Baby’s first local AI agent. | Photo: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge I'm embarking on a journey I've so far been hesitant to go on: actually using AI on the regular. Giving my most personal data to cloud services has been a major hold up for me, but it's increasingly possible to run powerful models locally to see what they're capable of. Is this tech so useful that it's worth throwing gobs of…
Allie Garfinkle / Fortune : AI retail trading agent startup Catalyst raised a $30M seed led by Sequoia and says a pilot generated hundreds of millions in trading volume over two weeks — Justin Zheng is pretty sure Dylan Iskandar took his money the first time they met as teenagers, over a poker game in 2019 at a conference run by economist Tyler Cowen.
Ashley Campion / CrowdStrike : Analysis: the hacker who targeted South Korean banks is likely Chinese-speaking, financially motivated, and used LLMs and open-source Chinese agentic tool ARTEX — CrowdStrike Intelligence identified infrastructure associated with a targeted campaign against South Korean financial organizations that resulted in exfiltrated data.
Isabelle Bousquette / Wall Street Journal : Quantum startup Oratomic raised a $475M Series B at a $5.4B valuation, up from $1.5B after raising a $300M Series A in July, taking its total funding to $775M — Oratomic's latest raise brings the company's total funding to $775 million — Quantum computing startup Oratomic raised $475 million …
Kirsi Heikel / Bloomberg : Analysis: planned and active data center investments in Finland surpass €67B, driven by AI demand, cool climate conditions, and renewable energy access — Finland's data center boom is gathering pace, with several new projects unveiled since after Alphabet Inc.'s Google announced …
CNBC : Huawei says it aims to increase its overseas smartphone market share and expand HarmonyOS globally within one to three years, as Huawei-powered EV sales slow — BEIJING — Faced with a slowdown in the smartphone and car markets, Huawei's consumer business is choosing to focus on phones with homegrown chips.
Steve Thompson / Washington Post : The US Federal Reserve's September meeting shows officials are increasingly citing surging AI investments, not tariffs, as the driver of rising goods inflation — At their September meeting, Fed officials cited “surging AI-related investments” as a factor in inflation pressures. — Loading...
Bloomberg : India's Global Capability Centers, which employ 2.4M people across companies like JPMorgan, are automating entry-level tasks and hiring far fewer graduates — Students struggle to find jobs as banks automate more tasks — Purva Jagtap graduated from her engineering college in India …
David Pierce / The Verge : ICANN receives 1,615 TLD applications from 481 applicants; Meta, OpenAI, and eight others applied for .agent, seven companies applied for .agi, and six for .asi — ICANN's latest top-level domain applications are out, and they are all about AI. … For the first time in years …
Mark Bergen / Bloomberg : UK-based quantum computing startup Universal Quantum raised a $100M+ Series A led by DCVC and Firgun Ventures to expand research hubs in Germany and Singapore — A British startup seeking to build a working quantum computer has raised $100 million from a range of investors …
Anniek Bao / CNBC : Manus' parent Butterfly Effect says it raised $500M+, led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, in its first funding since Meta was forced to unwind its Manus buyout — AI agent startup Manus has raised more than $500 million in its first funding round since Meta was forced to abandon its acquisition of the company.
Brent Crane / Bloomberg : A profile of Garmin CEO Cliff Pemble, who helped diversify its GPS product lines and grew annual revenue from $2.6B in 2013 to a record $7.2B last year — The company hit $7.2 billion in sales last year across fitness, outdoor, marine, automotive and aviation.
AHM : The Association for Human Mathematics says OpenAI's new math documents show power, not scholarship, and urges mathematicians to stop working with the company — Yesterday, on October 6th, 2026, OpenAI - which is currently defending lawsuits against accusations of illegal plagiarism …
Cade Metz / New York Times : A look at Emeryville, CA-based Atomic Machines, which is training AI on materials and designs to revamp how microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are built — Atomic Machines is training artificial intelligence on materials and designs — and then using it to build tiny physical devices.
Financial Times : SemiAnalysis: China has 24 GW of operational compute capacity and another 50 GW planned or under construction, compared to 56 GW operational in the US — Beijing is rolling out AI infrastructure at breakneck speed in Inner Mongolia — News — Samsung Electronics Co Ltd
Scott Aaronson / Shtetl-Optimized : A theoretical computer scientist, citing sources, says AI labs have quietly started probing whether their models can break important cryptographic protocols — -friend-of-the-blog Omer Reingold (shared with permission) — Last night my 9-year-old son was taunting my wife …
Felix Ng / Cointelegraph : Vitalik Buterin says “we should take the risks to cryptography from AI-accelerated math seriously”, backing a “bunker mode” call for the blockchain industry — Ethereum researchers say crypto users should consider moving funds to fresh addresses …
Bloomberg : Filing: Shanghai-based AI chipmaker Biren raises ~$515M in a new share sale; Biren's Hong Kong-listed stock is down 50%+ from a June peak but up ~70% YTD — Shanghai Biren Technology Co. aims to raise HK$4.04 billion ($515 million) in another share sale to help bankroll …
Priyanka Salve / CNBC : Elon Musk claims “certain oligarchs” are stalling Starlink's India launch to protect a “monopolistic chokehold”; SpaceX signed MOUs with Jio and Airtel in 2025 — SpaceX founder Elon Musk has accused vested interests of blocking the launch of his company's satellite internet service …
Bloomberg : Sources: Isomorphic Labs, an AI drug discovery startup spun out of Google DeepMind, is in early talks to raise funds at a valuation of at least $40B — Isomorphic Labs, an AI-powered drug discovery startup spun out of Alphabet Inc.'s Google DeepMind, is in early talks to raise new funds …
The Information : Source: Nvidia considered a last-minute OpenRouter bid, telling its leadership it was prepared to make a generous offer, but OpenRouter didn't want to wait — This July, Nvidia caught wind of a looming takeover of OpenRouter, a three-year-old startup that had emerged as a popular marketplace for AI models …
Angel Au-Yeung / Wall Street Journal : OpenRouter: the share of business spending between OpenAI and Anthropic models was roughly even in September, vs. Anthropic commanding a 75% share in January — Both companies need to show Wall Street they have sustainable businesses ahead of planned IPOs — Anthropic edged to the front …
Diana Novak Jones / Reuters : Unsealed docs: in its lawsuit, New York alleges TikTok gave thousands of users, including youth, non-functional safety features as part of placebo experiments — TikTok ran an experiment on thousands of users who tried to turn on a safety feature on the platform, giving them non-functional versions …
Bloomberg : Keyu Tian, a former ByteDance intern, raised ~$30M from 5Y and IDG for his unnamed AI lab that focuses on building world models, at a $200M post-money valuation — A former ByteDance Ltd. intern has secured funding from venture heavyweights including 5Y Capital for a stealth startup …
Marina Temkin / TechCrunch : Mecka, which collects human motion data to train humanoid robots, raised a $60M Series B led by Sequoia, with participation from Nvidia, M12, and others — Mecka AI, a startup that collects and analyzes human motion data to train humanoid robots and other kinds of robots …
Maxwell Zeff / Wall Street Journal : Letter: three fired OpenAI researchers urge AI labs to halt work that could impair AI monitoring and say their firings are “chilling those who remain at OpenAI” — In a letter to the board, recently-terminated employees ask that the industry not move forward with work that would degrade the ability to monitor AI
Yoolim Lee / Bloomberg : Samsung reports preliminary Q3 operating profit up 782% YoY to ~$80.1B, vs. ~$81.2B est., and revenue up 127% to ~$145.7B, lower than expected — Samsung Electronics Co. posted another record profit as surging memory chip prices and relentless spending on artificial-intelligence infrastructure boosted its earnings.
Connor Jones / The Register : The AGs of Florida, Iowa, Montana, and Nebraska sue TP-Link, alleging it deceptively marketed its routers' security and didn't properly disclose ties to China — Router maker rejects allegations it misled buyers about protection and its reliance on Chinese suppliers
Lynn Doan / Bloomberg : The DOD offers chipmaker Wolfspeed, which filed for bankruptcy in 2025, a conditional loan of up to $1.5B in exchange for warrants for up to 7.5% of the company — The US Defense Department pledged to issue a conditional loan to Wolfspeed Inc., the chipmaker that filed for bankruptcy last year …
Wall Street Journal : Sources: Broadcom has been working to arrange more than $50B in financing for OpenAI's custom AI chip; Oracle is in talks on financing for a big chip purchase — Apollo, Blackstone and Goldman Sachs among lenders in talks to finance megadeals worth tens of billions of dollars apiece
@openai : OpenAI says GPT-6 in ChatGPT's Chat tab is powered by GPT-6 Sol for Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise tiers and GPT-6 Luna for Free and Go tiers — GPT-6 with Intelligent UI rolls out globally to Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users today and will expand to Free and Go users starting tomorrow. GPT-6 in ChatGPT is powered by GPT-6 Sol for Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise ti…
The developer of Hermes agent raised a $90 million Series B.
Leo Schwartz / The Information : Sources: former White House AI adviser Sriram Krishnan is raising a ~$500M fund to back growth- and later-stage US AI companies, prioritizing national security — Sriram Krishnan, a key AI adviser to President Donald Trump who left the White House in June, is raising an AI-focused venture fund …
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat : Anthropic cuts Sonnet 5.5 cache read price from $0.20 to $0.10 and adds monthly API credits: $100 for Max 5x, $200 for Max 20x, up to $500 shared by Team users — The model starts at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens, matching OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna.
Frederic Lardinois / The New Stack : Anthropic prices Haiku 5.5 at $0.10/1M input and $0.50/1M output tokens for requests up to 100K tokens, and $0.50 and $2.50 above, vs. $1 and $5 for Haiku 4.5 — Anthropic on Wednesday launched Claude Haiku 5.5, the first new version of its smallest and most affordable model in nearly a year.
OpenAI : OpenAI rolls out GPT-6 in ChatGPT with Intelligent UI, a new feature that includes interactive elements like charts, buttons, and forms in answers — Last month we introduced the first GPT-6 models for paid customers and today we're bringing that next generation of intelligence to more people …
Anthropic : Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 5.5, the first Haiku model with effort controls, for high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks like summaries and classification — Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5: the cheapest, fastest, and most capable small model we've ever released. — Claude Haiku 5.5 is designed for high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks.
Zac Bowden / Windows Central : Microsoft opens preorders for the Surface Laptop Ultra from $2,599, shipping October 16; it has a breakaway port like Apple's MagSafe, but on a standard USB-C — Microsoft has finally given us the all-important pricing and availability details for its flagship Surface Laptop Ultra device, which it first unveiled back in June.
Stevie Bonifield / The Verge : Microsoft opens preorders for the $5,999 Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, with 128GB of unified memory to run local models with 120B+ parameters, shipping in November — Microsoft's high-end AI mini PC for developers starts shipping in November. — Microsoft's Nvidia-powered Surface RTX Spark Dev Box …
Two years after trying to sidestep mobile apps with dedicated AI hardware, Rabbit is launching OS3, a cross-platform agent that lives on the screens you already use.