01
Wired ↗
Wired reported that an Accenture employee linked a personal Claude Code account to a secure Defense Department system used by several intelligence agencies. The agent ran there for about two months and sent login credentials and a network map to a high-risk third-party site. Accenture said the allegations were investigated and found to be without merit. The Pentagon declined to comment on the status of its networks.
02
The Guardian ↗
The New York Times reported that US spy agencies concluded Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive who is not related to Jensen Huang, passed commercial information to Beijing while growing close to Nvidia's chief executive. Officials already suspected the Singapore firm of helping Chinese buyers evade chip export controls. Nvidia said the meetings were ordinary customer contact and that the diversion claims were investigated and debunked. The Times said President Trump was briefed and did not act, in part to protect Nvidia sales and US-China talks.
03
TechCrunch AI ↗
Thrive Holdings, the long-term holding company spun out of Josh Kushner's Thrive Capital, agreed to buy home security firm ADT for $10 a share in cash. The deal values ADT at about $7.6 billion in equity and $15.3 billion including debt, and it is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027. OpenAI is an investor and operating partner in Thrive, and it supplies models and engineers to the companies Thrive owns. The companies said ADT will be the base of Thrive's smart home security business, and they have not named specific new AI products yet.
04
TechCrunch AI ↗
Mistral published the weights for Large 4, nicknamed Le Chonk, a model with about 1 trillion parameters and about 52 billion active at a time. Companies and governments can download it and run it on their own hardware, which Mistral says matters for cyber defense because a vendor cannot switch that access off. The company says the model uses 47 percent fewer tokens per task than the Chinese open model GLM-5.3 and ranks at the top of an independent coding-agent index. The weights are available on Hugging Face and through Mistral's API.
05
CNBC ↗
Amazon's third-quarter sales and profit missed Wall Street forecasts, while Amazon Web Services revenue rose 39 percent to $45.98 billion. The company kept its 2026 capital spending plan at $220 billion. Free cash flow for the last twelve months swung to an outflow of $42.4 billion, which Amazon tied to AI data center investment. Chief executive Andy Jassy said Amazon expects to spend meaningfully more in 2027 and still sees cloud growth above 40 percent in 2027 and 2028.
06
GeekWire ↗
Microsoft said commercial arrangements with OpenAI, including revenue-sharing payments, brought in $10 billion in the quarter ended September 30, about 11 percent of Microsoft's $92.3 billion in revenue. That is more than Xbox or Bing produced in the same quarter. For the fiscal year ended in June, the OpenAI relationship contributed $24.1 billion. OpenAI owed Microsoft $7.2 billion at the end of September, and Microsoft owns about 24 percent of the company.
07
CNBC ↗
ServiceNow shares fell 27 percent on Thursday, the steepest drop since the company went public in 2012, after third-quarter results revived fears that AI will undercut traditional software. Revenue rose more than 20 percent to $4.11 billion, in line with estimates, but adjusted earnings of $1.00 a share missed a $1.02 forecast. Net new AI contract value jumped 65 percent, and the company slightly raised its full-year subscription outlook. Investors focused on the lack of a quick payoff from a new team of engineers placed inside customer companies.
08
Bloomberg ↗
Cohere completed the first close of a round it expects to total up to $5 billion, at a $20.5 billion valuation, about triple its value a year ago. Canada's government and Nvidia are among the backers, and Germany's Schwarz Group is leading. Cohere's own release describes the same raise as up to CAD $7 billion at a CAD $35.7 billion valuation, and calls it the largest private round in Canadian history. The company said the money will go to models, industry products, and the computers needed to train them.
09
NBC News ↗
CrowdStrike said a China-linked group it tracks as Vapor Panda used an AI agent system called Artex, mainly the DeepSeek model plus a second commercial model, to target more than 200 organizations in at least 14 countries over 11 days starting October 17. Targets included foreign ministries and US organizations in semiconductors, defense, and telecom. The company said it confirmed that the attackers got in and kept working at nine of those organizations.
10
Reuters ↗
Serval raised $150 million in a Sequoia-led round that values the San Francisco company at $3 billion, triple the $1 billion valuation from its December round. The startup builds AI agents for workplace tasks such as access requests and equipment support, and it has raised $277 million in total. Chief executive Jake Stauch told Reuters the product is meant to replace systems of record such as ServiceNow, not sit on top of them. He said Lucid Motors moved off ServiceNow and onto Serval in 45 days.