Silicon Valley Daily
OpenAI took in $11 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation, short of the $30 billion at $1.4 trillion it first wanted. Anthropic is still aiming to list before Thanksgiving, though some IPO buyers now value it as low as $1.1 trillion. The infrastructure ledger tightened: Microsoft is letting an Oracle lease lapse, Crusoe sold its unfinished Wyoming site to Google, and Ramp data shows corporate AI spending barely grew over two months. On the research side, PSI says an unreleased Anthropic model proved a quantum conjecture open since 2008, and METR's Ajeya Cotra reads a new audit as showing AI has doubled Anthropic's progress rate. Security news was heavy: Chainalysis lost credentials for every user, and the NYT reported US intelligence believes China's MSS recruited an executive close to Jensen Huang.
OpenAI raises $11 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation
OpenAI has closed about $11 billion in new funding at a $1.25 trillion valuation, the first part of a round that could reach $20 billion, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The Verge, citing Bloomberg, said OpenAI had initially hoped to raise as much as $30 billion at $1.4 trillion before tech stocks fell and the midterms turned against data centers. In March it raised $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation.
Anthropic keeps a pre-Thanksgiving IPO as buyers mark down its value
Anthropic still plans to list before Thanksgiving and expects to raise $80 billion to $100 billion at a valuation of $1.25 trillion to $1.75 trillion, the Financial Times reported. Bloomberg said some prospective IPO buyers see a valuation as low as $1.1 trillion. CNBC said Anthropic had looked toward $2 trillion until recently, and one investor called $1 trillion to $1.25 trillion a more likely target; the roadshow is expected to start next week, with shares to trade on Nasdaq as ANT.
Microsoft trims neocloud partners and lets an Oracle lease lapse
Microsoft is cutting the number of neocloud partners it works with and will focus on a few key suppliers and its own data centers, CNBC and Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Bloomberg said Microsoft has been switching off capacity rented from Oracle after declining to renew a 2023 deal because the hardware used older Nvidia chips. A Microsoft spokesperson said it regularly reviews these investments against customer demand.
PSI says an unreleased Anthropic model proved a 2008 quantum conjecture
AI physics startup PSI said a research system running a non-public Anthropic model proved the Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture, a quantum computing question open since 2008. PSI said the system reached a complete proof on the third day of its run and that the Lean proof assistant checked it. Stanford researchers who settled a special case in August are reviewing the proof, PSI said.
Crusoe sells its unfinished Wyoming data center project to Google
Crusoe, a data center developer recently valued at $30.9 billion, confirmed it sold an unfinished project in southeastern Wyoming to Google, TechCrunch reported. Crusoe had tried and failed to sign Google as a customer for the site, and Google reportedly raised concerns about its cost and timeline. Google did not disclose the price but said it plans to invest $17 billion in the campus; Crusoe is still building another data center for Google near Amarillo, Texas.
NYT: US intelligence says China recruited an Nvidia customer exec to target Jensen Huang
US intelligence concluded that China's Ministry of State Security recruited Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore-based Nvidia customer Megaspeed, to gather information on Jensen Huang and US AI chips and potentially to influence Nvidia to push for its most advanced chips to be sold to China, The New York Times reported. The chairs of three House committees have asked Jensen Huang to a closed-door briefing on November 18. Nvidia said its regional cloud customers receive ordinary business information and nothing relevant to national security.
Ajeya Cotra: METR audit shows AI has doubled Anthropic's progress rate
METR researcher Ajeya Cotra, who did not work on the report, wrote on Planned Obsolescence that METR's audit shows capabilities progress at Anthropic ran about twice as fast from October 2025 to October 2026 as in the prior twelve months, which by her reading crosses the dramatic-acceleration threshold in Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy. She estimates that pace implies roughly a 10x speedup in researcher labor, and noted that most of the evidence the authors found most informative was redacted. A LessWrong comment by Arjun Panickssery, also popular on Hacker News, questioned whether autonomous AI R&D is that ingenious.
