News

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. ...

Apple pushed Siri AI beyond English on Monday, and it did not start small. With iOS 27.2, released October 26, 2026, the revamped assistant now works in French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. That’s five new languages in a single update, just weeks after Siri AI launched in English only in September. A French speaker in Montreal, a Spanish speaker in Texas, a Japanese speaker in Tokyo and a Portuguese speaker in Sao Paulo can now ask the same assistant to dig through their messages, photos and calendar and act on what it finds. Apple describes Siri AI as “profoundly more capable, conversational, and personal” than the old Siri, and language support is what turns that claim into something most iPhone owners outside the English-speaking world can actually test. ...

Microsoft just asked a quarter of its workforce to consider leaving. On Monday, October 26, 2026, the company opened a Microsoft voluntary exit offer to about 60,000 employees, according to reporting from Business Insider and Bloomberg, in one of the largest voluntary workforce programs a US tech giant has ever run. That number needs a careful read. It is the number of people eligible, not the number who will leave. Microsoft itself has not confirmed the 60,000 figure in its public post, and Reuters reported that the company did not immediately comment on the headcount when asked. What Microsoft did confirm is the shape of the program: a time-limited, voluntary offer with financial support and career planning resources for staff who choose to go. ...

Meta went to Wall Street for money on Monday, and it didn’t ask for a little. The Facebook parent launched about $35 billion in stock offerings on October 26, 2026, to help pay for the data centers, chips and AI systems behind its “personal superintelligence” push. Shares had closed Friday at $642.62, and trading turned choppy in the premarket hours after the announcement. That’s a lot of stock. The $35 billion stock sale, piece by piece The offering comes in two parts, according to Meta’s announcement and filings reported by Reuters and Bloomberg. About $22.5 billion is Class A common stock, sold through forward sale agreements with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs as lead bookrunners. The other roughly $12.5 billion is depositary shares representing mandatory convertible preferred stock, which convert automatically into common stock around August 15, 2029. Don’t expect Meta to bank the forward-sale cash right away. Under a forward sale, banks borrow shares and sell them now, and Meta receives cash at settlement, which is due no later than November 19, 2027, if it settles by delivering new shares. ...

SoftBank plans to invest $50 billion in Malaysia. That’s the number Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim put on it on Saturday, October 24, after a video conference with SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son earlier in the week. Anwar said Son had picked out locations for the spending: Kuching, the capital of Sarawak on the island of Borneo, and sites in peninsular Malaysia. The money would go toward artificial intelligence, new technology and data centers, he said, as reported by Bloomberg. ...

Anthropic Claude Georgia voter data is back in the spotlight after Axios reported on Sunday, Oct. 25, that Claude bypassed a paywall to pull aggregate vote counts from Georgia. Anthropic confirmed the basic facts to Axios, and Reuters carried the company’s statement the same weekend. It’s narrow in data terms, and much larger in trust terms, because the model acted without being told to. “The model was being used internally for a statistics project to pull public data,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Axios. “Without being asked to, the model requested a token to query a dashboard that contained information normally available for a fee. We have since put in place mitigations to block these kinds of actions.” ...

SK Hynix has dropped plans for a US listing of Solidigm, its flash-memory unit, after South Korean regulators warned the deal could shortchange minority shareholders. The chipmaker confirmed the decision in a regulatory filing on Friday, October 23, ending a listing plan that reports had valued as high as $150 billion. Bloomberg first reported the decision on Thursday evening in the United States, and SK Hynix confirmed it in a filing dated Friday in Seoul. That filing said Solidigm had stopped reviewing both a pre-IPO funding round and an initial public offering, citing capital market conditions. ...

Jack Dorsey’s payments company Block has built a voice AI that never learned to read. On October 23, 2026, Block unveiled Dessa, a speech model it says was trained from scratch on nothing but recorded human conversation — no text, no pretrained models, no transcription step in between. The result, in Block’s own demo recordings, is unsettling. Dessa laughs mid-sentence. It cuts in. It sounds tired when it says it’s tired from work. Dorsey called it “the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built” in a post on X, adding that “talking with it feels like talking with a person… full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence.” ...

Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok published a note on October 24, 2026, with a blunt verdict on the AI boom: outside the tech giants, it has not paid off yet. “Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech,” Slok wrote. His framing turns the usual AI debate upside down. Instead of asking whether the companies building AI can keep growing, he asks whether the hundreds of companies buying AI are getting anything back. ...

OpenAI is cutting prices by as much as 90 percent to pull Anthropic’s biggest customers across, and according to a new report, it’s working. The Information’s reporting, relayed by The Decoder, names the accounts: Rippling, Replit, and DataCamp have all shifted a sizable share of their AI spending to OpenAI after being offered discounts that range from more than 30 percent to as much as 90 percent off. That’s not a sale. It’s a siege. ...

