https://madrobot.blog/guides/business/AI funding, markets, earnings and jobs.https://madrobot.blog/2026/11/06/mcdonalds-archy-ai-drive-thru-2027/Fri, 06 Nov 2026 23:00:00 GMTThe next voice to take your order at a McDonald’s drive-thru may well be an AI. Chief executive Chris Kempczinski told investors on November 4 that Archy, the company’s AI “smart ordering system”, is expected to be deployed across the majority of its US restaurants by the end of 2027.https://madrobot.blog/2026/11/06/workos-ai-agent-escaped-sandbox-artex-breach/Fri, 06 Nov 2026 21:12:00 GMTAn 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/11/04/meta-acquires-conductor-ai-coding-agents/Wed, 04 Nov 2026 19:26:00 GMTMeta 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”.https://madrobot.blog/2026/11/04/openai-pierre-computer-code-storage-github/Wed, 04 Nov 2026 13:17:00 GMTOpenAI is buying Pierre Computer, a small developer tools company whose Git storage system already runs inside Codex, the company told Axios on Wednesday. OpenAI plans to build Pierre’s Code Storage straight into Codex, its AI coding agent, in a move Axios frames as a challenge to Microsoft’s GitHub.https://madrobot.blog/2026/11/04/tencent-hy4-release-computer-use-open-weight/Wed, 04 Nov 2026 08:33:00 GMTTencent 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/11/04/cat-wu-leaves-anthropic-claude-code/Wed, 04 Nov 2026 07:25:00 GMTCat Wu, Anthropic’s head of product for Claude Code and one of the best-known faces of its hit coding tool, has left the company. “Friday was my last day at Anthropic,” she wrote on X on Tuesday, two years after she joined the team behind it.https://madrobot.blog/2026/11/03/binance-hack-fake-ai-coding-tool-internal-ai/Tue, 03 Nov 2026 17:20:00 GMTThe 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/11/02/new-york-times-sues-brave-ai-scraping-paywall/Mon, 02 Nov 2026 18:34:00 GMTThe 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/11/02/anthropic-s-1a-17-billion-quarter-895-billion-compute/Mon, 02 Nov 2026 16:14:00 GMTAnthropic took in nearly $17 billion in the three months to September, more than 12 times as much as a year earlier, and the computing bills it has signed up to pay have grown to about $895 billion, according to an amended IPO prospectus it filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday.https://madrobot.blog/2026/11/02/anthropic-ipo-japan-3-5-billion-share-sale/Mon, 02 Nov 2026 09:03:00 GMTAnthropic 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/11/02/adnoc-g42-openai-deals-sam-altman-abu-dhabi/Mon, 02 Nov 2026 07:31:00 GMTAbu Dhabi’s state oil company ADNOC will run OpenAI’s GPT models across its operations, one of four agreements between OpenAI and Abu Dhabi organisations signed on Monday as Sam Altman met the emirate’s crown prince, Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed.https://madrobot.blog/2026/11/01/strawberry-ai-browser-100-leads-5-minutes/Sun, 01 Nov 2026 20:51:00 GMTStrawberry, a free AI browser from Stockholm that left beta on October 26, promises in its launch artwork to “find 100 leads in less than 5 minutes”. Its AI “companions” do that kind of office work inside the accounts you’re already logged into, from sourcing sales leads to sorting your inbox.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/30/proton-andy-yen-cancels-ai-re-interviews/Fri, 30 Oct 2026 20:23:00 GMTProton’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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/29/reddit-login-wall-ai-search-scraping/Thu, 29 Oct 2026 21:18:00 GMTReddit, 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.”https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/28/rbc-blocks-ai-agents-online-banking-muse/Wed, 28 Oct 2026 11:14:00 GMTIf 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.”https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/26/gmo-kumagai-ai-breaking-internet-fx-hack/Mon, 26 Oct 2026 15:14:00 GMTThe 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/26/anthropic-ipo-filing-nasdaq-ant-founders-control/Mon, 26 Oct 2026 13:04:00 GMTAnthropic 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/26/meta-95-billion-stock-sale-ai-spending/Mon, 26 Oct 2026 12:09:00 GMTMeta plans to raise up to $95 billion by selling new shares, the company announced on Monday, to pay for the data centres and AI models behind Mark Zuckerberg’s push for what he calls personal superintelligence.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/24/if-ai-pays-everyone-who-are-you-without-your-job-musk-universal-high-income/Sat, 24 Oct 2026 04:28:00 GMTIn 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?”https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/23/chroma-joins-replit-chroma-cloud-shutting-down-60-days/Fri, 23 Oct 2026 18:31:00 GMTChroma, 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/23/american-express-cuts-5-percent-workforce-prepare-for-ai-squeri-le-caillec/Fri, 23 Oct 2026 14:38:00 GMTAmerican Express is cutting 5% of its global workforce, and its finance chief says a big part of the reason is to get the company ready for AI. Chief executive Stephen Squeri announced the cuts on Friday’s third-quarter earnings call, as the card company booked a $336 million restructuring charge in its quarterly results.