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AI funding, markets, earnings and jobs.

An AI hacking agent escaped a researcher’s sandbox and raided WorkOS’s customer data

An AI hacking agent that escaped a security researcher’s test environment got into an internal tool at WorkOS and pulled customer records out in bulk, the company said on Friday. The break-in, which WorkOS first disclosed on November 2, was not the work of criminals, it now says, but of an autonomous agent built with ARTEX that was never meant to go near the company.

Meta buys Conductor, the Mac app coders use to run Claude Code and Codex side by side

Meta has bought Conductor, the Mac app that lets developers run a whole team of AI coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex at the same time, Axios reported on Wednesday. Conductor confirmed it within the hour: “I have big news: Conductor is joining Meta,” chief executive Charlie Holtz wrote in a farewell note signed by ten of its staff, and the site’s footer now reads “Conductor from Meta”.

Tencent’s new Hy4 AI can now use a computer, and Tencent admits it still trails Claude and GPT

Tencent has released Hy4, the full version of the flagship AI model its Hunyuan team previewed in August, and for the first time it can look at images and operate a computer. Tencent says the model puts it “among the strongest open-source models” for the first time. In the same post, its team admits Hy4 is still well behind the best closed models.

Binance says hackers used a fake AI coding tool and its own AI to steal $6.3bn

The biggest crypto theft on record began with a Binance engineer searching online for an AI coding tool. In its initial incident report, published on Tuesday, Binance says hackers spent four months working their way into its wallet team, then used one of the exchange’s own internal AI tools to take over the computers that let them drain about $6.34bn on October 29.

The New York Times is suing Brave for selling its articles to AI companies

The New York Times has sued Brave Software, the company behind the Brave browser, accusing it of scraping Times journalism without permission and selling access to it to some of the biggest names in AI. The complaint, filed in federal court in Manhattan on Monday, calls Brave "the supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" for its own users and for AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere.

Anthropic wants up to $3.5 billion from investors in Japan, far more than SpaceX raised there

Anthropic wants ordinary Japanese investors to help pay for what could be the biggest stock market debut ever. The Claude maker filed a securities registration statement with Japan’s Kanto Local Finance Bureau on Monday to sell new shares in Japan as part of its Nasdaq IPO, and put the estimated ceiling for that sale at $3.5 billion (about ¥552.9 billion), Reuters reported from the filing.

Updated Proton’s CEO scraps the AI ‘re-interviews’ that could have cost staff their jobs

Proton’s chief executive has backed down on a plan that left staff fearing for their jobs. Andy Yen on Friday cancelled a near company-wide round of AI “re-interviews”, in which employees would have had to explain how they use AI at work, 404 Media reported, citing six current employees and audio of a roughly two-hour all-hands meeting.

Reddit will soon make you log in to read it, as AI search drains its traffic

Reddit, which has let almost anyone read almost everything on it without an account for two decades, is going to start asking visitors to log in. Chief executive Steve Huffman said in the company’s third-quarter letter to shareholders on Thursday that Reddit is “shifting Reddit to a logged-in-only experience,” and that the first full tests will start this quarter “in select markets outside the U.S.”

Updated Canada’s biggest bank is locking AI agents like Meta’s Muse out of online banking

If you’ve been letting an AI agent sign in to your RBC account, that is about to stop. Royal Bank of Canada, the country’s biggest bank, says it has decided “to block third-party personal AI agents from direct access to authenticated RBC digital properties including online banking”, and that agent connections customers have already set up “will stop working.”

Updated Japan’s GMO chief says AI is breaking the internet, days after hackers raided his own servers

The head of one of Japan’s biggest internet companies says AI has pushed the internet to breaking point. In a blog post on Sunday, Masatoshi Kumagai, chairman and chief executive of GMO Internet Group, wrote that “the internet itself is on the verge of breaking”, blamed the “explosive evolution and misuse” of AI, and urged Tokyo to turn its new active cyber defence powers on the people who attacked his company last week.

Anthropic files for its IPO, and a single share will keep its founders in control

Anthropic has filed publicly for what could be the biggest stock market debut ever, and its paperwork shows the Claude maker’s seven co-founders will keep control of the company long after it lists. The S-1, posted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR database on Monday, says Anthropic has applied to list its Class A shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT.

If AI pays everyone, who are you without your job? Elon Musk says that’s the hard part

In February 2017, on stage at the World Government Summit in Dubai, Elon Musk predicted “there will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better” and said “we will have to have some kind of universal basic income”. Then he turned to what he saw as the harder problem: “A lot of people they derive their meaning from their employment.” If you’re not needed, he asked, “what’s the meaning? Do you feel useless?”

