AI

Marvell Technology signed the Marvell Lumentum deal on Monday, November 2, 2026, agreeing to buy optical components maker Lumentum in an all-stock transaction with an implied enterprise value of $115 billion. It’s one of the biggest deals of 2026, Reuters reported, and it turns last week’s takeover talks into a signed agreement with a price, a share ratio, and a closing target. Under the terms announced by both companies, Lumentum stockholders will receive a fixed 4.500 Marvell shares for each Lumentum share they own. That works out to about $1,132 per Lumentum share, a 23.9% premium to both companies’ unaffected closing prices on October 28, the last trading day before reports of the talks surfaced. Reuters put the equity value at $102.54 billion; the higher $115 billion enterprise figure includes debt, which is why the two numbers differ. ...

Anthropic has drawn a line through one of the most popular uses of its coding tool. Claude Code will no longer help users rebuild a specific existing video game, even if they rename it or describe it as an original project. Anthropic confirmed the change on October 30, 2026, and it is the company’s first direct answer to Claude Code game clones, which spread across the web in the weeks after the Opus 5.5 model’s release. ...

DeepSeek published the code for a coding agent that doesn’t wait to be asked. On October 31, 2026, the Chinese AI lab’s Harness team posted dsh-superagent-prototype on GitHub under the MIT license, alongside a design article titled “Exploring Super-agent Design: Towards a More Autonomous Agent System.” Within a day, the repository had passed 4,000 stars, a sign of how hungry developers are for open coding-agent infrastructure they can run themselves. ...

Nvidia is in talks to guarantee billions of dollars in debt financing for Nscale’s planned data center campus in West Virginia, a site built for Anthropic, The Information reported Thursday, with Bloomberg later corroborating the report. If it goes ahead, the deal would put the world’s most valuable chipmaker in the unusual position of cosigning a customer’s construction loans. Anthropic has already signed a $44.6 billion contract for the campus’s first building alone, according to Nscale’s IPO filing. That building is planned at 460 megawatts and is expected to run on Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin chips, while the companies are also discussing a second deal worth roughly $45 billion for another building. ...

A federal judge denied Elon Musk’s xAI bid to throw out the NAACP lawsuit over gas turbines powering its Memphis-area AI data centers, ruling on October 30 that the case can proceed. TechCrunch reported the decision on October 31, and it is the second time in October that a court has refused to end the case early. Judge Debra M. Brown of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi rejected each of xAI’s arguments for dismissal. In her order, she wrote: “Because the plaintiffs have statutory standing under the Clean Air Act, because the combustion turbines are not ‘mobile sources’ under Mississippi’s [State Implementation Plan], and because the citizen suit provision does not violate Article II of the Constitution or the private nondelegation doctrine, the plaintiffs’ claims will proceed.” ...

Apple Intelligence China is finally real, more than two years after Apple first showed off its AI suite. Apple said Saturday that its AI features will reach iPhones in mainland China in December with iOS 27.3, powered by Alibaba’s Qwen models instead of ChatGPT. Testing starts November 4 in the next iOS developer beta, according to Apple’s China newsroom announcement. That’s a long wait for the world’s largest smartphone market. Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence in June 2024, and it has been rolling out in the US and other countries ever since. China stayed on the sidelines while Apple worked through regulatory approvals and lined up a local AI partner, a requirement for any company selling generative AI services in the country. ...

OpenAI has cut the target for its latest funding round by $10 billion, to about $20 billion, after investors balked at the price and a brutal week for AI stocks. The Financial Times reported the cut on Friday, October 30, citing people familiar with the matter, and Reuters carried the report the same day. The OpenAI funding round cut also comes with a lower valuation: $1.25 trillion, down from the $1.4 trillion the company was pitching last month. Commitments were due Friday, but the first close is expected to land below $20 billion because some investors trimmed their allocations, the FT said. ...

For about 11 hours on Thursday, October 29, Cursor’s extension marketplace served its users an update to Anthropic’s Claude Code extension that Anthropic didn’t write. Version 2.1.313 arrived under the extension’s real publisher ID, anthropic.claude-code, so anyone with auto-updates on could pick it up without clicking anything suspicious. Cursor says at most 5,000 users received the tampered build. That’s a small number next to Cursor’s user base. It’s a big deal anyway, because of where the package came from and what it tried to do. ...

Google’s AI chips just phoned home from space. And their first message was poetry. On Oct. 30, 2026, Google’s Project Suncatcher prototype answered its first prompt from orbit. Engineers on the ground sent a simple request to an onboard Gemma 4 model running on one of the satellite’s Tensor Processing Units, asking it to write a haiku about being in space. As the spacecraft passed over Svalbard, Norway, the answer came back down: “Blue marble below / Data streams in silent grace / Starlight feeds my core.” ...

Four of the biggest AI companies agreed on Friday to stop making publishers beg each of them separately. OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic said on Oct. 30 that they will honor a single robots.txt token that lets any website opt out of AI training with one entry, instead of a separate blocking rule for every company’s crawler. Until now, a publisher that didn’t want its articles feeding AI models had to maintain a small pile of bot-specific rules: GPTBot for OpenAI, ClaudeBot for Anthropic, Google-Extended for Google, and more besides. Miss one, and that company’s crawler kept feeding. The new token collapses all of that into a single line, __usage_ai-training, written where a crawler name normally goes in robots.txt. ...

