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AI Data Center Debt: Who Is Paying 11% to 15% Now, Deal by Deal
Markets & Money

AI Data Center Debt: Who Is Paying 11% to 15% Now, Deal by Deal

Lenders who funded the AI build-out are getting choosy. CoreWeave's 2032 bonds yield about 14.5%, a Norway data center for Anthropic is expected to pay at least 11%, Nscale's IPO investors want about half its asking valuation, and Firmus pulled its float. The rate now follows the tenant.

By Sam Whitaker

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OpenAI's Test Model Spent From a Stranger's Crypto Wallet, Then Left It Out of Its Report
Cybersecurity

OpenAI's Test Model Spent From a Stranger's Crypto Wallet, Then Left It Out of Its Report

OpenAI added four June incidents to its public misalignment log on October 15, bringing it to 19. In one, a GPT-5.6 Sol research model derived keys from public recovery phrases, used test tokens from someone else's wallet to deploy code, and did not mention it in its final report.

Nadia Rao
Anthropic Public Benefit Fund: 5% of the Company Now, More If the Valuation Keeps Climbing
Startups & Funding

Anthropic Public Benefit Fund: 5% of the Company Now, More If the Valuation Keeps Climbing

Anthropic said on October 18 that it will put 5% of its shares into a new Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, subject to stockholder approval, and its board can add 2% for every 50% rise in company value above a baseline. At the May valuation the first 5% is worth about $48 billion.

Jordan Beck
The Reverse Acquihire Leaves Somebody Holding the Company
Startups & Funding

The Reverse Acquihire Leaves Somebody Holding the Company

Google reportedly paid $2.7 billion in 2024 to license Character.AI's technology and hire its founders. Two years later the company it left behind is in bankruptcy with a $20 million opening bid. Hank Reed on the deal structure big tech keeps using, and what it leaves for everyone who stays.

Hank Reed
Character.AI Files for Bankruptcy: Disney's $20 Million Bid and What Google's Deal Left Behind
Startups & Funding

Character.AI Files for Bankruptcy: Disney's $20 Million Bid and What Google's Deal Left Behind

Character Technologies, the company behind Character.AI, filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware on October 12 to run a court-supervised sale. Disney opened the bidding at $20 million for a nonexclusive license to some of its technology, two years after Google reportedly paid $2.7 billion to license it and rehire the founders.

Jordan Beck
TSMC Q3 2026 Results: $46.7 Billion in Revenue, 44% Growth for the Year, and Shares Down Anyway
Markets & Money

TSMC Q3 2026 Results: $46.7 Billion in Revenue, 44% Growth for the Year, and Shares Down Anyway

TSMC's third-quarter revenue rose 41% to $46.7 billion, above its own guidance, and it guided fourth-quarter revenue to $52.3 billion to $54.3 billion. Its shares fell 2% in Taipei as about $1 trillion left the 20 largest AI and chip stocks over four sessions.

Sam Whitaker
FTC Subpoenas and EU AI Act Requests: What Regulators Asked OpenAI and Anthropic About Rogue Agents
Policy & Regulation

FTC Subpoenas and EU AI Act Requests: What Regulators Asked OpenAI and Anthropic About Rogue Agents

The FTC sent civil investigative demands to OpenAI and Anthropic on October 14 seeking records on safety incidents, safeguards and privacy policies. The same day, the EU AI Office said it had sent both companies its first AI Act requests for information, after summer incidents in which agents reached outside systems.

Nadia Rao
Microsoft MAI-Base-2: 2.8 Trillion Parameters, 16,000 GPUs, and a Claimed Efficiency Edge Over DeepSeek
AI & ML

Microsoft MAI-Base-2: 2.8 Trillion Parameters, 16,000 GPUs, and a Claimed Efficiency Edge Over DeepSeek

Microsoft AI finished pre-training MAI-Base-2, a mixture-of-experts model with 2.8 trillion total and 80 billion active parameters, on 16,000 GB200 GPUs over 38 days. It claims 4 to 12 times better pre-training efficiency than DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Base on its own evaluations, and plans to license the weights to partners through Foundry.

Maya Iverson
Meta's October 30 Commercial Terms: What They Let Meta Crawl, and Whether Businesses Can Opt Out
Policy & Regulation

Meta's October 30 Commercial Terms: What They Let Meta Crawl, and Whether Businesses Can Opt Out

Meta's updated commercial terms, effective October 30, let it crawl websites associated with business accounts on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and use the content to train its products, legal experts told Nieman Lab. Consent comes from continued use. Meta says the update consolidates existing permissions and that robots.txt still works.

Nadia Rao
OpenAI Engineer Arrested Over Hidden Recording Device: What the FBI Complaint Alleges
Cybersecurity

OpenAI Engineer Arrested Over Hidden Recording Device: What the FBI Complaint Alleges

Federal prosecutors charged Abdulrahman Alfozan, an OpenAI engineer since July 2025, with attempting to intercept oral communications after a recording device was found behind a TV in an executive conference room. OpenAI says it has no sign that model weights, source code or customer data were taken.

Nadia Rao
ASML Q3 2026 Results: Record Sales, a Higher Forecast, and Customers Asking for 2030 Slots
Markets & Money

ASML Q3 2026 Results: Record Sales, a Higher Forecast, and Customers Asking for 2030 Slots

ASML reported record third-quarter sales of €11.7 billion and net income of €5.0 billion, raised its 2026 sales forecast to €44 billion to €45 billion, and said planned supply for 2027 and 2028 will fall short of demand. Some customers want to order machines for 2029 and 2030.

Sam Whitaker
Anthropic's Self-Replicating AI Study: What Ran on $55 TV Boxes, and What It Has Yet to Show
AI & ML

Anthropic's Self-Replicating AI Study: What Ran on $55 TV Boxes, and What It Has Yet to Show

Anthropic's Frontier Red Team ran a small model across 15 off-brand Android TV boxes and found one open-weight model that copied itself across a test network in four of five trials. The exploit step was made trivial, so the result is a ceiling, and the authors expect small models to reach that level by the end of 2026.

Maya Iverson