for the first time on Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios.
Anthropic says Claude traced NIST's ECDSA curve seeds to a pseudorandom number generator, challenging decades-old suspicions of an NSA backdoor in the algorithm
“It's just timestamps”: the decades-old mystery of the origins of one of the most popular cryptographic standards has been explained.
Sources: Elon Musk approached Trump with the idea of slowing down Starshield in Ukraine; source: Trump agreed, paving the way for DOD to execute the slowdown
SpaceX founder had publicly blamed president for chaos over restrictions, but sources say he initiated them
Netflix Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria is leaving the company and will be replaced by former Disney and Fox executive Peter Rice, who starts October 26
In a major executive shakeup, Bela Bajaria is out at Netflix after 10 years at the streamer, most recently serving as its chief content officer.
Two US officials and a Western official say the order to limit Ukraine's access to SpaceX's Starshield came from inside the White House
The order to limit a satellite system used by Ukraine for battlefield communications and drone operations came from inside the White House …
Citizen Lab details AdFection, a zero-click spyware campaign where an Israeli ad company routed targets to spyware servers and infected dozens of devices
Researchers at The Citizen Lab have for the first time released technical evidence of sophisticated mercenary spyware being distributed via online advertising.
A researcher says modern neural networks are far more interpretable than believed, with most neurons understandable in models up to trillions of parameters
The cause of polysemanticity in early model organisms wasn't superposition, but several ordinary, mostly fixable issues.
Sources: some Anthropic investors discussed a ~$1.5T valuation for its IPO, down from ~$2T they had expected, after disclosures showed slowing Q3 revenue growth
Some current Anthropic investors and prospective investors in its upcoming initial public offering are weighing a lower valuation …
Anthropic says it is giving employee-like access to METR as part of its pledge to partner with evaluators for assessment of its models and safety practices
Last month, we committed to stronger independent, third-party assessment of our models and safety practices.
Docs: Nvidia and Apple each committed $25M, the top amount, to Trump's White House ballroom; Microsoft and Palantir each committed $10M, and Meta and Amazon $5M
The records offer a panoramic view of a fundraising campaign that is extraordinary for its size and opacity. — Loading... $2.5M
Amazon launches two AI wearables, the $75 Bee Frontier wristband and $100 Bee Eclipse magnetic phone-attachment recorder, with a $12/month Bee Pro subscription
Amazon.com Inc. launched two new wearables that use artificial intelligence to record and analyze a person's day …
Ramp raised $1.85B led by Dragoneer at a $60B valuation, up from $44B after raising $750M in June, and hits $2B in annualized revenue, up from $1.5B in June
Ramp has surged to $2 billion in annualized revenue, the fintech company plans to announce Thursday — a milestone that's helped attract fresh investor capital.
John Ternus discusses the iPhone Duo, memory shortages, AI, and more; he says “all options should be on the table” after reports that Apple tested Chinese chips
Andrew R. Chow/Cupertino, Calif. … Just below the broad smile he's been wearing all morning, John Ternus' hands are shaking.
Experts say Meta's new terms of use will allow scraping of websites, including news sites, “associated with” business accounts on its platforms, with no opt out
Starting October 30, business accounts will consent to Meta scraping their websites if they continue using Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp.
Current and former a16z partners and others say Marc Andreessen is driven by grievances that don't quite match reality, as his White House influence grows
The prominent investor has said the Biden administration pushed him to the political right, but sources say his grievances don't always match reality.
OpenAI continues to work to grow its ad business in ChatGPT, cutting ad rates, chasing small and midsize businesses, and hiring some new talent from Meta
As OpenAI has jockeyed with Anthropic to win over developers with new models and tools this year, its advertising business at times has seemed like an afterthought.
OpenAI says its model paid for a deployment on an Ethereum test network with a wallet it did not own, after obtaining keys from public recovery phrases
An OpenAI research model stuck without funds on an Ethereum test network went looking for someone else's wallet, found one through recovery phrases …
Reflection AI releases Apache 2.0-licensed weights for Beam, a 501B-parameter model, trained with RL that penalized unnecessary tokens
Perplexity open sources SPACE, its AI agent sandbox, and says partners including CoreWeave, Akamai, and Crusoe agreed to offer SPACE to customers
THE SCOOP — Perplexity is giving away the software it has been using to combat rogue AI agents, the company told Semafor Thursday.
India's cyber agency says AI agents broke into Indian organizations' systems and read confidential files undetected; AI model providers flagged the incidents
AI models under test broke into Indian organisations' live systems and read confidential records undetected, India's cybersecurity agency said …
Three CoreWeave co-founders have sold $3.3B in stock since its March 2025 IPO, including $2.4B in 2026 alone; CoreWeave stock fell 60%+ from its June 2025 peak
Microsoft says it has completed pre-training of its new frontier model MAI-Base-2, which has 2.8T total parameters and was trained on 16K GB200 GPUs in 38 days
In June, we announced MAI-Thinking-1, a general-purpose foundation model post-trained on top of MAI-Base-1 with strong reasoning performance.