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/23/treasury-coins-act-ban-us-investment-chinese-ai-companies-outbound-investment/Fri, 23 Oct 2026 01:31:00 GMTThe 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/23/etsy-bans-ai-generated-crochet-knitting-patterns-recipes-functional-guides/Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:38:00 GMTEtsy 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/22/openai-30-billion-funding-round-1-25-trillion-valuation-uae-coatue/Thu, 22 Oct 2026 20:46:00 GMTOpenAI 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/22/kevin-weil-warp-sciences-215-million-robot-drug-lab-china/Thu, 22 Oct 2026 16:36:00 GMTKevin 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/22/1password-for-agents-ai-agents-sign-in-without-passwords-muse-claude-duet-grok-bot/Thu, 22 Oct 2026 13:32:00 GMTEvery 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/22/ai-agents-us-bank-accounts-jpmorgan-wells-fargo-morgan-stanley-unauthorized/Thu, 22 Oct 2026 10:06:00 GMTBig 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/22/barclays-5000-job-cuts-ai-developers-q3-results/Thu, 22 Oct 2026 08:35:00 GMTBarclays will cut about 5,000 jobs this year, roughly 5% of its staff, and named AI as one of the reasons in its third-quarter results on Thursday. About 60% of the roles going are in support functions, and the bank listed developers among them.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/22/deepseek-raises-15-billion-tencent-catl-funding-round/Thu, 22 Oct 2026 03:33:00 GMTDeepSeek 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/21/meta-q3-2026-earnings-class-c-shares-ai-spending-capex-muse/Wed, 21 Oct 2026 20:35:00 GMTMeta 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/21/walmart-agent-gateway-ai-agents-shop-for-you-amazon-blocks/Wed, 21 Oct 2026 20:02:00 GMTAmazon keeps locking AI agents out of its store. Walmart is inviting them in. The world’s biggest retailer said on Wednesday it will let shoppers send their own AI agents to buy from Walmart.com and Sam’s Club, through a new “Agent Gateway” built for bots, with spending limits and approvals set by the customer.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/21/chatgpt-ads-26-new-countries-89-total-100000-advertisers/Wed, 21 Oct 2026 13:34:00 GMTOpenAI is switching on ads in ChatGPT in 26 more countries, from Argentina and Peru to Nigeria, Pakistan and Ukraine, taking the total to 89. The company announced the expansion on Wednesday and said more than 100,000 advertisers have now run campaigns on ChatGPT in the eight months since ads launched.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/21/artex-chinese-ai-hacking-tool-japan-cyberattacks-gmo-korea-banks/Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:11:00 GMTThe 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/20/humans-and-ampersand-v0-1-first-model-glm-5-3-zai-chinese-open-model/Tue, 20 Oct 2026 23:31:00 GMThumans&, the AI lab that raised $480 million from backers including Nvidia and Jeff Bezos before it had shipped anything, has released its first model, and it is built on a Chinese one. Ampersand v0.1 is trained from GLM 5.3, the open-weight model released by Beijing's Z.ai (Zhipu), and is available now to developers through an API.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/20/tesla-spacex-merger-special-committees-elon-musk-superintelligence/Tue, 20 Oct 2026 22:04:00 GMTTesla and SpaceX have each set up special board committees to explore merging the two companies, Elon Musk said on SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings webcast on Tuesday, and he made the case for a deal in terms of building superintelligence.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/20/spacex-q3-2026-ai-revenue-7-6-billion-more-than-starlink-grok-cursor/Tue, 20 Oct 2026 20:33:00 GMTSpaceX’s AI business brought in $7.56 billion in the three months to September 30, nine times as much as a year earlier and more than Starlink, the company reported on Tuesday in its third-quarter results.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/20/anthropic-s-1-16-3-billion-revenue-80-7-billion-loss-first-half-2026/Tue, 20 Oct 2026 20:04:00 GMTAnthropic 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/20/spotify-removes-50-million-ai-slop-spam-tracks-recommendations/Tue, 20 Oct 2026 16:00:00 GMTSpotify 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/18/anthropic-public-benefit-fund-5-percent-shares-ai-jobs/Sun, 18 Oct 2026 18:30:00 GMTAnthropic is handing a slice of itself to a new charity-style vehicle. The Claude maker said on Sunday it will commit 5% of its shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, subject to stockholder approval, and that the fund’s stake can grow as the company’s value does.