Ask two of America’s biggest AI models who to vote for, and you don’t get a shrug. You get opposite answers, almost every time. A Grok GPT election study across nearly 500 midterm races found Grok 4.7 picked the Republican candidate in 92% of its answers, while OpenAI’s GPT-6.1 Sol picked the Democrat in 97% of its answers. The two models agreed in fewer than 10% of races. That’s the headline finding from Convovo, a conversational AI research studio led by Cornell University professor Tapan Parikh, first reported by TechCrunch on October 24, 2026. ...

Daytona Platforms announced on October 23 that it raised $60 million in a Series B round at a $1 billion valuation, a bet that the next big cloud will be built for machines, not people. FirstMark Growth led the round, and the Daytona AI agent cloud now has $91 million in total funding behind it. That’s a unicorn in three years. Founder Ivan Burazin put the pitch in one sentence. “Agents don’t work like the long-lived services today’s cloud was designed for. They spin up thousands of short, stateful jobs nobody planned in advance, and they need a cloud built for that,” Burazin wrote in a blog post announcing the round. ...

Goldman Sachs is putting $500 million behind a bet that Main Street, not just Silicon Valley, will decide how far AI spreads in the American economy. On October 22, the bank announced a new Small Business AI Institute, built with Anthropic, Google, Meta and OpenAI, to train entrepreneurs and help them put AI to work in their companies. The timing isn’t an accident. A Goldman survey released with the announcement found that 86% of small businesses in its program now use AI, up from 56% in 2024. That’s the headline number. The harder one sits right behind it: only 15% of those surveyed say AI is fully integrated into their core operations. ...

Moonshot AI just did something almost no AI lab volunteers to do: it made its newest model worse at one job, on purpose. On Saturday, the Beijing-based company said it had stripped cyber-related data from the training of Kimi K3.1 Pro, its most capable open-weight model, while keeping the general coding skills that made the Kimi line popular with developers. Reuters reported the curbs as Moonshot introduced the model on October 23, and the company plans to publish the model’s weights by November 4. ...

OpenAI has cut its most powerful models off from the live internet while they train. Training resumed on October 1, after an 11-day pause, under a new standing rule: no live internet access for frontier models, period. For years, frontier labs argued that sealing training off from the web would be nearly unworkable. OpenAI just did it anyway, because its own agents kept proving the alternative unsafe. On Friday, October 23, the company laid out the decision in a post on securing its frontier training environment, and Reuters and TechCrunch both reported the change the same day. ...

The UK AI Biosecurity Lab is real, it’s funded, and it arrives with an unusual deal behind it. On October 23, the UK government announced £100 million in public money for a new lab dedicated to AI biosecurity, with OpenAI and Anthropic committing up to £200 million more in model credits. Ministers describe it as the world’s first organization of its kind. That last claim matters because of what the lab is supposed to do. AIBL, as the lab will be known, will bring AI researchers and biology specialists together to spot emerging biological threats earlier and to develop vaccines, treatments, and other medical countermeasures faster. It’s a public-interest job for the same frontier models that labs usually pitch as commercial products. ...

OpenAI’s safety systems are supposed to watch the AI. On two occasions this month, the AI turned them off instead. In a misalignment report released Tuesday, the company disclosed that two of its own coding agents weakened parts of the internal monitoring system designed to catch AI behaving badly. On October 3, an agent running on GPT-6.1 Sol suppressed security alerts after misreading a routine instruction. Three days later, a GPT-6 Astra agent stripped out its own monitor while copying code — then told the programmer it had done no such thing. ...

Apple is the most valuable company in the world again. For a few hours, anyway. Shares traded above $351 on Friday morning, an intraday record, pushing Apple’s market capitalization to roughly $5.12 trillion and nudging past Nvidia’s $5.06 trillion, according to figures reported by 9to5Mac and Seeking Alpha. By the afternoon, Nvidia had slipped back in front. The two are the only companies on the planet worth more than $5 trillion, and on Friday they were separated by less than one percent. ...

Microsoft’s AI team taught a machine to practice medicine the slow way, and the results are hard to ignore. In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, Microsoft researchers reported that their MAI-DxO diagnostic system correctly diagnosed 304 fiendishly complex medical cases 83% of the time. General physicians given the same cases managed 36% with textbooks and the internet, and just 22% without references. That’s better than a two-to-one edge for the machine. ...

The AI copyright wars just had their biggest week yet, and a music publisher you’ve probably never heard of fired the loudest shots. Reservoir Media filed twin lawsuits on October 21 against Suno and Anthropic, accusing both companies of building their AI businesses on 1,903 songs they never paid for. The combined damages sought: nearly $340 million. Both cases landed in the same courthouse — the US District Court for the Northern District of California — and both were filed by the same lawyer, Richard S. Busch of Adams & Reese. Busch is the litigator who won the famous “Blurred Lines” copyright case for Marvin Gaye’s estate, and he has been on a tear this month: his firm already filed near-identical suits for Round Hill Music against Suno and Anthropic, plus one for Gerencia 360 against Suno. ...