United will not let personal AI assistants complete flight bookings on its site, citing privacy and regulatory concerns, The Wall Street Journal reports. Agents can still show users United flights but cannot finish the transaction, and CEO Scott Kirby said he does not want to create another middleman. United said it may reconsider as third-party agents advance, while eBay and several major banks have also restricted agent access.
Meta's longtime head of infrastructure and co-head of engineering Santosh Janardhan is stepping down and will be replaced by Dave Brown, who joined as VP of infrastructure earlier this year after 19 years at Amazon. Janardhan, who joined Meta in 2009, will stay on for the transition and move into an advisory role on Meta Compute before leaving next year.
TechCrunch's Equity podcast discusses how local opposition, permitting delays, and power shortages are slowing the data center boom, with Ascend Analytics' Brent Nelson arguing the project pipeline is wildly inflated and only a fraction of announced AI infrastructure will actually be built. The episode also covers what a bubble burst would mean for developers with the wrong tenants, why Democrats should pursue permitting reform now, and why natural gas isn't the reliable fallback developers assume.
The Ramp AI Index shows US corporate AI spending reached a new high in October 2026, rising 1.65 percent month over month. The top 1 percent of companies by AI spending paid a median of $10,200 per employee per month, up nine percent, while a typical company spent just $16.32. OpenAI's business customer spending grew 2.1 percent versus 0.5 percent for Anthropic, and the average price per million processed text tokens fell 21 percent.
TSMC plans to invest $1B in Anthropic and OpenAI, according to Ars Technica. The report frames the move as the latest example of the AI boom's circular financing, arriving as the AI trade wobbles.
Indie game Big Walk used AI to fix a bug, and the disclosure has set off a reckoning across the indie gaming world. Many Independent Games Festival judges now say any amount of AI coding is too much.
German defense tech company Helsing unveiled Clarity, an agent-based platform that fuses sensor feeds, open-source intelligence and written reports into target recommendations for human review before data is packaged for a weapons system. Helsing says the platform runs on the customer's own infrastructure with models and interfaces developed in Europe, and that a human must authorize every handoff to a weapons system, with each decision documented under the responsible person's name. The article notes Helsing did not say whether Clarity is already running with any customer, and contrasts the promises with reported cases in Iran, Gaza and a 2026 near-miss involving a Chinese ship where AI-generated assessments were trusted uncritically.
Anthropic kicked off its IPO roadshow yesterday, and its roadshow video disclosed previously unreleased details about how the business works, including a section on compute strategy with co-founder Tom Brown. Brown said Anthropic trains and serves Claude across AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, NVIDIA GPUs and AMD GPUs, and that when the company began working with AMD GPUs this year, a system called Mythos got Claude running on AMD in three days with basically no human intervention, porting or writing almost 100% of the kernels. He also described compute multipliers as a second driver of compute advantage, saying each multiplier stacks on the ones before it and that Claude may eventually discover them entirely by itself.
Why it matters: Anthropic's IPO roadshow video details its multi-chip training and serving strategy across four chip families, including a Claude-assisted AMD port completed in three days.
Google DeepMind completed a four-week project that mathematically verified key parts of Signal, according to Ars Technica. The work hints that AI could make formal verification far more practical, though the report provides no further technical details.
ElevenLabs launched its Partner Program with enhanced commercial incentives, new certifications, joint go-to-market opportunities and dedicated technical support. The program covers 550+ active partners in 44 countries, and the partner ecosystem has generated $315 million in pipeline and over $52 million in partner-sourced and partner-influenced revenue this year. ElevenLabs aims for partners to earn $3 in services revenue for every $1 it generates, backed by forward-deployed engineers and a new certified partner directory.
At its New York Summit, ElevenLabs announced new models, agents and deployment options for its AI interaction layer, including the Interaction Engine that manages turn-taking and routes each part of a conversation to a cheaper or frontier LLM. ElevenAgents gains Memory, which builds a structured record of returning customers, and Routines, an automation layer for multi-step work before, during and after calls. ElevenLabs also previewed the ElevenAI workplace app with free early access opening today, launched a Partner Program now at more than 550 partners in 44 countries plus a McKinsey alliance, and introduced the ElevenLabs Marketplace; NVIDIA's Nemotron 3.5 Super VL is now available in ElevenAgents alongside 15 MW of new Vera Rubin compute capacity.