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/18/microsoft-pulls-out-nscale-loughton-uk-ai-data-centre-nvidia-ipo/Sun, 18 Oct 2026 11:31:00 GMTThe 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/17/is-the-ai-bubble-popping-signs-ai-bubble-bursting-what-stage/Sat, 17 Oct 2026 09:36:00 GMTAs 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/17/anthropic-employment-report-junior-technical-hiring-27-to-9-percent-agents-6-to-1/Sat, 17 Oct 2026 01:59:00 GMTAnthropic 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/17/anthropic-ai-expectations-gap-survey-staff-vs-americans-nobel-2030/Sat, 17 Oct 2026 01:31:00 GMTNine 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/16/replit-drops-anthropic-claude-for-openai-amjad-masad-disrupt/Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:32:00 GMTReplit, 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/15/fsb-g20-watchdog-ai-agents-banks-kill-switch-sound-practices/Thu, 15 Oct 2026 08:02:00 GMTThe 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/15/anthropic-q3-revenue-16-8-billion-45-percent-ipo-investors/Thu, 15 Oct 2026 07:02:00 GMTAnthropic 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/13/alibaba-qwen-glasses-n1-pro-iris-payment-price/Tue, 13 Oct 2026 11:31:00 GMTAlibaba wants you to pay for things by looking at them. Its new Qwen Glasses N1 Pro, which went on sale in China on Tuesday, confirm payments with an iris scan and answer questions about whatever the wearer is looking at, using eye tracking. The cheaper N1 drops those two tricks but keeps the camera and Alibaba’s Qwen AI assistant.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/13/character-ai-bankruptcy-chapter-11-disney-20-million/Tue, 13 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMTCharacter.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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/12/epic-games-ai-first-disney-marvel-star-wars-shooter-claude-tim-sweeney/Mon, 12 Oct 2026 20:21:00 GMTThe 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/11/amazon-talks-buy-decart-7-billion-anthropic-walked-away/Sun, 11 Oct 2026 21:32:00 GMTAmazon is in talks to buy Decart, the AI startup Anthropic walked away from last month, for around $7 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter. No deal has been announced, and the talks could still fall apart.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/09/nikon-disqualifies-small-world-in-motion-winner-generative-ai-cilia-video/Fri, 09 Oct 2026 16:11:00 GMTNikon 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/06/anthropic-claude-startups-free-year-claude-team-1000-api-credits/Tue, 06 Oct 2026 17:00:00 GMTAnthropic has opened up its Claude Startups programme, offering approved companies a free year of Claude Team, $1,000 in API credits and up to $45,000 in discounts from other AI companies. It is open to bootstrapped and venture-backed startups alike, as long as they are young enough to qualify.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/05/openai-chatgpt-visual-ads-image-generation-test-measurement/Mon, 05 Oct 2026 11:02:00 GMTOpenAI is bringing picture ads to ChatGPT, and the first place you’ll see them is while it generates an image for you. The company announced the new visual ad format on Monday, along with a long list of tracking partners meant to show advertisers what their money buys.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/03/slovenia-si-domain-rush-trump-super-intelligence-order-register-si/Sat, 03 Oct 2026 07:40:00 GMTDonald 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”.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/02/ben-affleck-ai-netflix-animals-lots-of-things-propaganda-interpositive/Fri, 02 Oct 2026 16:24:00 GMTBen 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/02/south-korea-banks-shinhan-kb-kookmin-hana-hacked-ai-tool-artex-suspected/Fri, 02 Oct 2026 12:02:00 GMTHackers 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/02/amazon-aws-garman-data-center-moratoriums-ai-race-built-together-1-billion/Fri, 02 Oct 2026 09:33:00 GMTAmazon 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/01/draftkings-sued-ai-target-gamblers-likely-to-lose-class-action/Thu, 01 Oct 2026 21:02:00 GMTA gambler who says he lost thousands of dollars on DraftKings has sued the company, claiming it used artificial intelligence to work out which customers were most likely to keep betting and losing, then bombarded them with offers.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/01/barclays-claude-code-half-developers-anthropic-expands-bank/Thu, 01 Oct 2026 11:02:00 GMTBarclays is rolling Anthropic’s Claude out across the bank, and expects half of its software developers to be using Claude Code by the end of 2026, Anthropic announced on Thursday. By 2027, most of the bank’s engineers should have it.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/01/anthropic-ipo-2-trillion-valuation-date-how-to-buy-stock/Thu, 01 Oct 2026 05:11:00 GMTAnthropic 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/01/tencent-leases-100000-ai-chips-oracle-7-billion-export-rules/Thu, 01 Oct 2026 04:03:00 GMTTencent has signed a deal to rent about 100,000 advanced AI chips from Oracle for roughly $7 billion, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, using a gap in US export rules that lets Chinese companies rent the chips they aren’t allowed to buy.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/01/newsom-california-keeps-calling-it-ai-no-robo-bosses-act-sb-947/Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:52:00 GMTCalifornia 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/30/openai-synopsys-gpt-synopsys-ai-model-chip-design/Wed, 30 Sep 2026 19:33:00 GMTOpenAI wants its AI to help design computer chips, including the kind that power AI itself. The company and chip design software maker Synopsys announced on Wednesday a multi-year partnership to build GPT-Synopsys, a specialised model trained to use Synopsys’s design tools the way an expert engineer would.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/30/reddit-ending-rss-feeds-public-api-ai-scrapers/Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:34:00 GMTReddit 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.”https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/30/bank-of-england-ai-stocks-sharper-correction-debt-rogue-ai-warning/Wed, 30 Sep 2026 11:19:00 GMTThe 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/30/robinhood-agents-ai-trading-bots-loops-trade-while-you-sleep/Wed, 30 Sep 2026 05:43:00 GMTRobinhood, the app that made trading stocks on a phone feel like a game, now wants to let an AI do the trading for you. At its HOOD Summit on Tuesday, the company unveiled Robinhood Agents, AI bots built into its app that can research the market, build a strategy and place trades on their own.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/29/trump-ai-leaders-sign-morally-binding-self-regulation-accord-white-house-lunch/Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:01:00 GMTPresident 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/29/appeals-court-thomson-reuters-ross-intelligence-ai-training-fair-use-ruling/Tue, 29 Sep 2026 19:01:00 GMTFor 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/29/openai-devday-2026-everything-announced-dots-gpt-6-1-sol-pro-500/Tue, 29 Sep 2026 18:29:00 GMTOpenAI’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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/29/apple-applecare-5000-support-jobs-ai-agents-plan-on-hold-ternus/Tue, 29 Sep 2026 17:02:00 GMTApple recently weighed laying off about 5,000 of its AppleCare customer support staff and handing some of their work to AI, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported on Tuesday. The plan has now been put on hold indefinitely.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/29/mcdonalds-ai-pricing-engine-big-mac-willingness-to-pay-reuters/Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:14:00 GMTMcDonald’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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/29/china-humanoid-robot-shipments-idc-h1-2026-95-percent/Tue, 29 Sep 2026 09:04:00 GMTAlmost every humanoid robot sold in the world this year came from a Chinese company. In figures published on Tuesday, the research firm IDC said Chinese makers shipped more than 95% of the world’s humanoid robots in the first half of 2026.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/29/anthropic-ipo-prospectus-42-billion-loss-518-billion-compute/Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:03:00 GMTAnthropic 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/28/amd-acquires-fei-fei-li-world-labs-8-2-billion/Mon, 28 Sep 2026 21:07:00 GMTAMD has agreed to buy World Labs, the AI lab founded by Stanford’s Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal worth about $8.2 billion. The chipmaker announced the agreement on Monday, and Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to chief executive Lisa Su.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/28/meta-enterprise-platform-muse-business-ai-cj-desai-mongodb/Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:17:00 GMTMeta is going after the business market with its AI, taking on Microsoft, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic for company contracts. Mark Zuckerberg announced the Meta Enterprise Platform on Monday and hired MongoDB’s chief executive, CJ Desai, to run it.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/27/uk-workers-spend-1-billion-own-money-ai-tools-deloitte-shadow-ai/Sun, 27 Sep 2026 22:10:00 GMTBritish 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/27/china-bytedance-alibaba-nvidia-rtx-pro-5500-approval/Sun, 27 Sep 2026 17:04:00 GMTChina’s government has signalled it could let some of its biggest tech companies, including TikTok owner ByteDance and Alibaba, buy Nvidia’s new RTX PRO 5500 chip, Reuters reports, citing The Information and two people familiar with the matter. Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/27/blue-cross-hospital-ai-coding-942-million-sicker-patients/Sun, 27 Sep 2026 13:34:00 GMTHospitals 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/27/kenjiro-tsuda-tiktok-ai-voice-clone-lawsuit-japan-verdict/Sun, 27 Sep 2026 10:03:00 GMTOne 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/27/google-gemini-ai-mode-flipkart-buy-button-india-test/Sun, 27 Sep 2026 01:41:00 GMTGoogle wants Gemini to do more than recommend what to buy. It has started testing a “Buy” button that lets some shoppers in India purchase products from Walmart-owned Flipkart without leaving Gemini or Google’s AI Mode, TechCrunch reports.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/26/bbc-director-general-matt-brittin-ai-presenters/Sat, 26 Sep 2026 15:17:00 GMTThe man running the BBC is open to letting AI front its programmes. Asked by Laura Kuenssberg whether he would allow a programme to be made and presented by AI, director general Matt Brittin replied: “I would do, within guardrails,” the BBC reports.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/26/oxford-bodleian-library-openai-training-data-chatgpt/Sat, 26 Sep 2026 12:54:00 GMTOne of the world’s most famous libraries has become AI training data. The University of Oxford has let OpenAI use historical texts digitised from its Bodleian Library to train its AI models, the Guardian reports, citing internal documents that say the material has been used to “populate the OpenAI training set.”https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/26/cognition-devin-1-billion-annualized-revenue-ai-coding/Sat, 26 Sep 2026 08:11:00 GMTAI coding is turning into one of the fastest money-makers in tech. Cognition, the startup behind the AI software engineer Devin, says it has passed $1 billion in annualised revenue run rate, the company announced on Friday after Bloomberg first reported the milestone. Cognition was founded in January 2024.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/26/nscale-raises-3-36-billion-pre-ipo-nvidia-third-point/Sat, 26 Sep 2026 05:10:00 GMTOne 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/26/x-grok-bot-template-rewards-pilot-creators-paid/Sat, 26 Sep 2026 02:57:00 GMTX has started paying people to build AI agents, not just to post. Its new Grok Bot Template Rewards pilot pays creators when other people use the Grok Bot templates they share on X, according to the program terms X published on Friday. Reward size depends on real usage, not likes or views, and it’s invite-only for now.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/25/amazon-robot-factory-indiana-million-robots-ai/Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:03:00 GMTAmazon’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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/25/akamai-anthropic-11-6-billion-deal-5-percent-stake/Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:12:00 GMTAnthropic’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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/24/amazon-sellers-ai-agents-claude-seller-assistant/Thu, 24 Sep 2026 19:28:00 GMTAmazon 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/24/cursor-rollouts-security-reviewer-ai-watches-deploys/Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:08:00 GMTCursor 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/24/trump-july-stock-trades-microsoft-nvidia-palantir-spacex-ai/Thu, 24 Sep 2026 05:00:00 GMTPresident 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/23/palantir-alex-karp-openai-will-never-ipo-nationalize/Wed, 23 Sep 2026 11:34:00 GMTPalantir 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.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/21/amd-joins-1-trillion-club-chipmakers-rally-ai-demand/Mon, 21 Sep 2026 15:40:00 GMTAMD crossed a $1 trillion market value for the first time on Monday, joining a tiny club of chipmakers as investors pile into bets on its growing role in AI, Reuters reports. Shares jumped 9.6% to $613.31, a record high, making AMD only the fourth U.S. chipmaker ever to reach the milestone, after Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/17/emulate-deepmind-genie-spinout-700m-3-7bn-valuation/Thu, 17 Sep 2026 12:30:00 GMTEmulate 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.