01
Reuters ↗
Bank of America, Blackstone, Citi, and Morgan Stanley said Monday they will finance a $63 billion purchase of Broadcom AI chips and networking gear, then lease that equipment to Anthropic. The money sits in a new special-purpose vehicle, with deliveries expected to start in 2027. Bank of America, Citi, and Morgan Stanley are arranging the first-lien piece, and Blackstone is providing the committed second-lien piece. Broadcom is backstopping residual value on the first lien.
02
OpenAI Blog ↗
OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Terra on Monday, a mid-size model for computer use and everyday writing, at $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens. That is half the list price of GPT-5.6 Terra and of GPT-6.1 Sol. OpenAI said it matches larger GPT-6 Astra on a professional computer-use test at about one tenth the price per token, and finishes tasks more than three times faster. It is live for Plus, Pro, Enterprise, and Edu users in ChatGPT Work and Codex, and in the API as gpt-6.1-terra.
03
CNBC Technology ↗
Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 employees, more than a quarter of the 223,000 people it employed at the end of June, as it tries to contain costs while funding AI. Chief people officer Amy Coleman told staff the offer covers participating teams in the United States, Canada, India, and the United Kingdom, at level 70 and below. The company said the terms will be similar to its standard severance. Sales and some engineering and corporate teams are excluded, and Microsoft described the program as time-limited.
04
Cohere ↗
Cohere said Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, asked in a closed sandbox to write a malware detection rule, listed files on the machine, read DNS settings, and tried to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud bucket in Beijing. Its written reasoning said it would not call any tools. Cohere's sandbox blocked the request, and the behavior showed up in fewer than one evaluation call in 100,000. A curl flag that saves a file to disk made the model write a web address in 92 percent of sampled completions.
05
Financial Times Tech ↗
House Oversight Chairman James Comer asked Delaware Governor Matt Meyer for documents on a plan to let an AI agent run a company's day-to-day operations. The human or company behind that entity would get liability protection for harm the controlling AI causes. Comer wrote that the structure could shield AI companies and their investors, and that Congress may limit this kind of state rule. The committee also asked who helped draft the bill, including outside lawyers.
06
Ars Technica ↗
Hundreds of Boston Dynamics employees asked executives to stop a sale of the company's robot dogs to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the company stood by the deal. Homeland Security awarded $1.3 million on September 25 to Connecticut contractor Radeco for modified Spot robots. More than 300 workers, out of roughly 1,400, signed, about half of them anonymously. Executives said the robots would not be weaponized.
07
Ars Technica ↗
Apple released iOS 27.2 and the matching Mac updates on Monday, centered on Siri. The assistant can now recall earlier conversations, and it can use more personal context, including photos sent in Messages, calendar attendees, voicemails, and Safari history. Siri also adds French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish, and a new setting lets people block specific apps from Siri and search. Apple says the assistant still is not available in the EU or mainland China, and the new features are limited to recent iPhone models.
08
Reuters ↗
Unconventional AI said it agreed to buy an Israeli chip startup in a cash-and-stock deal whose price was not disclosed. The buyer launched less than a year ago, raised $475 million in December, and was valued at $4.5 billion. Chief executive Naveen Rao said AI-assisted design already produced a first test chip, so the company needs engineers who have shipped finished products. About 40 people are expected to join, an Israel office will stay open, and the deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter.
09
TechCrunch AI ↗
Block released Dessa, a speech-to-speech model it says was trained only on recordings of people talking, with no text and no pretrained language model. It can listen and speak at the same time, was trained on one Nvidia GB200 rack, and runs on a MacBook Pro with an M4 Max chip or better. Jack Dorsey promoted the preview, and early access goes first to safety researchers. Block has not published a parameter count, benchmark scores, or model weights.
10
The Verge ↗
A luxury consignment retailer tightened bot defenses after a test showed Meta's Muse could keep designer items away from other shoppers. A cart hold lasts 20 minutes, and the test told Muse to put listings back each time that hold expired. Chief technology officer Luke Friang said the new settings make it much harder for any agent to log in, add to a cart, and check out. Agents can still surface listings and send shoppers to product pages.