Meta’s Age Check Depends on Apple and Google
A New Mexico jury awarded $375 million against Meta over child safety in its apps. A separate state-AG agreement calls for age signals from Apple and Google outside them.
Muse Meets the Checkout Boundary
Meta says more than a quarter of Muse’s 10 million-plus users have bought through the app, averaging over $200 per purchase. Shopify plans a Shop Pay route to checkout; Amazon has blocked the agent from shopping on its site.
NIST Analyzed 199 of 3,370 CVEs Before AI Scaled Up
NIST analyzed 199 of 3,370 incoming CVEs in March 2024. By 2026, it was reserving NVD analysis for vulnerabilities it judged most consequential.
Recursion’s 23,000TB, Warp’s $215M Lab Bet
Warp Sciences raised $215 million to pair AI with robotics. Biohub’s $1.8 billion Virtual Biology Initiative puts a larger, differently structured commitment behind the measurements that predictive models need.
Aptoide Entered Google Play; Setapp Plans to Close
Third-party app stores face a test of effective, not merely legal, access: Australia’s iPhone order targets March 1, 2027, while AltStore topped 100,000 EU downloads and Setapp Mobile planned to close.
Beijing Unwound Meta’s $2 Billion Manus Deal
Microsoft and Google put computer use inside existing products, while Cursor starts agents from workflow triggers. After Beijing forced Meta to unwind its planned $2 billion Manus acquisition, Butterfly Effect raised more than $500 million to build independently.
PHP releases security fixes for two critical unauthenticated RCE vulnerabilities, affecting all web request-serving installations, and urges PHP users to update
PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35 fix two critical vulnerabilities that can allow unauthenticated remote code execution.
Meta reports Q3 revenue up 26% YoY to $64.6B, operating income down 37% YoY to $12.99B on a $9.9B AG settlement, and family DAP up 3% YoY to 3.64B for September
Announces Establishment of New Class C Common Stock — Meta Platforms, Inc. (Nasdaq: META) today reported financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2026.
Source and leaked memo: EA plans to cut ~400 jobs, or ~3% of its total staff, and shut down BioWare; EA went private in August following a $55B leveraged buyout
The next ‘Mass Effect’ will be canceled as part of the layoffs — Electronic Arts Inc. said it will lay off staff and shut down BioWare …
A New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $25B in penalties after a jury found Meta misled residents about its data practices in the Cambridge Analytica scandal
Meta was ordered to pay $25 billion in penalties by a New Mexico court on Wednesday as part of a data privacy case that stemmed …
Anthropic debuts Claude Duet, a proactive agent app for iOS, Android, and the web that works in the background, in research preview for US Pro and Max users
A research preview is available by waitlist today, starting with US Pro and Max subscribers. — Join the waitlist … ShareCopy link
iPhone Duo review: a fun device with a cool matte inner display, but the cover display is too small, it is heavy and bulky, the cameras are OK, and it gets hot
The iPhone Duo is the riskiest Apple product in years. It's a huge rethink of what an iPhone is and could be …
Microsoft reveals pricing for Xbox Cloud Gaming without Game Pass, for Xbox Insiders now and everyone in November: 10 hours for $4, 25 for $8, and 50 for $12
Microsoft is opening up Xbox Cloud Gaming to anyone in November. … Microsoft announced last month that it will let anyone …
iPhone Duo review: the outer device is by far the worst iPhone Apple has ever made, while the inner device is a splendid tablet with a UI that bests the iPad's
The very nature of the iPhone Duo raises numerous obvious questions about what it's like to use. Does it not feel thick and heavy, awkward both to pocket and unpocket?
US officials say Trump asked Elon Musk to lift Starshield restrictions; Ukraine officials said it was not fully fixed Thursday but was working at higher speeds
Military-grade system appeared to be working more normally on Thursday, soon after the call — WASHINGTON—President Trump …
GitLab patches a critical flaw, rated 10.0, that lets unauthenticated attackers run code on self-managed servers, affecting every release since 7.0 in 2014
GitLab released fixes on October 21 for a flaw that lets an attacker run code on a self-managed server without logging in, and it affects every version …
Nvidia unveils the DSX POD, a modular containerized version of its Vera Rubin reference architecture to cut data center deployment from six months to 14 days
Details released at GTC Berlin event, taking place this week — Nvidia has claimed its DSX reference architecture for AI data centers …
Cloud provider Railway says an unauthorized party may have accessed customers' encrypted environment variables and, for some, obtained the decrypted contents
Earlier this morning, Railway detected anomalous activity involving systems that store customer environment variables.