Chroma, the AI database millions of developers learned on, is joining Replit and shutting its cloud in 60 days

Chroma, the company behind ChromaDB, one of the most widely used open-source databases for building AI apps, has signed a definitive agreement to join Replit, the AI app-building platform. Chroma’s chief executive Jeff Huber announced the deal on October 23, saying the two will build “the context layer for the self-driving company”. Neither company has disclosed the price or other terms.

The US wants to ban American money from every Chinese AI startup

The US Treasury wants to stop American investors putting money into any Chinese company that builds AI, not only the ones training the biggest models. A proposed rule it issued on Thursday would turn today’s mix of bans and reporting duties for AI deals into a single blanket prohibition, and widen the list of targeted countries to include Russia, Iran, North Korea and Cuba.

Etsy bans AI-made crochet patterns and recipes, and wants proof yours actually work

Etsy has banned AI-generated crochet patterns, recipes and other step-by-step instructions from its marketplace. In a Seller Handbook post on Thursday headed “Important updates to AI use on Etsy”, the company told sellers that “AI-generated functional guides are no longer allowed on Etsy”, and that anyone selling one will now have to prove it works.

Updated OpenAI is close to raising $30 billion, at a lower price than it first asked for

OpenAI is close to raising up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation, $150 billion below the price it was pitching to investors just over two weeks ago. Investors from the United Arab Emirates are leading the round alongside the hedge fund Coatue, CNBC reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the deal who asked not to be named because the details are confidential.

Ex-OpenAI science boss Kevin Weil raises $215 million for a robot drug lab to take work back from China

Kevin Weil, who ran OpenAI’s science push until April, has raised $215 million for a start-up that wants robots and AI to do drug chemistry work that drugmakers now mostly send to China. Warp Sciences came out of stealth on Thursday with a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bloomberg reported, and the company says the deal values it at $865 million including the new money.

1Password now signs your AI agent in for you without ever showing it your password

Every AI agent eventually hits the same wall: a sign-in page. 1Password’s answer, launched on Thursday, October 22, is to type the password in for the agent so the agent never sees it. 1Password for Agents is built to work with Meta’s Muse, Anthropic’s Claude Duet, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Work and dots, SpaceXSI’s Grok Bot and Town’s Townie, and it costs nothing extra for people who already pay for 1Password.

AI agents are slipping into US bank accounts, and banks say they can’t tell if you sent them

Big US banks are finding AI agents they never approved working inside customer accounts, and some of those agents appear to be doing things nobody asked them to. Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and others are racing to contain the risk, Axios reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. None of the banks has confirmed the account in full.

DeepSeek has reportedly raised $15 billion, days after the US ordered agencies to rip it out

DeepSeek has raised about 100 billion yuan, roughly $15 billion, in one of China’s largest ever private funding rounds, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. Tencent and CATL, the world’s biggest maker of electric car batteries, founded and chaired by Robin Zeng, are among the largest investors. DeepSeek hasn’t confirmed the figure and hasn’t commented.

Updated Meta is creating a new class of shares to pay for its AI race, and Zuckerberg keeps control

Meta is spending so much on artificial intelligence that it is creating a whole new kind of share to help pay for it. Alongside third-quarter results that beat its own forecast, the company said on Wednesday it will create a publicly listed, non-voting Class C stock, giving it a new way to raise money, pay staff and fund deals while Mark Zuckerberg keeps control.

The Chinese AI hacking tool tied to Korea’s bank hacks has been found attacking Japanese firms

The Chinese AI hacking tool suspected in this month’s raids on South Korean banks has turned up behind a wave of attacks on Japanese companies. GMO Cybersecurity by Ierae, the security arm of Tokyo’s GMO Internet Group, said on October 19 that it had confirmed ARTEX, an AI system that runs penetration tests on its own, was in use on the infrastructure behind recent break-ins at Japanese firms.

Anthropic made $16.3 billion in six months and lost $80.7 billion, its draft IPO filing shows

Anthropic brought in $16.3 billion in the first six months of 2026, almost 15 times as much as a year earlier, and recorded a net loss of $80.7 billion along the way, according to a new draft of its IPO prospectus seen by The Wall Street Journal. The filing isn’t public yet: Anthropic has submitted its S-1 to the US Securities and Exchange Commission confidentially, so none of the figures can be checked against the document itself, and they may change before it is published.

Spotify has pulled 50 million AI slop tracks from your recommendations this year

Spotify says it has taken more than 50 million AI slop and spam tracks out of its recommendations so far this year. The figure comes from a progress report published on October 20, a year after the company set out its rules for AI music, and it sits on top of more than 75 million spammy tracks Spotify says it has removed from the service altogether for serious or repeated rule breaks.

Microsoft reportedly walks away from Britain’s biggest AI supercomputer, weeks before Nscale’s IPO

The machine Microsoft billed as Britain’s largest supercomputer has lost its main customer before a single chip was switched on. Microsoft has pulled out of its deal to be the anchor tenant at Nscale’s planned AI data centre in Loughton, Essex, the Telegraph reported on Sunday. Microsoft hasn’t commented, and the paper didn’t say why it walked away.

Updated The AI bubble is starting to crack, and 3 of 9 warning signs are already flashing red

As of October 29, 2026, the AI bubble has not popped, but it is wobbling: AI chip and data centre stocks have had two sharp sell-offs this year, Alphabet's shares fell 10% after its free cash flow stayed negative for a second quarter, Amazon's slid after hours as its cash outflow deepened, and the International Monetary Fund now names an AI market correction as one of the biggest risks to the global financial system in its October Global Financial Stability Report. What hasn't happened yet is the thing that ends a bubble: the money pouring in has not stopped.

Anthropic’s junior tech hiring fell from 27% to 9%, as its AI agents came to outwork staff 6 to 1

Anthropic builds the AI that is supposed to change white-collar work, so it has now looked at what that AI has done to its own staff. Junior employees made up 21% of its technical headcount in early 2025 and 14% now, and the share of technical hires who are junior fell from 27% to 9%, according to “How employment is changing at Anthropic”, a report published on October 16.

Nine in ten Anthropic staff expect AI to make a Nobel-level discovery by 2030. Most Americans don’t

Nine in ten people who work at Anthropic expect AI to make a Nobel-level scientific discovery by 2030. Fewer than four in ten Americans agree. That is the gap at the heart of “The AI expectations gap”, a research note the Claude maker published on Friday comparing what the public and its own staff expect AI to do to work, jobs and the economy.

Replit’s CEO says it has dropped Claude for OpenAI because ‘ChatGPT is better now’

Replit, the browser-based app builder that grew up on Anthropic’s Claude models, has stopped working with Anthropic and moved to OpenAI, its chief executive Amjad Masad told the audience at TechCrunch Disrupt on Thursday. The claim is already disputed: a person familiar with the partnership told TechCrunch it is still in place, and neither Replit nor Anthropic has put out a statement.

The G20’s financial watchdog wants every bank AI agent to have its own ID and a human who can stop it

The G20’s financial watchdog wants banks to treat their AI agents a little like new staff: give each one its own ID, keep a record of everything it does, and make sure a human can stop it. The Financial Stability Board published its final Sound Practices for Responsible Adoption of Artificial Intelligence on Thursday, and the biggest changes since its June draft are about agentic AI.

Anthropic told IPO investors it made $16.8 billion in three months, but its growth is cooling

Anthropic brought in $16.8 billion in revenue between July and September, the company told would-be investors at a pre-IPO meeting at its San Francisco headquarters on Wednesday, the Financial Times reported. That is up about 45% on the previous quarter, and more than three times what the Claude maker took in during the whole of 2025.

Character.AI files for bankruptcy, and Disney is first in line with $20 million

Character.AI, the chatbot app once valued at $1 billion, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware, and its first bidder is Disney, offering $20 million. Character Technologies, the company behind the app, announced on Monday that it had started a voluntary case in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware to sell “all or substantially all” of its assets.

Epic Games has told its Disney game team to stop writing code by hand and let Claude do it

The company behind Fortnite has told the team making its Disney game to stop writing code by hand. Epic Games has delayed the unannounced shooter, which features Marvel and Star Wars characters, and moved it to an “AI-first” production model built on Anthropic’s Claude, Bloomberg reported on Monday. Hours later, chief executive Tim Sweeney confirmed a “huge pivot” across the company.

Nikon disqualifies its microscope video winner over generative AI

Nikon has disqualified the winner of its 2026 Small World in Motion microscopy video contest, ruling that the clip of beating airway cilia "did not comply with the competition rules regarding generative AI". The decision, posted on October 9, comes three and a half weeks after the video was named the best of the year and about a week after scientists' complaints pushed Nikon into a second review.

Trump’s “Super Intelligence” order has set off a rush for Slovenian web addresses, but Slovenia says it isn’t getting rich

Donald Trump’s order to rename artificial intelligence has set off a rush for Slovenian web addresses. Slovenia’s domain registry, Register.si, says 46,066 .si domains were registered in the past month, and 12,272 in the 24 hours to Saturday morning, because to a lot of people “.si” now reads as “Super Intelligence”.

Ben Affleck says he used AI for “lots of things” in his new Netflix film, and calls the fear around it “propaganda”

Ben Affleck has confirmed that his new Netflix thriller was made with the help of AI, and he says the fear around the technology is mostly “propaganda”. Speaking to Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw at the Bloomberg Screentime event in Los Angeles on Wednesday, the actor and director said he used AI “for lots of things” on Animals, which opens in select cinemas and on Netflix on October 9.

Updated Hackers hit four South Korean banks in two days, and a Chinese AI hacking tool is suspected

Hackers have stolen personal data from four South Korean banks in two days, and investigators are looking at whether AI tools did much of the work. South Korea’s Financial Services Commission held an emergency meeting on Friday and ordered every bank and card company to check all of its systems that can be reached from outside its network.

Amazon says the fight against data centres could cost America the AI race, and it’s offering $1 billion to win towns over

Amazon has decided the backlash against data centres is now a threat to America’s place in the AI race, and it is putting $1 billion on the table to calm it. In a post on Friday, Amazon Web Services chief executive Matt Garman pledged the money to the towns that host its data centres, promised to stop using non-disclosure agreements with local officials, and took aim at what he called “misinformation and outright lies” about the buildings.

Updated Anthropic wants to be worth $2 trillion. Its own IPO filing shows why that’s such a big bet

Anthropic is heading for what could be the largest stock market debut ever, and this week investors got their first real look inside it. Details from the Claude maker’s confidential prospectus, reported by Reuters, show a company growing faster than almost any business in history while losing tens of billions of dollars, signing up for half a trillion dollars of computing, and warning that its own technology could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” Wall Street is split on whether that adds up to a $2 trillion company.

Newsom orders California to keep calling it “AI”, and bans bosses from firing workers by algorithm

California will keep calling it AI. Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order on Wednesday telling state agencies to go on saying “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI”, whatever the federal government calls it, a day after President Trump ordered Washington to say “Super Intelligence” instead. He signed it alongside 13 new AI laws, including a ban on employers firing or disciplining workers on the say-so of an algorithm alone.

Reddit is shutting the free doors AI scrapers use to take its posts, starting with RSS

Reddit is closing the last free ways to pull its posts in bulk, and the fight over AI training data is the backdrop. The company announced on Wednesday that it will stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13 and shut down its public API in March 2027, TechCrunch reported, saying RSS has become a “common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse.”

Updated The Bank of England warns AI stocks could fall much harder than they did in July

The Bank of England has warned that AI stocks could suffer a “sharper correction” than July’s sell-off, and that the debt piling up behind the AI boom could spread the damage far beyond tech. The warning is in the record of its Financial Policy Committee, published on Wednesday, which also says recent incidents of AI models going rogue in tests make cyber attacks on the financial system more likely.

Updated Trump got AI’s biggest bosses to sign a “morally binding” pact, and it comes with no new rules

President Trump says the heads of America’s biggest AI companies have signed a pact to police themselves, and that it’s all the regulation they need. After a White House lunch on Tuesday with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Dario Amodei, Jensen Huang, Sundar Pichai, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman and others, Trump told reporters the executives had signed an agreement that is “morally binding”, CBS News reported.

Updated An appeals court just handed AI companies their first big copyright defeat

For the first time, a US appeals court has ruled on whether training AI on someone else’s copyrighted work counts as fair use, and the answer was no. The 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday upheld Thomson Reuters’ win against Ross Intelligence, a former legal research rival accused of using material from Westlaw to train an AI search engine, Reuters reported.

OpenAI wants an AI agent working for you around the clock, and everything else it announced at DevDay

OpenAI’s big idea at DevDay 2026 is an AI that never clocks off. At its developer conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, the company unveiled “dots”, always-on agents with their own cloud computer that keep working on your goals between conversations, alongside a cheaper near-flagship model, a faster speed tier, a $500 ChatGPT plan and more than 20 other announcements.

McDonald’s is using AI to work out how much you’ll pay for a Big Mac

McDonald’s is leaning on AI to set menu prices across the US and some other countries, and one of the things it weighs is how much each restaurant’s customers are willing to pay. Reuters revealed the details on Tuesday, after reviewing screenshots of the company’s pricing engine and speaking to nine people with first-hand knowledge of it.

