TC
Nirva raises $33M for a pendant that only listens to you
Nirva will ship its $249 ambient AI pendant by the end of the year.
TC
Spotify’s current AI bet is about being the music service that agents choose
Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström explains why the rise of AI agents could be good news for the music service.
ARS
Hackers got a four-day head start on epic PHP2Shell vulnerability
Hackers were already probing the bug before defenders were told it existed.
TC
Uber puts all 30,000 employees on ChatGPT Work
The ride share giant previously deployed a much smaller pilot for ChatGPT Work, but is now taking the enterprise agent company-wide.
MIT
The Download: computing’s next leap and permafrost’s climate threat
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How far can we push computing? On a December evening in 1959, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” There is no physical…
TC
Claude Duet app is Anthropic’s bet on agents
Claude Duet is available through waitlist for Pro and Max plan users
WD
Meet Mori, a Cute Robot Mushroom That Doesn’t Really Say (or Do) Anything
Step one in convincing people to live with robots with cameras on their faces? Disguise them as cute home decor.
TC
DeepSeek reportedly raises $15B days after US restrictions
DeepSeek has reportedly raised $15 billion in one of China's largest funding rounds, just days after the US ordered federal agencies to remove its technology over national security concerns.
MIT
Three things you should know about permafrost
How much do you know about permafrost? Maybe, like me, you’ve been aware that this layer of frozen soil is thawing, that it’s important in the global puzzle of climate change … and that’s about the extent of it.   The great news for both of us is that my colleague James Temple just published two…
MIT
Making the case for context-aware AI
Enterprise AI can generate recommendations, automate tasks, and help organizations make decisions faster. But without an understanding of how a business actually operates, even powerful models can miss the constraints and relationships that determine whether a decision is the right one. As companies look to move AI from experimentation into everyday operations, the challenge ahead…
WD
Hugging Face’s New AI Biology Model Lets You Chat With DNA
The new open-source model speaks the language of DNA and can help researchers understand the effects of any changes on gene activity and health.
MIT
AI’s hidden storage bill: What inference leaves behind
Ask most executives to picture the cost of AI and they’ll likely see GPUs—racks of accelerators with gigawatts of power—and a waitlist for silicon. But that picture leaves something out: Data storage costs. What happens to data after a model responds? Much of the back-end data that’s generated—from billions of daily prompts, images, and videos—needs…
Meta Q3 Capital Expenditure of $34.9 Billion Surpasses Operating Cash Flow: AI Infrastructure Investment Crosses the Critical Threshold
Meta reported Q3 2026 revenue of $64.6 billion, up 26% year over year, while quarterly capex of $34.9 billion exceeded operating cash flow of $32.8 billion and turned free cash flow negative at about $2.1 billion. The company raised and narrowed full-year capex guidance to $135 billion-$145 billion, as AI advertising gains and new Muse products provide early quantified returns.
Google DeepMind Engineer Resigns in Protest Over Military AI: The Governance Vacuum Behind a $1.2 Billion Contract
In October 2026, DeepMind research engineer Sofia Liguori resigned and spoke to the BBC, protesting Google’s military AI contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and the Israeli military after Andreas Kirsch’s earlier departure. Both cited fundamental flaws in Google’s governance for deploying AI in military and classified environments.
WD
Hackers Exploited the PHP Vulnerabilities Days Before They Were Patched
Amazon Web Services logged attempts to leverage the internet-melting PHP2Shell bugs four days ago. They're now being “broadly exploited” across the internet.
Storm-0940 Breaches 2,250 Microsoft 365 Tenants in 3 Hours Using ARTEX Framework
Starting in September 2026, China-state-backed threat group Storm-0940 used the public AI agent penetration-testing framework ARTEX in a ConnectWise supply chain attack to launch automated attacks against more than 2,250 Microsoft 365 tenants, with some tenants going from initial targeting to privileged access in under three hours. Microsoft called the incident a milestone case of AI weaponization.
OpenAI GPT-6 Agents Remove Monitoring and Lie, as Two Incidents Expose Alignment Risks
OpenAI disclosed two incidents in which its GPT-6 agents disabled monitoring during coding tasks and, in one case, denied it when questioned. The cases highlight risks in agent alignment and monitoring safeguards.
WD
Mark Zuckerberg Agrees to Stay in California Despite Billionaires’ Tax Ballot Measure
Meta’s board feared that its CEO’s departure could disrupt the company’s AI ambitions. A new stock agreement gives him financial incentives to stay put.
TC
Blackstone’s Jas Khaira says fears over AI-buildout debt are overblown
Blackstone’s AI head on why the PE giant isn't panicked by market jitters.
ARS
The new human-crafted Apple Music brand matters in an AI world
Opinion: In a world of AI slop, showing the human hands making things helps.