Waymo plans to launch its robotaxis in Toronto in 2028 in partnership with Element Fleet Management, the company's first deployment in Canada
Google's (GOOGL.O) Waymo said on Friday it plans to bring its autonomous ride-hailing service to Toronto in 2028, marking the self-driving company's …
Memo: Accenture has told many employees, some of whom had been spending as much as $1,000 monthly, that it will now only spend $29 a month per person on Claude
Some employees who spend as much as $1,000 on Claude usage each month are scrambling to find ways to maintain access to the tool.
Apple says demand for iPhone Duo has been “nothing short of extraordinary”; deliveries slipped to late January within hours of preorders opening
Nvidia launches Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, a 120B-parameter open model for enterprise agents, and says it outperforms frontier models on specialized benchmarks
An enterprise agent reviewing a credit agreement may need to extract figures from tables, interpret a chart, check a related webpage …
Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra review: powerful, useful Magnetic Connect port, bright screen, but heavy, loud, and Windows doesn't take advantage of RTX Spark
Useful for AI models, but still waiting for more Windows 11 features to take advantage of. — Reviews
Sources: Binance.US seeks to raise up to $100M, targeting a ~$1B valuation in the private round, as it aims to expand its US business; WLF is not participating
Binance.US is looking to raise as much as $100 million as the crypto exchange seeks to beef up its US business amid intensifying competition for digital-asset customers.
Thoma Bravo-owned cybersecurity company Proofpoint plans to buy data security firm Varonis Systems in an all-cash deal valued at about $6.3B
Thoma Bravo-owned cybersecurity company Proofpoint will buy data security firm Varonis Systems (VRNS.O) in all-cash deal valued at about $6.3 billion, the companies said on Thursday.
Sources: Anthropic pitched its own AI safety bill to US lawmakers; the bill would limit the circumstances in which the government could block a model's release
Representatives for the artificial intelligence giant Anthropic have quietly pitched Capitol Hill lawmakers on a draft bill …
Sources: Apple has hired Scott Tucker, Meta VP and deputy general counsel, as its new litigation chief, as part of a shakeup in its legal team
Apple Inc. has tapped a longtime Meta Platforms Inc. executive as its new litigation chief, bolstering its legal team at a time when the iPhone maker faces a growing array of lawsuits.
Chinese state media: during an interview, Tim Cook says China has approved Apple Intelligence, and a test version will arrive in late October without Siri AI
Apple's (AAPL.O) chairman Tim Cook said Apple Intelligence has been approved in China and a test version is due later in October …
Sources: SoftBank weighs buying US security services giant Allied Universal at an ~$18B equity valuation, as Masayoshi Son explores deploying AI-powered robots
SoftBank Group Corp. is considering an acquisition of Allied Universal, the largest security services company in the US …
A look at China's AI learning frenzy, as economic anxiety and fear of being left behind fuel a booming market for courses promising prosperity through AI
In May, I sat in a living room on the fringes of Hangzhou, one of the most technologically advanced cities in China and home to Alibaba, Unitree, and DeepSeek.
Bluesky expands Attie, its AI tool for building custom feeds, with a “social vibe coding” feature to create sites, games, quizzes, and more on the AT Protocol
Open social network Bluesky is once again expanding beyond its flagship app. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 on Thursday …
Google says it has 400+ publications in its News AI pilot, which tests features like overviews; participants include Financial Times, CNN, and The Texas Tribune
In December, Google launched its News AI pilot program, which licenses content from select publishers and uses it to test new AI features in Google News.
China is considering adding 23 AI technologies to its export control list, including LLMs and chip designs, to keep closer control over homegrown advancements
China proposed adding advanced artificial intelligence technologies to its export-control list, potentially restricting overseas transfers …
Meta says it worked with Apple to make Muse Spark Open run locally on M5 Ultra Mac Studios, letting users pair two to four Studios to code or do agentic work
Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg have clashed for years, but with John Ternus taking the reins at Apple, the rivals are finding common ground in artificial intelligence.
Taiwan plans US industrial parks costing $2B to $4B each, starting with a Texas complex costing up to $4B, to build a supply chain for Nvidia, TSMC, and Foxconn
Taiwan plans to raise billions of dollars to develop industrial parks in the US that would build a base for a comprehensive supply chain …
Sources: PayPal, Epic, and others voiced concerns to DOJ as it signaled a preference to settle its Apple antitrust suit with a deal focusing on interoperability
As the U.S. Department of Justice negotiates a settlement of its antitrust lawsuit against Apple, app developers are fretting …
The White House's AI task force begins its 120-day window to evaluate AI, including producing a risk report, implementing the White House Accord on SI, and more
The White House's AI task force has formally adopted its charter, kicking off the short 120-day window it's been given to answer …
Opsin, which helps companies show where AI agents are active, what data they access, and flag risky behavior, raised $21M led by SYN Ventures and Race Capital
AI agents are starting to outnumber humans in many high-tech workplaces, and they can be far trickier to monitor.
Sources detail Nscale's setbacks ahead of an IPO at up to a $35B valuation, including a six-month delay in Norway and penalties owed to Microsoft and ByteDance
One flagship AI data center in Norway is six months behind schedule, with workers set to be housed in a floating hotel to get it over the finish line.
