News

Binance says hackers drained about $6.3 billion from its wallets on Thursday, in what investigators now call the largest crypto theft ever recorded. The world’s biggest crypto exchange put the estimated impact at $6.3 billion, while blockchain firm TRM Labs traced $6.36 billion moving out of Binance wallets across 10 blockchains. Most of the money moved in about 20 minutes, TRM said, starting at 20:05 UTC on October 29. Binance has since worked with partners to freeze roughly $3 billion of the stolen funds, and the company says it will cover all losses. Withdrawals remain paused while Binance overhauls its withdrawal systems, with service expected back within 48 hours. ...

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. ...

Apple did the thing it swore it would never do. At its “Pro and Tell” event in Los Angeles on Oct. 28, the company unveiled the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display — the first Mac with a touchscreen — starting at $2,899 for the 14-inch model. It’s a sharp break from decades of Apple orthodoxy, and it arrives at the top of the MacBook Pro lineup rather than as an experiment. Pre-orders opened the same day, with the laptops reaching customers and Apple Stores on Nov. 6. ...

Anthropic told California Governor Gavin Newsom that officials should be able to ask a court to block the release of an AI model posing a “serious risk” to the public, in an October 15 letter Reuters reported on October 28. Politico first reported its details. “When a review finds a model poses a serious risk, the government should be able to ask a court to block it,” the letter said. An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed the letter is authentic; the governor’s office did not immediately respond to Reuters. ...

Google DeepMind unveiled Genie 4 on October 27, 2026, and the pitch is simple enough to state in one sentence: type a prompt, step into the world it makes, and then keep rewriting that world while you are still standing in it. The new Google Genie 4 world model generates photorealistic scenes in real time, and for the first time in the Genie line, those scenes come with sound of their own. ...

OpenAI plans to buy Google TPU chips, The Information reported on Tuesday, in a move that would put ChatGPT’s maker on its rival’s silicon for the first time as an owner rather than a renter. The report, citing a person familiar with the matter, did not disclose financial terms or a timeline for any purchase. That’s a striking shift for a company that has built its empire on Nvidia hardware. OpenAI is already one of the largest buyers of Nvidia’s graphics processing units, the chips it uses to train AI models and run them for users. Amazon, Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet plan to spend as much as $600 billion combined this year on AI infrastructure, according to Reuters, and OpenAI’s reported purchase sits right in the middle of that spending race. ...

Apple announced on Tuesday, October 27, that the Apple Creator Studio AI assistants will arrive in November, bringing a beta helper built on Apple models and OpenAI to Keynote, Pages and Numbers. In Keynote, the assistant can help design and animate slides or rework a deck that’s already built. In Pages, it drafts, reorganizes and edits text. In Numbers, it calculates, suggests chart types and builds custom tables, all while looking at the document in front of you rather than answering from a blank chat box. ...

Apple will replace iPhone Duo handsets with inner display problems, days after its first foldable phone went on sale. The company confirmed the iPhone Duo screen replacement offer on Monday, October 26, telling affected owners to contact AppleCare for a replacement unit. Apple described the issue as one affecting a small number of units, and it did not say how many phones are involved or what causes the damage. That timeline matters because the phone only reached stores on October 23, priced from $1,999, with initial online orders selling out in minutes. Owners started posting photos over the weekend of cracks and bright lines across the 7.6-inch inner display, mostly where the phone folds. ...

Oracle is doubling down on Nvidia and hedging at the same time. On Tuesday, the cloud company said it will expand to “multi-gigawatt scale” with Nvidia’s newest Vera Rubin AI servers, while also offering chips from Nvidia rivals for the first time. It’s a big order of confidence in Nvidia’s hardware, wrapped in a clear message: Oracle doesn’t want to be locked into one chipmaker. The companies did not disclose what the expanded deal is worth. But Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has previously said Vera Rubin systems can generate up to $40 billion in revenue per gigawatt for the chipmaker, which gives a sense of the scale involved when a cloud provider talks in gigawatts rather than server racks. ...

Apple did not wait for its event. On Tuesday, October 27, 2026, it unveiled a new 14-inch MacBook Pro and a new iMac, both running its M6 chip, and pitched them as machines built to run AI work on the device instead of in the cloud. The Apple M6 MacBook Pro starts at $1,999, the M6 iMac starts at $1,499, and both reach stores November 6 after pre-orders open October 28. ...

Nvidia is buying into its own customer. The chipmaker said Tuesday, October 27, 2026, that it will invest $3 billion in Meta’s equity offering and expand the Nvidia Meta Muse partnership, a deal that ties the world’s most important AI chip supplier directly to one of its biggest buyers. Meta announced the expanded Muse partnership the same morning it upsized its equity fundraising to $97.5 billion, the largest in the company’s history. Nvidia’s $3 billion is a small slice of that total. Its meaning is much larger than its size. ...