Recursive releases Flint, an open-weight, 40B-parameter coding model developed with its Eureka Machine AI system, which automated most of the development
Recursive makes the case that the benefits of using AI to build AI outweigh the risks. — For the past few days I've been testing …
Filing: Mark Zuckerberg commits to staying in Meta's HQ jurisdiction in return for nonvoting shares; he weighed leaving California over a proposed wealth tax
Meta Platforms Inc. signed an agreement with Mark Zuckerberg to keep him living in the same jurisdiction as the company's headquarters …
Sources: US banks are restricting third-party AI agents from accessing customer accounts, after some agents appeared to act independently of users' instructions
Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents operating inside customer accounts, with some agents attempting …
OpenAI says it will make its AI models available on Google Cloud's model garden and Antigravity coding tool in the coming weeks, after launching on AWS in April
OpenAI will make its artificial intelligence models available for developers through Google's cloud, following years of competition between the two companies.
Sources: advisers within Elon Musk's empire are pushing to announce a SpaceX-Tesla merger by H1 2027 so it can close while President Trump remains in power
Time is running out to pull off the $3.7 trillion merger before political and financial environments take a turn.
Microsoft says China-linked hackers used AI penetration testing tool ARTEX to compromise ConnectWise as part of a campaign targeting hundreds of organizations
A Chinese state-aligned hacking group used an AI-driven penetration testing tool to compromise IT services firm ConnectWise as part …
Walmart unveils Agent Gateway, an MCP server that lets AI agents shop on its site, and Agent Profiles that authorize agents and track their purchases separately
Walmart is embracing agentic commerce with the launch of its own Agent Gateway to manage transactions …
An Australian federal judge rules Apple must let Australian iPhone users install apps from third-party app stores starting March 1, 2027; Apple plans to appeal
An Australian federal judge has ordered Apple to make sweeping changes to its App Store rules following a years-long antitrust battle with Epic Games.
METR says a pilot test of OpenAI's monitoring system found vulnerabilities, including an exploit that could have let AI agents hide hundreds of recent actions
AI safety research group METR said on Thursday a pilot exercise to stress-test OpenAI's internal monitoring system uncovered several …
Apple is rolling out a new “Made for iPhone Duo” badge in the App Store, and touts Netflix, Prime Video, Zoom, Word, and Outlook as Duo-optimized apps at launch
Many apps, including Netflix, Microsoft Word, and Zoom, are taking advantage of the Duo's extra screen real estate.
Hugging Face releases Carbon-X, an open-weight, 14B-parameter decoder-only model trained on 300B tokens that lets users query DNA sequences via natural language
The new open-source model speaks the language of DNA and can help researchers understand the effects of any changes on gene activity and health.
OpenAI says the PHP flaws, found using GPT-5.6 Sol, “are among several significant vulnerabilities” it found and expects “similar findings to increase sharply”
Check a website: — node phpcheck.js “https://example.com” — Check the local CLI PHPJulie Bort /TechCrunch:PHP Armageddon: OpenAI, Google's Wiz find ancient holes, panicking the internetMatteo Wong...
Several government, school, and hospital websites in Europe were taken offline as organizations rush to protect themselves from two critical PHP security flaws
Several government, school and hospital websites in Europe were taken offline on Wednesday as organizations rushed to protect themselves …
The PHP Foundation details how it found and fixed the two flaws, and says it had to release patches a day early after the two CVE IDs began circulating online
Earlier today, the PHP project released PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35. These releases fix two critical vulnerabilities that …
Cloudflare says it deployed WAF mitigations for all free and paid tier customers to combat two PHP flaws by default, about nine hours ahead of public disclosure
Today, Calif.io, Wiz, OpenAI and Quarkslab disclosed two vulnerabilities in PHP, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 and known as php2shell.
PHP's creators disclose a critical memory-management vulnerability, dubbed “PHP2Shell”, that affects up to 70% of websites, discovered via GPT-5.6 Sol in August
AI tools helped find one of the most severe online bugs ever. Cyber experts are racing to patch it before hackers use AI to exploit it.
Sources: DeepSeek raised ~$15B in its latest fundraising round, one of China's largest ever, with CATL and Tencent among the biggest contributors
The Chinese AI pioneer DeepSeek has raised about 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) in its latest fundraising round, one of the country's largest ever …
Source: Elon Musk's public endorsement of a SpaceX-Tesla merger has rattled some insiders, who worry his comments could invite shareholder scrutiny and delays
Elon Musk's public endorsement this week of a potential $3.5 trillion merger between SpaceX (SPCX.O) and Tesla (TSLA.O) …
GM says it plans to debut OnStar AI, an in-car assistant that can execute vehicle functions and run diagnostics via voice commands, in the 2027 Cadillac Lyriq
Sources: Visa is in late-stage talks to buy stablecoin custody and infrastructure provider Fireblocks for ~$2.5B, its first acquisition in the stablecoin sector
Visa is in late stage talks to acquire stablecoin infrastructure and custody company Fireblocks for about $2.5 billion, Axios Pro has learned from multiple sources.