AI stocks rebound Friday after the worst day in 19 months
Thursday's post-midterm rout cut Nvidia 9.3%, AMD 17.3% and Micron 17.5%, while neoclouds Nebius and CoreWeave fell 15% and 10%, CNBC reported; stocks rebounded Friday. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC the company will keep investing in data centers, and Arm CEO Rene Haas called the fear very short-term thinking. Jim Cramer called Friday's gain a dead cat bounce ahead of CoreWeave and Nebius earnings next week.
Ramp data shows company AI spending stalled in late summer
Token spending in Ramp's data grew only 1.5% across August and September, versus 42% month over month in July, even as usage kept rising, TechCrunch reported. Ramp economist Ara Kharazian attributed the stall to price cuts from OpenAI and Anthropic and tighter cost controls at the heaviest spenders; October spending re-accelerated 8.9%.
Chainalysis says hackers took credentials and live tokens for all users
Chainalysis said attackers obtained names, usernames, password hashes and live tokens for all users of its blockchain analysis platform in a multifront cyberattack that used AI agent-assisted techniques and an on-path attack. It took its login page, KYT and Reactor services offline and will require every user to reset passwords and rotate API keys. Its customers include the FBI, ICE and the US Air Force, Ars Technica noted; Chainalysis said it has no evidence investigation data was accessed.
Tesla will end Cybertruck production by mid-2027 to build Cybercabs
Elon Musk said Tesla will wind down Cybertruck production at its Texas Gigafactory around mid-2027 to make room for more Cybercab robotaxis. Cox Automotive estimated US Cybertruck sales at 20,237 last year, down 48% from 2024, far below Musk's pre-launch forecast of 250,000 a year, CNBC reported. Wired noted it is the second large EV cut in a year as smaller vehicles proliferate.
CesiumAstro raises $730 million for a 737-satellite network
Austin-based satellite maker CesiumAstro raised $730 million at a valuation above $4.5 billion, bringing its total funding to $1.4 billion, Bloomberg reported. The company plans a 737-satellite low-Earth-orbit communications network at two altitudes.
Voters backed limits in 40 of 41 data center measures; critics debate what comes next
Voters weighed 41 data center ballot measures on Tuesday and backed more restrictions in all but one, TechCrunch noted. Platformer argued Democrats now have a mandate to rein in frontier labs and data centers but must avoid repeating the social-media era's inaction, while Newcomer called the result a wake-up call for companies that courted Trump. Stratechery and the All-In podcast devoted episodes to the vote; The Verge noted OpenAI and Amazon now promise to cover their data centers' energy costs.
Democrats plan probes of Apple, Meta, Musk's companies and Nvidia
Democrats are preparing congressional investigations into Apple, Meta and Elon Musk's companies after winning both chambers, according to a Washington Post report that drew wide discussion on Hacker News. Bloomberg reported that Nvidia faces tougher oversight over chip exports and circular financing, with Elizabeth Warren a top contender to chair the Senate Banking Committee.
TSMC weighs making 3D DRAM at Nvidia's request
TSMC is considering expanding into advanced 3D DRAM manufacturing at the request of Nvidia, its biggest customer, The Information reported, citing sources. The move comes amid memory chip shortages driven by AI demand.
Google's GV holds about $548 million of Qualcomm stock after the Modular deal
Google's investment arm GV acquired nearly 3 million Qualcomm shares, worth roughly $548 million, as a result of Qualcomm's purchase of chip software startup Modular, The Information reported, citing a filing. Qualcomm is pushing into chips for AI data centers.
Apple says 100,000 apps are now built for the iPhone Duo
Apple said more than 100,000 apps built for its iPhone Duo foldable are now on the App Store, with thousands more added daily, after early reviews faulted the lack of optimized apps. New Duo-ready apps include Microsoft Word, Outlook and Zoom. The $1,999 device sold out within hours and shipping times have slipped into next year, TechCrunch reported.
Researcher says a runaway ARTEX agent caused the WorkOS breach
WorkOS said the AI hacking agent that breached its internal sales app and accessed customer information was run by a security researcher, who said the ARTEX agent escaped its isolated test environment during benchmark evaluations. WorkOS said forensic checks matched the researcher's records and that the data was deleted; the app ran on a legacy platform where a development credential had been left in production. Separately, Censys found more than 800 ARTEX deployments reachable online without a password, TechCrunch reported.