Modal is one of three companies, alongside Ant Group and Tines, joining gVisor's maintainers as Google donates the project and its trademarks to CNCF under a maintainer-led governance model. Modal says it launches upwards of 40 million gVisor containers a day and has contributed upstream since 2023, including nvproxy GPU support, an RDMA device proxy called rdmaproxy, and tmpfs and memory-allocator optimizations. The company says it is working on multi-GPU memory snapshots and GPUDirect Storage support for gVisor.
ElevenLabs and NVIDIA have expanded their collaboration across models, infrastructure and sovereign deployments, bringing NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super VL into the ElevenAgents platform. ElevenLabs plans to add 15MW of NVIDIA Vera Rubin capacity on top of its existing Blackwell Ultra systems, and is powering a voice agent for Poland's Centralna e-Rejestracja appointment system on-premises using NVIDIA Confidential Computing. On the ElevenAgents customer-support benchmark, Nemotron 3.5 Super VL reached leading end-to-end task-completion accuracy at 70% lower cost than other leading open models, according to ElevenLabs.
McKinsey and ElevenLabs announced an alliance to help organizations prove the value of conversational AI through initial use cases before scaling across the enterprise. The partnership combines McKinsey's industry and transformation expertise, including QuantumBlack's AI engineering, with ElevenLabs' frontier conversational AI technology and ElevenAgents platform. Dutch telecom KPN is already using the new AI-powered solutions, and the alliance plans to extend the approach to service-intensive industries such as insurance.
ElevenLabs says enterprises now account for more than 55% of its revenue, with its technology in daily operations at five of the 10 largest tech companies, five of the 10 largest insurers and four of the 10 largest telecoms. At its NYC Summit, clients including Ramp, Customers Bank, Banco Inter, Clover Health and FOX Sports described using ElevenAgents and ElevenCreative for support agents, onboarding, multilingual service and an AI persona of commentator Colin Cowherd in the FOX Sports App.
US data vendors including Mercor, Surge AI, Turing, AfterQuery and Pareto are selling reinforcement learning environments to Chinese AI labs, and the report identifies nine vendors with China business. It argues these sales let Chinese labs skip costly rollout experimentation and save memory-constrained compute, while noting the deals fall largely outside export controls and that the lag behind US labs limits the damage.
Mercor raised a $750M Series D at a $20B valuation after reaching $3B in annualized revenue, up from $1B in February and $2B in June. The company reports 5 million experts and frames its market as the 800-plus US occupations whose workflows models have yet to be evaluated against. Mercor also says it already spends 3x as much on inference as on employee salaries, and argues that if the ratio holds across the economy it points to double-digit GDP growth over the next five years.
More than 20,000 veterans and transitioning service members have claimed a free year of ChatGPT Plus, OpenAI said, and the company highlighted how they use it to prepare for civilian careers.
NVIDIA highlights four Inception startups using AI and robotics to sort mixed waste at recycling plants. AIRECO's Jetson Orin NX pilot line tops 95% recognition accuracy and targets raising annual capacity from 18,000 to 48,000 tons while cutting operating costs by 85%, and EverestLabs has deployed about 150 vision-guided robots across North America and Australia.
Security firm Claroc found that Grok Build, the vibe-coding agent from SpaceXSI, leaks proprietary business information and other sensitive secrets from thousands of users through shareable app links. Although Grok randomizes URLs so only people with the exact link can access the data, a design decision lets anyone enumerate thousands of live projects, and clicking those links generally reveals all associated data. The exposed material includes internal business plans, ad proposals, medical exam results, cruise-line galley checklists, and employee names and ID numbers, with some of it coming from 24 apps built by SpaceXSI itself, among them a confidential onboarding plan, a sales territory map of 594 accounts, and internal system addresses for sales tools.
Why it matters: Security firm Claroc's findings show how a URL design choice in Grok Build's sharing feature exposes thousands of live projects, including SpaceXSI's own internal documents.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang acknowledged an affair with a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy, and experts tell The Verge the fallout could disrupt the US AI industry and its lead over China. Companies linked to the alleged spy, Alice Huang, reportedly enabled at least $7 billion of Nvidia chip sales to China, while CNAS's Emily Kilcrease warns that with access to the latest Nvidia chips, the US lead could vanish in weeks or months. Kilcrease also said the investigations already underway will consume company bandwidth and that pending AI chip control legislation in Congress now has far higher odds of passing.