The Browser Company says it will shut down its Arc browser on December 22, launched in 2023, shifting attention to its AI-focused Dia browser, launched in 2025
New feature development for the innovative web browser ended last year. Now The Browser Company is telling users to try Dia, Arc's replacement.
Anthropic donates the Agent Skills open standard to the Agentic AI Foundation and says 70+ platforms have integrated it, after donating MCP to the AAIF in 2025
Today, we're donating Agent Skills, the open standard that gives AI agents specialized knowledge and workflows, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF).
Mark Zuckerberg says Muse has drawn 10M+ users since its launch and 25%+ of users are making purchases through the app, with an average purchase size of $200+
- Meta reported third-quarter earnings on Wednesday. — Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said over 10 million people have set up a Muse AI agent since its launch.
President Trump says he called Sundar Pichai to ask to rename the Atlantic Ocean in Google Maps, but that he would “probably pass” following Pichai's pushback
President Donald Trump said he called Google's Sundar Pichai to discuss renaming the Atlantic Ocean, but would “probably pass” …
The PHP Foundation says its patches for the RCE vulnerabilities are limited to PHP 8.2 and newer, leaving legacy deployments dependent on third-party vendors
‘This Is Not a Drill’: Critical PHP Vulnerabilities Are Setting the Internet on Fire
Canva launches Craft, its first image generation model, trained on human-designed templates, available to all users, with plans to support third-party chatbots
Design platform Canva released its first image generation model, called Canva Craft, developed by its research team to compete …
Amazon issues refunds from a 2025 settlement, crediting “President Trump's Federal Trade Commission,” the first time an FTC refund has been tied to a president
Millions of Americans are expected to receive a settlement check from Amazon credited to “President Trump's Federal Trade Commission” …
A look at Elon Musk's potential SpaceX-Tesla merger, which would create a $3.6T company at current prices but faces hurdles from shareholders and regulators
but how much should Tesla shareholders be paid?
Stockholm-based legal AI startup Legora raised a $550M Series E at an $8.8B post-money valuation led by Atreides, up from $5.55B after a $550M Series D in March
Sources: Datadog offered to acquire Israeli cloud cybersecurity startup Upwind Security for nearly $4B; Upwind is finalizing a $300M round at a ~$3.8B valuation
Enterprise software firm Datadog recently offered to buy Israeli cloud cybersecurity startup Upwind Security for nearly $4 billion …
Microsoft says its GPT-5-powered Diagnostic Orchestrator uses agents that mimic panels of experts to diagnose conditions up to 4x more accurately than doctors
'We're going to build something that is indistinguishable from human performance ... in the next couple of years,' Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman tells The Verge.
IBM reports Q3 revenue up 5% YoY to $17.1B, above $16.82B est., net income up 26% to $2.19B, software revenue up 8% to $7.8B, and infrastructure revenue up 4%
AI code-testing startup Blacksmith raised a $66M Series C led by Sequoia Capital at a $1B valuation, up from $550M after raising a $45M Series B in August
Apple says it plans to add Reachability to the iPhone Duo later in 2026, helping users with small hands more easily access the left or right edges of the screen
Julian Chokkattu /Wired:
AWS analysts say that at least one actor attempted to exploit the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities on October 17, four days before their public disclosure and patching
and used—the PHP vulnerabilities before they were disclosed. And of course now everybody's getting in on it. from @lhn.bsky.socialAndrew Couts /@couts:NEW: AWS detected attempts to exploit the PHP vu...
a16z rebrands a16z Crypto as a16z Frontier and expands the fund's scope to back startups developing AI, robotics, and other emerging technologies
In 2018, Andreessen Horowitz made a splash in the venture capital world by launching a spin-off dedicated to digital assets called a16z Crypto.