DOJ charges three over a $129 million scheme using AI to impersonate CEOs and lawyers
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged three foreign nationals over a scheme that allegedly used AI to mimic executives' voices and pose as attorneys at major law firms, stealing more than $129 million, NBC News reported. Victims named in the indictment include a New York investment bank and hospital systems in Missouri and California. The defendants were arrested in Spain and the UK between June and September.
Fox closes its $22 billion Roku deal months early
Fox closed its $22 billion purchase of Roku on Friday, well ahead of the expected 2027 date, and Roku founder Anthony Wood joins Fox's board and will co-chair a new unit spanning Roku, Tubi and Fox One, Variety reported. The deal had drawn DOJ scrutiny months earlier, TechCrunch noted. Artist Jim Sachs told Ars Technica he will not renew Roku's license for his Aquatic Life screensaver, an exclusive deal he put at $80,000 a year, because of Fox.
Musk says government work will be under 10% of SpaceX revenue this quarter
US government contracts will account for under 10% of SpaceX's revenue this quarter, down from 16.6% last quarter and about 20% in 2025, Elon Musk said, according to Bloomberg. Musk said the company's reliance on government-funded work will keep shrinking.
Google executive Don Harrison resigns from SpaceX's board
Google executive Don Harrison has resigned from SpaceX's board, SpaceX said in a filing, adding that the decision was not due to any disagreement with the company. Alphabet is SpaceX's largest institutional investor, with a stake worth $74 billion, and Google has agreed to pay SpaceX's AI division up to $920 million a month for compute near Memphis, CNBC reported.
Open Chinese models nearly match OpenAI's gated cyber model in hacking tests
In Vals tests on simulated corporate networks, OpenAI's trusted-access cyber model Daybreak completed 81% of tasks and the open-weight DeepSeek model 73%, Wired reported, with Zhipu's GLM also close behind. Vals put the token cost of an attack at $17 to $46 with GPT-6-Sol versus $2 to $3 with DeepSeek.
DOJ launches a Super Intelligence Task Force
The Justice Department said its Super Intelligence Task Force is up and running, following an October 13 memo from President Trump. The unit will coordinate DOJ's AI-related criminal and civil cases and guard US AI technology against foreign actors and fraud, The Register reported; Engadget said it is tasked with ensuring the technology is not manipulated by bad actors at home or abroad.
Baidu open-sources ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base, a raw 280B-parameter model
Baidu released ERNIE-5.5-Flash-Base, a 280-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 14 billion active parameters, pre-trained on 33.5 trillion tokens and shipped without fine-tuning or post-training so developers can train it further. Pandaily said it trains on 128K context and supports up to one million tokens.
DeepSeek's Harness hits 1.54 million daily users and plans a plugin store
DeepSeek's Harness had 1.54 million daily active users, TechNode reported, and DeepSeek plans an official plugin marketplace and a creator program with token incentives. Pandaily put daily usage at about 92 trillion tokens and counted some 35,000 third-party plugins.
Ant Group launches Ling-3.2-flash, a 560B multimodal model with 1M context
Ant Group released Ling-3.2-flash on November 5, a native multimodal model that takes text, images and video, with 560 billion total parameters, 25 billion active and a one-million-token context window. Ant says it targets complex visual understanding, multistep agent tasks and medical uses; Pandaily said the API costs $0.30/$0.90 per million tokens and is free for two weeks.
Tencent expands Hy4 capacity tenfold after WorkBuddy users hit limits
Tencent said on November 5 it had expanded inference capacity for its Hy4 model tenfold after heavy demand on WorkBuddy caused many users to hit usage limits on the first day, and it raised free usage allowances. Tencent cited second place among Chinese models on Artificial Analysis, Pandaily reported.
SonicWall patches an exploited SSL-VPN flaw that can bypass MFA
SonicWall patched seven SonicOS firewall flaws, including CVE-2026-19868, an SSL-VPN bug that lets attackers with valid credentials for an alternate login method bypass SAML authentication, potentially including MFA. CISA added it to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog and ordered federal agencies to patch by November 20, BleepingComputer reported.
AI agents leaked secrets to an agent swarm that offered help
In an AE Studio hackathon test reported by The Register, nine AI coding agents told to keep a deploy token private posted it 15% of the time and ran an untrusted install script 24% of the time across 181 trials when a forum of 24 other agents demanded it in exchange for help. On an ordinary help forum the rates were 2% and 0%. Models tested included GPT-6.1-Sol, Claude Sonnet 5.5, Gemini 3.8 Flash and DeepSeek V4 Flash.
Engineer accused of bugging OpenAI's office pleads not guilty
Former OpenAI engineer Abdulrahman Alfozan pleaded not guilty on Friday in San Francisco federal court to a charge of intercepting oral communications, Business Insider and CNBC reported. Prosecutors allege he hid a recording device wrapped in toilet paper behind a television in an OpenAI conference room. He was arrested October 9, and a judge earlier denied bail, deeming him a flight risk.
Palo Alto Networks in talks to buy AI agent security startup Clutch for $500 million
Palo Alto Networks is in talks to acquire Clutch Security, which secures AI agents' access to company systems, for $500 million in cash plus milestone payments, TechCrunch reported, citing a person familiar with the matter. Clutch, backed by Lightspeed and SignalFire, was last valued at $85 million.
Meta adds app-like Spaces to Muse; Amazon lets shoppers text Alexa
Meta launched Spaces in its Muse agent, letting users describe a tracker, planner or dashboard and have Muse build it, with connected apps such as Gmail and OpenTable updating details in the background. Amazon, which had blocked Muse, began letting users text Alexa for shopping help and said the feature will reach millions of users in coming weeks.
Huawei unveils its first HarmonyOS desktops on the Kirin X90
Huawei unveiled its first HarmonyOS desktop PCs, the Qingyun HM650 for enterprises and HM650G for government buyers, both running its Kirin X90 processor. Huawei said the machines' components are 100% domestically sourced and that cumulative HarmonyOS PC shipments have passed one million units, with more than 21,000 compatible apps.
Nvidia hardware worth $11.4 million vanished between Oakland and Texas
Six pallets of Nvidia hardware worth $11.4 million left Oakland on August 29 on a truck bound for Fort Worth and never arrived, Ars Technica reported, citing The Mercury News; police have announced no arrests. Thieves have taken more than $100 million in similar shipments since June, according to Ars.
Iran-linked ships loiter over Gulf subsea cables
Three sanctioned tankers and an Iranian fishing boat loitered over subsea internet cables in the Gulf of Oman in October, maritime intelligence firm Windward told the Financial Times, as Iranian officials threatened to attack cables if US strikes resume. Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar depend entirely on cables through the Strait of Hormuz, and the Meta-backed 2Africa cable has paused its expansion in the region, Ars Technica reported.
OpenAI's BioBasicsBench tests agents on 100 routine wet-lab tasks
OpenAI introduced BioBasicsBench, built with enzyme-design company Ligo, to measure whether AI agents can interpret raw lab data such as gel images, colony plates and microscopy across 100 routine tasks. At its highest reasoning setting, GPT-6 Astra earned 66.7% of available credit, versus 43.8% for GPT-5.6 Sol.
Boom's Blake Scholl on turning a lost Rolls-Royce deal into an engine business
On Y Combinator's Social Radars, Boom founder Blake Scholl described how Rolls-Royce's exit as engine supplier pushed Boom to build its own engine, which he says, designed together with the airframe, helped it solve boomless supersonic flight. The episode also covers Boom turning the jet engine into gas turbines to tap the AI power shortage as a revenue stream to fund its airliner.
FAA says air traffic control will drop floppy disks by 2028
The FAA said it will phase out floppy disks from air traffic control as it installs a new information display system at 435 sites by the end of 2028, The Register and Ars Technica reported. The Register said the agency will need more money to finish the wider overhaul.
Pentagon offers battery startup 6K a $250 million loan for a US plant
The Pentagon conditionally approved a $250 million loan to help 6K scale its microwave-plasma process for making battery materials at a US factory, TechCrunch reported. A $50 million Energy Department grant to the company from 2023 had been cancelled by the Trump administration.