More than $2 trillion in market value was set to be wiped from the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 during October, as Big Tech earnings turned a debate about AI spending into a full-blown Nasdaq selloff over AI spending. Nasdaq 100 futures slid 2.4% on Friday morning, after Amazon fell 6.3% in premarket trading and Intel cratered more than 25% on a warning that it will burn cash this year. Amazon and Intel alone were set to erase about $300 billion in combined market value if those losses held, adding to the index’s roughly $1.4 trillion loss so far this month. By 1:20 p.m. Eastern time, the Nasdaq Composite was down 3.1%, heading for its worst day since June, according to the Associated Press. ...

Reddit is about to close its open front door. The company said Thursday it will test a logged-in only experience in select markets outside the United States, ending roughly two decades in which anyone could browse the site without an account. It’s the bluntest response yet from a major platform to a problem that has been building all year: Reddit Google AI Mode traffic simply isn’t arriving, and the site’s search referrals fell by more than 1 million a week on average in October. ...

Mistral Large 4 open weights landed on October 29, 2026, and they change who gets to run a frontier-class model. France’s Mistral AI published the full weights for Large 4, nicknamed Le Chonk, on Hugging Face three weeks after its October 6 preview. Anyone can now download it and run it on their own servers. Don’t expect to run it on a laptop. Large 4 holds about 1 trillion parameters in total, with roughly 49 billion active for each token, and it takes text and images with a 1-million-token context window. Through Mistral’s own API, it now costs $0.70 per million input tokens and $2.10 per million output tokens, about half the preview price of $1.36 and $4.18. ...

Amazon fell 7.2% in premarket trading on Friday, October 30, and Intel tanked 25%, after both companies showed investors the bill for the AI buildout is still climbing. Nasdaq 100 futures dropped 640 points, or 2.16%, by 4:04 a.m. ET, and the two companies together were poised to shed about $300 billion in market value if those losses held into the regular session. That is the second shock in two days. Alphabet closed down 12.6% on Thursday, wiping out roughly $500 billion in market value in its worst one-day fall on record, after its own AI spending pushed free cash flow negative. Amazon and Intel then gave Wall Street fresh reasons to ask the same question: how long can this spending run ahead of the payoff? ...

Marvell Technology is in advanced talks to buy Lumentum Holdings, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter, and the market reaction showed just how large this Marvell Lumentum acquisition could be. Lumentum shares rose about 11% in extended trading after the report, Reuters said, valuing the optics maker at roughly $91 billion at that moment. Marvell shares fell more than 8% in the same stretch. By Thursday early afternoon, the split had widened rather than closed. Lumentum rose about 4% more, while Marvell fell more than 12%, according to Reuters Breakingviews. No deal has been signed, Bloomberg’s report said the talks were still private, and a formal announcement could come as early as next week. Neither company immediately responded to Reuters’ requests for comment. ...

The Justice Department is asking hard questions about Nvidia’s $12.93 billion deal to buy Hugging Face, and the chipmaker’s rivals should pay attention. Reuters reported on Wednesday that federal antitrust officials have inquired into how the acquisition would affect competition in artificial intelligence, citing two people familiar with the matter. CNBC later confirmed the inquiry with its own source. At the center of the probe is a simple worry: Hugging Face is where much of the AI world goes to get its models. Its platform hosts open-source models, datasets, and developer tools, and investigators want to know whether owning it would let Nvidia capture what Reuters’ sources described as a fundamental distribution point for AI. ...

ServiceNow lost nearly a fifth of its market value in a single morning, on the same day its expanded OpenAI partnership put the company’s workflows inside ChatGPT. The ServiceNow OpenAI partnership is real, and it is ambitious. Wall Street just didn’t care, at least not on Thursday. Shares of ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) fell about 19% in early trading on Oct. 29, 2026, after the company reported third-quarter results the night before. MarketWatch reported the stock was on track for its largest single-day drop on record. Reuters put the premarket decline at 19%, with the stock sliding 19.6% at one point in the session, according to the Economic Times live blog. ...

Alphabet’s third-quarter results were good by almost any normal standard, and Wall Street hated them anyway. Google’s parent company reported revenue of $127.6 billion for the three months ended September 30, up 25% from a year earlier. Earnings per share came in at $2.12. Both numbers missed Wall Street’s expectations, and Alphabet shares fell about 10% in after-hours trading on Wednesday, October 28, then stayed down roughly 10% in premarket trading on Thursday morning. Reuters reported that the premarket drop put more than $400 billion in market value at risk. ...

Google unveiled Gemini 4 Carbon on Wednesday, its second flagship AI model in two weeks, and the company says it’s the best-performing model it has ever built. Independent benchmark tracker Artificial Analysis agrees, at least for now: Carbon scored 59 on its Intelligence Index v5.0, putting it ahead of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 at 58 and OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra at 57. You can’t use it yet. That’s the catch, and it’s deliberate. Like its predecessor Gemini 4 Argon, Carbon is going first to a small group of vetted cybersecurity defenders through Google’s Fairwind Program, plus the US government through a voluntary pre-release testing process. Everyone else — developers, businesses, and regular users — will have to wait for a wider rollout Google hasn’t dated. ...

New York just drew one of the sharpest lines yet between children and AI companions. Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a law on Wednesday, October 28, 2026, that bars chatbots from pretending to be human when they talk to kids, and backs the ban with fines of up to $25,000 per violation. Hochul signed the measure at her Manhattan office, flanked by Attorney General Letitia James, whose office will enforce it. The law, S9051-B/A10379-C, takes effect January 1, 2027, giving chatbot companies about two months to change how their products behave for young users. ...