Barclays plans to cut 5,000 jobs, or ~5% of its workforce, by the end of 2026 as part of AI-driven cost cutting, with ~60% affecting support and developer roles
Amazon rebrands its Kindle Unlimited subscription as Kindle+ and expands access to audiobooks, including titles narrated by AI
Unlike narrated audiobooks from Audible and other providers, the audiobooks created with Virtual Voice in Kindle+ will instead be narrated by AI. — ZDNET's key takeaways
Meta says it will create a new class of nonvoting stock to raise capital for developing and serving AI models, with the 2-for-1 stock split on January 19, 2027
Item 1.01. Entry into a Material Definitive Agreement.
eMudhra says it will exit the SSL/TLS certificate business, 1% of its revenue, after its TLS certificates with private keys of just 3 to 8 bits were compromised
Indian digital trust services provider eMudhra (EMUD.NS) on Thursday said it would voluntarily withdraw from the global SSL/TLS …
Sources: OpenAI nears an up to $30B round led by investors from the UAE and Coatue at a $1.25T pre-money valuation, as an “opportunistic” bridge ahead of an IPO
OpenAI is closing in on a funding round that could value the artificial intelligence giant at more than $1 trillion ahead …
SAP: Q3 cloud revenue up 25% YoY to €6.67B, vs. €6.57B est., total revenue up 12% to €10.27B, current cloud backlog up 26% to €24.1B, all in constant currencies
Ukraine says the abrupt throttling of US-funded Starshield grounded dozens of drones mid-flight, costing one unit $1M+, and halted some strikes for three days
Memo: eBay is cutting ~9% of its workforce to simplify operations and shift resources to its fastest-growing areas; eBay cut ~6%, or 800 employees, in February
Filings: Nvidia, Anthropic, and OpenAI had their highest-spending lobbying quarter between July and September, spending $2.2M, $2.1M, and $1.5M, respectively
Collectively, they spent nearly $6 million around cybersecurity, child safety, and more. … It was a busy summer for AI lobbyists.
Nvidia launches its OpenShell Reference Architecture, a framework to secure and monitor AI agents, partnering with Canonical, AWS, Google, Microsoft, and others
Thomas Claburn /The Register:
OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads to 26 additional countries, taking the total to 83 countries, and says the platform has 100K+ advertisers, up from 20K in late August
Texas Instruments reports Q3 revenue up 28% YoY to $6.06B, above $5.93B est., net income up 78% YoY to $2.43B, and forecasts $5.8B-$6.3B in Q4, vs. $5.73B est.
Sources: SoftBank's SB Energy is considering going public as soon as December or waiting until 2027, as it closely watches Anthropic's IPO, expected in November
SB Energy, the SoftBank Group-controlled developer of a massive planned Ohio data center project for OpenAI …
Microsoft and Alphabet join 14 other companies objecting to a plan by OKXICE, a venture of OKX and ICE, to trade blockchain-based versions of their shares
A growing number of companies are pushing back against tokenized trading of their shares. Microsoft and Alphabet are the latest …
Spotify Q3: revenue up 16% YoY to €4.97B, below €4.98B est., subscribers up 9% YoY to 306M, MAUs up 11% YoY to 788M, meeting est., and €672M in operating income
Sources: Elon Musk has invested ~$1B in Ellisons' Skydance; in 2022, David Ellison's father, Larry Ellison, invested $1B in Musk's deal to take Twitter private
Microsoft says it is closing The Garage, which for 17 years gave employees worldwide space and tools for side projects and ran the company's Global Hackathon
Microsoft is winding down The Garage as a companywide program, ending a 17-year run for the effort that gave employees space and tools …
Whop, which helps people start, run, and scale businesses and uses AI to suggest business decisions, raised $205M led by Sequoia Capital at a $5.1B valuation
AuxoAI, which helps large businesses build and deploy AI systems, raised a $20.7M Series A led by NTTVC to accelerate growth and scale enterprise AI consulting
How the US and China are building rival “AI empires” to extend their power over innovation, production, science, culture, and, ultimately, advanced thought
Jensen Huang says he urged UK-based neocloud Nscale to “work around the clock” to resolve data center delays amid investor pushback over its $30B IPO valuation
Cloudflare's Matthew Prince says PHP2Shell exploit attempts on its network rose from thousands in the 10 hours before the disclosure to millions afterward
Matthew Prince /@eastdakota:
Watchtower, which uses AI and simulation software to help the US Armed Forces make logistical decisions, emerges from stealth with a $35M seed
Flapping Airplanes, which is working on methods to train AI models using less data and compute and make the chips more efficient, raised $1B at a $6B valuation
Palantir says that neither it nor the US government has a “kill switch” for its Maven military AI system that NATO uses, after Ukraine's Starshield disruptions
ServiceNow and Nvidia launch Arc, a personal, long-running enterprise AI agent for productivity tasks across email and Teams, for RTX Spark and Nvidia OpenShell
Radhika Rajkumar /ZDNET:
Source: a16z plans to drop “crypto” from its flagship blockchain fund, rebranding it to “a16z frontier” and broadening its investment strategy beyond crypto
Sources: the Pentagon quietly established the Technology Support Office (TSO), a sabotage agency for executing cyberattacks, supply chain disruptions, and more
Minneapolis-based Slingshot, which uses AI to help businesses offer embedded insurance, emerges from stealth with a $27M seed co-led by Rally and Skyward Group
1Password passes $500M in ARR, up from $400M in November 2025, driven by enterprise AI coding assistants and agents, and launches 1Password for Agents
Meta expects its 2026 capex to be $135B-$145B, up from $130B-$145B previously, and forecasts Q4 revenue of $73B-$76B, vs. $73.6B est.; META jumps 3%+ pre-market
Riley Griffin /Bloomberg:
US SEC filings show how Meta restructured its stock to shield Mark Zuckerberg from California's proposed wealth tax, after he said he'd sell his Palo Alto home
The extraordinary story of how Mark Zuckerberg wheeled and dealed to get Meta's board of directors to protect him from California's wealth tax. With @elitanjourno https://www.nytimes.com/...Teddy Schl...