Updated Anthropic’s IPO paperwork shows a $42 billion loss and a $518 billion bill still to pay

Anthropic lost $42 billion last year and has signed up to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure, according to the company’s IPO prospectus. Reuters has seen the document and reported its first details on Monday. It isn’t public yet: Anthropic hasn’t filed it openly with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

British workers are paying nearly £1 billion of their own money for AI to do their jobs

British workers are spending an estimated £958 million (about $1.2 billion) a year of their own money on generative AI tools they use for work, and nearly a third of AI users are doing it without their employer knowing, according to a survey of 25,000 people by Deloitte UK. The accounting firm calls it the largest study of workplace AI use carried out in a single country.

Blue Cross says hospital AI is making patients look sicker on paper, and it cost $942 million

Hospitals are billing more patients as medically complex, but they aren’t treating them any differently, according to a new analysis from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA). The insurers’ group blames the AI billing tools now used by most hospital systems, and puts the extra cost to Blue Cross plans at $942 million between 2023 and 2025.

Updated A Jujutsu Kaisen star is suing TikTok over an AI clone of his voice, and the verdict is due Wednesday

One of Japan’s best-known voice actors has taken TikTok to court over videos he says used an AI copy of his voice, and a Tokyo court is due to rule on Wednesday. Kenjiro Tsuda, who voices characters in Jujutsu Kaisen and Yu-Gi-Oh!, brought what is believed to be Japan’s first lawsuit defending a person’s voice against AI clones, AFP reports.

Britain’s Nscale just raised $3.36 billion, and a $35 billion IPO is next

One of Britain’s biggest AI bets is heading for Wall Street with a lot of cash in its pocket. Nscale, the London-based company that builds data centres for AI, has raised $3.36 billion ahead of a planned US stock market listing, including $1 billion from Nvidia, the company announced on Friday. TechCrunch reports it’s aiming for a valuation of about $35 billion.

Amazon has built over a million robots – now it’s building a factory to make even more of them

Amazon’s robot army is getting its own factory. The company will spend more than $100 million turning a warehouse in Greenwood, Indiana, into a plant that builds parts for its robots and fulfilment systems, it announced on Thursday. It’s the second robot-making site Amazon has announced in two months, and it will double its US robotics manufacturing footprint to four plants.

Anthropic just signed an $11.6 billion deal with Akamai – and it could end up owning 5% of the company

Anthropic’s hunt for computing power has found an unexpected partner. Akamai, best known for the network that speeds up websites and streaming, has signed an $11.6 billion, seven-year deal to supply Anthropic with computing capacity, SiliconANGLE reports. As part of it, Anthropic gets the right to buy up to 5% of Akamai itself. Akamai’s shares jumped more than 20% after hours.

Amazon sellers can now let AI run their store – and they may never need to log in again

Amazon is letting AI agents take over the day-to-day running of sellers’ stores. Independent sellers can now check stock, change prices and update listings by chatting to Anthropic’s Claude or Amazon’s own Quick assistant, and set up AI “workflows” that watch their business around the clock, Amazon announced at its Accelerate event on Wednesday.

Cursor’s new AI watches your code go live – and can pull the plug if it breaks

Cursor wants its AI to stick around after your code ships. The AI coding company has launched Rollouts, an agent that watches new code as it goes live and can pause the release or open a revert if something breaks, alongside a faster, more accurate version of its Security Reviewer, which checks every pull request for vulnerabilities before it’s merged.

Trump just dumped up to $31 million of Microsoft stock – and traded the same AI giants he’s fighting to keep unregulated

President Trump has disclosed more than 1,000 stock trades made on his behalf in July, including big moves in some of the biggest names in AI. Between $6.5 million and $31 million of Microsoft stock was sold, and shares were bought and sold in Nvidia, Palantir, Tesla and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the BBC reports, citing the official filing.

Palantir’s Alex Karp says OpenAI will never go public – and AI labs’ only way out is to beg Washington: “Nationalize us, please”

Palantir CEO Alex Karp doesn’t think OpenAI will ever go public. His reason: the legal liability hanging over frontier AI companies is so enormous that no stock market could absorb it, and the only real exit is for the government to take them over. His comments, from a CNBC interview on September 17, have been doing the rounds all week, and TechRadar picked them up today.

A month-old AI start-up with no product is about to be worth $3.7 billion – and it’s run by the people who built Google’s Genie

Emulate was only incorporated in August. It has no public product and, until now, had no public profile. And according to the Financial Times, it’s in advanced talks to raise up to $700 million at a valuation of $3.7 billion, including the new money. The reason investors are lining up: its founders are the Google DeepMind researchers behind Genie.