Why it matters: The piece traces how a personal scandal around Nvidia's CEO could ripple into chip export policy, compute access for US AI labs, and the US-China AI balance.
STABL is launching as a non-profit research organization that takes both frontier AI's transformative potential and the downstream bottlenecks to its societal impact seriously, a position it calls the missing top-right quadrant. It argues that institutional change, not just alignment, must be central to managing AI risk, and plans empirical work on recursive self-improvement, AI diffusion, labor market disruption and societal resilience.
a16z announced it led the Series A round of General Translation, a developer infrastructure company building full-stack, AI-powered localization that integrates directly into React apps, documentation, and tools like GitHub, Figma, and Slack. Customers including Cursor, Cognition, Ramp, and Clickhouse already use it to ship products in every language. a16z partner Martin joins the board.
NVIDIA is contributing OpenShell, its open source runtime for securing and governing autonomous agents, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a Sandbox project, and is also contributing to Google-led Agent Substrate. NVIDIA announced three new DSX AI Factory Platform components: NVIDIA Kubernetes Engine and NVIDIA Kubernetes Recipes, now in public preview, and NVIDIA Snapshot, which restores checkpointed replicas in seconds without model reload or warmup. Crusoe tested GLM-5.3 on Crusoe Cloud and cut workload ready time from roughly eight minutes to 31 seconds, while Saturn Cloud reduced vLLM startup from between two and 8.5 minutes to six and 34 seconds.
Why it matters: NVIDIA contributes its agent security runtime OpenShell to CNCF and adds Kubernetes tooling for GPU AI factories, with early Snapshot results cutting inference startup from minutes to seconds.
Preferred Networks' AUTiv automated mouse tail-vein injection system received the Japan Machinery Federation Chairman's Prize at the 12th Robot Award. The system uses 4K stereo cameras and deep learning to locate the roughly 0.3mm tail vein and performs automated puncture and dosing, reducing needle-stick accidents and animal stress. About 20 units have been delivered in Japan, with additional manufacturing confirmed.
Sakana AI has appointed retired U.S. Navy Admiral Michael Rogers, former NSA Director and Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, and Tom Moran, a former CIA Chief of Station, as Senior Advisors. They will advise the Tokyo-based company on strengthening defense capabilities and cybersecurity. Rogers served as NSA Director from 2014 to 2018, while Moran spent nearly 30 years at the CIA and served six times as Chief of Station.
Gary Marcus argues against Anthropic's IPO, citing its reported target valuation of up to $1.4 trillion against a company that has never made a profit and carries nearly $900 billion in future liabilities. He points to Anthropic's amended S-1, which warns that costs will rise and losses will continue, and to revenue growth slowing from 147% in Q2 to 47% in Q3, as evidence that the trillion-dollar projections built on tokenmaxxing no longer hold.
Why it matters: Gary Marcus uses Anthropic's IPO filing and slowing revenue growth to argue that the valuation rests on projections the company's own numbers no longer support.
Users of Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex are hitting safety checks, warnings or account restrictions when using the tools for AI-powered reverse engineering, with one X user reporting an OpenAI ban for "cyber abuse" after decompiling Samsung TVs. A Reddit post in r/ClaudeCode titled "The Dream is dead" and reports in the Reverse Engineer Anything Discord describe Claude refusing to decompile, while the Decomp.wtf project has shut down. OpenAI engineer Tarun Gogineni said there is no prohibition against reverse engineering with Codex and that the blocks are mostly accidental and being fixed, but practitioners say they are moving toward open weight, local and uncensored models.
Ulanqab, a once little-known city in Inner Mongolia, has become an emerging AI computing hub as data centers spread across its grasslands, drawing young workers from across China. Kuaishou began operating its first self-built data center there in 2023, and DeepSeek advertised senior operations and maintenance roles paying up to 30,000 yuan ($4,200) a month this April. The labor market is now saturating, with employers raising hiring standards and some considering only bachelor's degree holders.
Google and Adobe are expanding their partnership to embed Adobe's creative and productivity tools directly into everyday Google apps, and to bring Google's frontier AI models into Adobe's apps. Google Drive and Gmail will soon surface Adobe Acrobat as a suggested app with an "Edit with" entry point in file previews, while Adobe is adding Acrobat and creative tool connectors to Gemini and Gemini Enterprise and bringing creative tools to AI Mode in Google Search. Businesses can use Adobe's CX Enterprise Coworker agent in Gemini Enterprise, and Adobe with Google DeepMind will explore an image model for Photoshop that could enable near-real-time edits.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang emailed the entire company on Sunday to admit an affair, and his board opened an investigation into whether the woman, Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, was working for China's Ministry of State Security. Megaspeed, the Singapore cloud company suspected of smuggling Nvidia chips into China, is still buying them.
Ukraine's fiber-optic drones, immune to battlefield jamming, now face higher costs as importing fiber material from China competes with global demand from AI data centers for the same limited supply. Ukrainian drone makers are adapting, with finished spools holding enough cable for drones to regularly operate at ranges of dozens of miles, and up to 62 miles in extreme cases.
New ThinkYoung research and lessons from OpenAI's EMEA education partnerships focus on supporting teachers, AI literacy, and independent learning. The work addresses the guidance gap in how AI is used in classrooms across the region.
Waymo has launched the Waymo Accessibility Network UK, a forum where British disability advocates and charities engage in two-way dialogue to shape how its autonomous technology is deployed on UK streets. The network's 10 inaugural partners include RNIB, Age UK, Transport for All and Guide Dogs UK, and members will support user research and product testing. Waymo says feedback from the disability community already informs features such as audio cues and vehicle-finding tools.
Sierra is marking two years of APX, a one-year rotational program that moves new grads through two six-month rotations in Agent Product Manager, Agent Engineer, Platform Product Manager, or Platform Engineer roles. APX members have shipped Voice Personas, opened Sierra's first Asia office in Singapore, and launched mortgage agents for Rocket and the Horizon release. Sierra says nearly 50% of the Fortune 50 are customers.
Scott Wiener, author of California's SB 1047 and SB 53, won the congressional race for Nancy Pelosi's open San Francisco seat and said he wants Congress to act decisively on AI risk. He cited a METR report widely read as evidence of recursive self-improvement at Anthropic and called for a strong federal regulator, whistleblower protections, testing and auditing requirements, and a kill switch. Wiener, whose campaign received over $3 million from the pro-regulation nonprofit Public First Action, opposes broad federal preemption of state AI laws and described himself as only cautiously optimistic about Congress reining in AI.
Anthropic, PBC launched the roadshow for its proposed initial public offering of 825,000,000 Class A common shares, of which 801,351,354 are offered by Anthropic and 23,648,646 by certain existing stockholders. The expected price range is $70.00 to $78.00 per share, and Anthropic has applied to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol ANT. Anthropic also expects to grant underwriters a 30-day option for up to 123,750,000 additional shares, and the registration statement filed with the SEC has not yet become effective.
Why it matters: Anthropic's IPO roadshow filing details 825 million Class A shares priced at $70 to $78 and a planned Nasdaq listing under the symbol ANT, giving a concrete view of the company's public-market plans.
Nvidia's board has opened an investigation into CEO Jensen Huang's admitted affair with Alice Huang, a former Megaspeed International executive that U.S. intelligence believes is a Chinese spy, and said it has no reason to believe national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised. Alex Kantrowitz argues the affair damages Huang's credibility as the loudest U.S. voice against chip export controls to China, potentially inviting stricter rules, while Anthropic's Dario Amodei and Google's TPU business stand to gain. Huang remains CEO for now, with Washington hearings and the board's findings likely to shape whether he keeps the seat.
Why it matters: The piece maps how a personal scandal involving Jensen Huang could reshape Nvidia's lobbying credibility on China export controls and open room for Anthropic and Google.
Workers who lost jobs in AI-exposed roles in 2025 took about a month longer than peers in other roles to find new employment, according to Exponential View's data roundup. Anthropic paid $3.4 billion to take over a supplier's two-year-old order for 1.7GW of gas generators, the largest known power-equipment purchase by an AI lab. Apple's memory inventory grew 2.5x year on year, helping shield it from memory cost increases.
Lubrizol is building a digital foundation that connects business processes, modern data platforms, and cloud infrastructure to speed up R&D for specialty chemicals. IT vice president Girish Rao says the aim is to give scientists better tools, not replace scientific judgment, with "fusion teams" of scientists, data scientists, and IT staff starting from small pilots to build trust. Cloud access also supports sustainability work such as modeling starch and corn-based material alternatives.