Warp Sciences, founded by former OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil to speed up drug development using AI, emerges from stealth with $215M at an $865M post-money valuation
Sources: SpaceX is in talks with at least one major cellular infrastructure firm to secure a minimum of 80K US cell sites, as it eyes a wireless carrier launch
SpaceX aims to secure a minimum of 80,000 cell sites across the US, and it's in talks with at least one major cellular infrastructure company …
A look at Huawei and DeepSeek's mutual reliance, where Huawei provides compute hardware while DeepSeek contributes AI model workloads and kernel optimizations
How the AI boom is boosting paint maker PPG's sales: its specialized gray coatings resist fire, rust, and more, and total $3M to $8M per data center, per JLL
OpenAI, PerturbAI, and Scripps say thousands of GPT-Rosalind agents analyzed data on millions of mouse brain cells in 32 minutes, a job that takes humans months
Enact, which develops full-stack tech for general-purpose robots, emerges from stealth with a $30M pre-seed from Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch, Yann LeCun, and more
Dario Amodei says Anthropic's “race to the top” makes AI safer, lists nine safety decisions with “substantial costs”, and admits to mishandling a draft AI bill
Nirva, which plans to launch a wearable AI personal companion that offers relationship advice and more, raised $25M, bringing its total funding to $33M
Claude flagged 493 security issues across 25 open-source projects, covering 5M+ lines of C, C++, Java, PHP, and Python code; one went unnoticed for 21 years
Filing: Meta reports ~$825B in lease and contract commitments, up from nearly $700B in July; off-balance-sheet leases total $355.7B through 2036; META drops 5%+
Sarah Frier /Bloomberg:
Demis Hassabis says he expects AGI within two to three years, down from his three-to-five-year prediction earlier in 2026, and discusses AI's science potential
Epic says “Fortnite is coming back to the App Store in Australia” on Thursday after a federal court ruled in an antitrust case that Apple must open up iOS
Rhea Rose Abraham /Reuters:NEW
A Micron labor union staged Taiwan's first-ever strike in the semiconductor industry on Thursday, demanding a regular profit-sharing scheme for its employees
Anthropic and Citrini Research use an internal Claude model to autonomously generate protein minibinders against five scorpion neurotoxins, testing 211 designs
Maxinsights, which creates training data for robots using first-person footage from cameras worn by 5,000+ contractors, raised a $30M seed led by Peak XV
Sources: OpenAI has cut its valuation target to $1.25T, down from the $1.4T valuation it pitched earlier this month, after facing resistance from some investors
Still seems a bit high to me given they were getting lapped by Anthropic just a few short months ago.
Pressure to back promising AI startups is upending the VC investment process, with investors willing to buy into the same round at rapidly escalating valuations
Chicago-based Formic, which provides robots-as-a-service automation to manufacturers, raised $50M, including a $40M Series B and $10M in asset-backed financing
Israeli security company Lava finds 32 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra B300 chips connected to systems linked to state-owned operator China Telecom, despite US controls
Xona, which plans to deploy a 258-satellite low-Earth orbit constellation as a commercial alternative to GPS, raised a $250M Series D at a $2.45B valuation
Sources: Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner proposed joining a bid for TikTok's European business over lunch with Charles Kushner, the US ambassador to France
Atlanta-based Tractian, which uses AI and sensors to predict machine failures and recommend maintenance plans, raised a $130M Series D at a $1.4B valuation
Meta reports 18% YoY ad revenue growth in Europe for Q3, down from ~40% in Q1 and 24% in Q2, lagging the US and Canada, after rolling out Less Personalized Ads
Isabella Ward /Wired: