Anthropic is consulting law firms as it develops agents that negotiate deals for people and interact with AI counterparts.
Cristina Criddle / Financial Times : Sources: Anthropic is consulting law firms on deal negotiation tactics as it develops AI agents to negotiate on humans' behalf and interact with AI counterparts — Tech companies are being forced to confront the rules of negotiation when machines act on humans' behalf
Microsoft canceled its planned 23,000-Nvidia-chip anchor tenancy at Nscale’s repeatedly delayed Essex data center.
James Titcomb / Telegraph : Microsoft cancels its deal with Nscale to serve as the anchor tenant and rent 23K Nvidia AI chips at a planned data center facing repeated delays in Essex, UK — US tech giant pulls the plug on Nscale deal in threat to multibillion-dollar listing — Microsoft has pulled …
DeepSeek launched search-and-fetch API access priced at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests.
DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash-1017, claiming faster completion, shorter outputs, and stronger benchmarks.
Saritha Rai / Bloomberg : DeepSeek releases V4.1-Flash-1017, an update it says offers “stronger benchmark performance, faster task completion, and shorter outputs” than its predecessor — DeepSeek released an update of its AI model this weekend that it says is faster and leaner, ramping …
openDemocracy reports Amazon uses AI systems to monitor union-organizing risk in UK warehouses.
OpenCode says a distillation attack exposed API keys for roughly 1.4% of Console users.
Walter Schulze / Startup Fortune : Anomaly Innovations, behind coding agent OpenCode, says a breach hit ~1.4% of OpenCode Console users and their API keys, in a “large scale distillation attack” — A large-scale distillation attack against the company behind the open-source coding agent OpenCode exposed stored OpenAI …
Satya Nadella discusses RTX Spark Surface hardware and Microsoft’s plan to make Windows safer for AI agents.
Joanna Stern / The New Things : An interview with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the Nvidia RTX Spark-powered Surface Laptop Ultra, plans to make Windows a safer OS to run AI agents, and more — My exclusive interview with Satya Nadella on the new Surface Laptop Ultra and Microsoft's plan to make Windows safer for AI agents
A filing says Disney will hire 60+ Character.AI staff in a deal worth about $180M over three years.
Bloomberg : Filing: Disney agreed to hire 60+ staff from Character.AI and pay them ~$180M over three years, plus $30M for retention awards; a bankruptcy judge must approve — More than 60 workers at Character.AI are being offered a lifeline from the media giant … Soft Landing — Layoffs are common in bankruptcy.
AI battery-materials startup Holyvolt reportedly raised $45M at a $245M valuation.
Nick Lichtenberg / Fortune : Holyvolt, which develops AI tools for making and testing new battery materials, raised $45M from Zone II, CC.VC, and others, a source says at a $245M valuation — Steven Prast is old enough to remember when a mobile phone came in a bag. It was too heavy to carry around, so most people mounted it in the car.
MapQuest added a map layer locating license-plate readers and cameras from more than 10 surveillance vendors.
Chase DiBenedetto / Mashable : MapQuest adds a Surveillance Layer to its mobile app showing license plate readers and cameras from 10+ companies including Flock, using OpenStreetMap data — MapQuest will not go gentle into that good night. — The navigation software — which debuted in 1996 and was later eclipsed …
Meta removed ToS wording implying it could scrape websites associated with business accounts.
Terrence O'Brien / The Verge : Meta removes ToS language that suggested it could scrape websites “associated with” business accounts, saying it applied only to “ads and business products” — Language that experts say allowed the scraping of news sites to train its AI has been removed from Meta's terms.
An ad-tech company allegedly served as distribution infrastructure for mercenary spyware.
Lean now ships verified kernels, strengthening the trusted computing base for formal proofs.
OpenJDK published JDK 28, the next major release of the Java platform.
LWN’s kernel 7.2 development report details the release’s contributors, changes, and engineering scale.
A report documents Codex Desktop continuously generating Crashpad pending dumps.
Esp32sim runs ESP32 firmware directly in the browser, enabling lightweight embedded development and testing.
Sphinx is a shipping hook that quizzes developers on AI-generated code before it is released.
Microsoft and CMU partnered on training programs for early-career software engineers.
University of California researchers report evidence that GLP-1 drugs may slow biological aging.
US federal budget deficit rose 12% in a year to nearly $2 trillion.
ProPublica investigates a mole who infiltrated the upper ranks of American militia groups.
The FT reports Israeli settlers attacked European diplomats in the West Bank.
GTCR and Elliott agreed to take car-insurance software provider CCC private in a $6.1B including-debt deal.
Bloomberg : GTCR and Elliott agree to acquire and take private CCC, a Nasdaq-listed car insurance software provider, for $4.6B; the deal values CCC at $6.1B including debt — GTCR and Elliott Investment Management are acquiring car-insurance software provider CCC Intelligent Solutions Holdings Inc …
Teal offers a statically typed dialect of Lua for safer Lua development.
LPViz provides an interactive, in-browser environment for exploring linear programming.
Furifont is a Japanese font that renders furigana alongside text.
A Commodore 64 hardware simulator lets users break individual chips and pins to observe failure behavior.
A technical explainer details what breaks as Chrome and Edge remove XSLT support.
A deep optimization write-up shows how to superoptimize a floating-point-unit emulator.
Financial Times : RegLayer: 47+ large US data center projects were delayed, withdrawn, or blocked in 2026; Bernstein says ~35% of the planned US data center pipeline is credible — A vast bet on the future of the technology is running into the unforgiving economics of the physical world
New York Times : AI debt worries mount as CoreWeave's bond yield tops 15%, insuring SoftBank debt gets pricier, and some Oracle debt trades near 80 to 90 cents on the dollar — Debt trouble at CoreWeave, Oracle and SoftBank raises questions about whether there are broader problems with the data center build-out.
Google : Google says “magic state cultivation” works in practice on its Willow quantum processor, calling it a breakthrough that reduces errors by about 40x — We've shown that magic state cultivation works on Google Quantum AI hardware. — Google Quantum AI has demonstratively opened …
Zack Abrams / The Block : Turkish police detained Hex and PulseChain founder Richard Heart on Oct. 14, seizing $7M+ in cash and six cold wallets; HEX fell nearly 50% on initial reports — Turkey's justice minister said Heart's wife and three bodyguards were also detained, and that searches turned up guns, ammunition, watches and jewelry.
Steven Zeitchik / The Hollywood Reporter : Bleecker Street says TikTok suspended the Musk documentary account for “political policy” violations and called the suspension “permanent”; Bleecker's appealing — Move comes just as Alex Gibney doc film expands to nearly 500 screens. Distributor Bleecker Street says it is appealing.