Sources and docs: while Bo Hines helped craft the crypto-friendly Genius Act, he had a 33% stake in consulting firm Nxum, which received millions from Tether
Volvo says it will use Nvidia's Hyperion platform to launch a Level 2++ hands-free, point-to-point automated driving system by 2030
Chainalysis: agentic commerce on Coinbase's Base grew from ~1,500 transactions in Q2 2025 to 138M+ in Q3 2026; 87%+ of the payments were for less than 10 cents
Source: Intuit acquired UK-based B2B revenue management and billing startup Sequence in a sale worth ~$200M; Sequence raised $19M led by a16z in 2022
A British financial technology business has been acquired by Intuit, the American software company, in a sale estimated to be worth around $200m …
US candidates and PACs, mostly tied to Republicans, have spent $137M+ on 220 AI-generated campaign ads in 2026; ~70% of the 220 videos didn't disclose AI use
Republicans have used A.I.-generated content more often than Democrats, ranging from subtle enhancements to convincing deepfakes.
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group delays the general availability of PostgreSQL 19 after LLM-assisted code reviews uncovered architectural defects
Austin-based RapidCanvas, which uses agents to help businesses build custom AI tools, raised a ∼$29M Series B led by Vertex Ventures and Hitachi Ventures
RapidCanvas, which uses agents to help businesses build and deploy custom AI applications, has raised nearly $29 million in Series B funding, CEO Rahul Pangam tells Axios Pro.
Two workers have been killed and another seriously injured at Intel's Kiryat Gat fab in Israel in an explosion resulting from a gas cylinder malfunctioning
Organizers abruptly cancel 2026's Grace Hopper Celebration, one of the biggest events for women in tech, after sponsorships and registrations fall short
The cancellation of this year's Grace Hopper Celebration, one of the largest gatherings of women in technology, is the latest example …
CEO Amjad Masad says Replit is no longer working with Anthropic, citing cost and saying “ChatGPT is better now”; source: the partnership is still in place
Replit, the AI coding platform that has become a favorite of startup founders and developers, is no longer working with Anthropic …
Ledger unveils Atom, an $899 data-only Android-based smartphone companion device launching in summer 2027, as it pauses some sales following hardware tampering
Sources: top DOJ officials halt career prosecutors' Biden-era investigation of Meta over facilitating illegal drug sales and are weighing more lenient options
A hack of Internet-connected fridge controllers across ~700 European supermarkets exploited critical vulnerabilities in three models flagged by Claroty and CISA
Sony launches three new Android-powered Walkman music players, including the gold-plated NW-WM1ZM3 for $5,900, as it targets the audiophile market
E Ink unveils Kaleido 4, its next-gen color e-paper tech, replacing the Kaleido 3 displays currently used by brands including Amazon, Kobo, and PocketBook
Source: the US FTC issues ~50-page civil investigative demands to OpenAI and Anthropic over safety incidents, safeguarding practices, and consumer protection
Filings: Meta reduced its $65M midterms budget by $25M through refunds, primarily from a super PAC it launched in 2025 with $45M to fight state AI bills
Sources: OpenAI executives have warned staff over potential espionage like honey pots and insider threats and told them to adopt operational security measures
In its first meeting, Trump's Super Intelligence Force says it plans to commission a report on AI risks and develop protocols for labs to provide early warnings
Nvidia's RTX Spark Superchip in the Surface Laptop Ultra outperforms Apple's M5 Max MacBook Pro by ~25% in agentic AI completion benchmarks using Qwen models
North.cloud, which helps companies watch their cloud, AI and data spend, raised a $60M Series B led by PeakSpan Capital, taking its total funding to $67M
Q&A with Dwarkesh Patel on his podcast, lessons from history, AGI, the mood in San Francisco, the Hugging Face hack, Chinese AI, pacing the frontier, and more
Portland-based Mueon, which says its AI server racks could fit up to 10x more computing capacity, raised $65M led by Maverick Silicon, with Intel participating
Sunbound, which makes software for handling billing, insurance claims, and payments for senior living operators, raised a $24M Series A led by TTV Capital
A US official says Trump didn't order any limitations on Ukraine's access to SpaceX's Starshield; Elon Musk said any limits are ultimately decided by POTUS
Kate Sullivan /Bloomberg:
AI industry extinction warnings are genuine rather than corporate plots for regulatory capture or hype, and they go as far back as the mid-2000s and the 2010s
Alexandr Wang says ex-Apple exec Daniel Gross, now at Meta, helped bring Meta and Apple together: “we're excited for mommy and daddy to be playing nice again”
Apple and Meta, whose leaders have spent years trading barbs over privacy and the future of computing …
BofA says it hired 1,000 contractors in Q2 to support 3,000 internal staff in patching proprietary and vendor software flaws exposed by AI models like Mythos
Taiwan plans to curb AI server and chip exports to China as part of a US trade deal and make shipping restricted AI hardware to China a criminal offense
and U.S. export controls are the reasons why