Sunday, October 25, 2026

18 news stories · 16 video stories

AI news

18 stories from written sources (1388 articles from 139 of 430 feeds, published between Oct 23 09:00 UTC and Oct 25 09:00 UTC, none shown in an earlier edition). Brief summaries with linked sources; the videos follow.

Top story

Anthropic's public prospectus shows $80.7 billion first-half loss; IPO reported for mid-November

Big News Network reported the filing puts the loss at $80.7 billion. FinanceFeeds said the listing is targeted for mid-November, and Stocktwits said revenue and compute costs are both rising fast. Prior reports cited a draft; coverage reviewed gives no revenue figure.

Sources: FinanceFeeds · Stocktwits · Big News Network.com

Labs and models

Block unveils Dessa, a speech model it says was trained only on human speech

Block said Dessa processes audio directly rather than converting it to text, and runs locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max, The Decoder reported. The model is not public yet; Block is seeking security researchers to test it. The claim that it is the first trained entirely on speech is the company's.

Sources: The News International · TechCrunch AI · The Decoder

DeepSeek releases V4.1 Flash, which WinBuzzer says gains on coding and cost but lags on facts

A llama.cpp pull request and a Reddit poster describe a model of 763 billion parameters with a technical report on Hugging Face; the parameter count is the poster's. Startup Fortune said the cheaper model is worsening GPU scarcity.

Sources: r/LocalLLaMA · Startup Fortune · WinBuzzer

Policy and courts

Elvis Presley rightsholders sue Anthropic over 274 songs

Rolling Stone reported the suit alleges Anthropic trained its models on 274 songs without permission. UA.NEWS, relaying Rolling Stone, put the damages sought at about $41 million. Anthropic's response was not in the coverage reviewed.

Sources: UA.NEWS · VICE · Billboard · Rolling Stone

Google DeepMind employees resign over Pentagon AI deals, reports say

Livemint and Hindustan Times reported that researchers left over the company's classified military work, citing ethical and safety concerns. The excerpts do not say how many resigned or give a Google response.

Sources: The Financial Express · NewsBytes · Hindustan Times · Livemint

FBI explores espionage case against former OpenAI engineer, WSJ reports

The Wall Street Journal reported in an exclusive that the FBI is exploring an espionage case against the Saudi former OpenAI engineer. Demokratis.co.id reported that a judge ordered him detained without bail; the Journal's account of that is not in the excerpts.

Sources: Demokratis.co.id · FourWeekMBA · WSJ

Google updates privacy policy to say Gmail and Photos data used by AI features can inform ads

The Hacker News said the policy now states that allowing Search or Gemini to use data from other Google services could let Google target ads based on that activity. Moneycontrol and WinBuzzer reported the change; the coverage reviewed gives no effective date.

Sources: TechStory · WinBuzzer · Moneycontrol.com

Sweden's Government Offices block ChatGPT and Claude, keep Microsoft Copilot

Decrypt reported the Swedish government's offices have blocked the two chatbots on staff computers while leaving Copilot available. The excerpts do not give the reason or the date the block took effect.

Sources: Crypto Briefing · BigGo Finance · Decrypt

Business and chips

OpenAI discounts of up to 90 percent are drawing customers from Anthropic, The Information reports

Rippling raised OpenAI's share of its coding workload from 16 to 52 percent as Anthropic's fell from 57 to 18, CEO Parker Conrad said. Replit switched after an offer of more than 30 percent off a contract worth over $100 million a year, and DataCamp's CEO said costs fell 80 to 90 percent.

Sources: TOKENPOST · The Decoder

Nvidia's financing role faces test as Huang pitches chips as loan collateral

CNBC said Nvidia's push to fund AI developers and neoclouds is facing its first major stress test as credit tightens. BigGo Finance reported Huang is pitching lenders on financing Nvidia chips to unlock $500 billion, and TokenPost put Nvidia's gross guarantee exposure at up to $108.5 billion.

Sources: Martin Cid Magazine · TOKENPOST · BigGo Finance · CNBC Technology

Texas suspends 17 data center permits and shuts down automated approval portal

Tom's Hardware reported the state halted the permits and disabled the portal that approved projects automatically. The site had kept running for a month after Gov. Greg Abbott called for a pause on approvals, the outlet said.

Sources: Mezha.net · Tom's Hardware

Character.AI files for Chapter 11 as Disney bids $20 million

According to openclassactions.com, the chatbot company filed for bankruptcy and Disney made a $20 million bid. The site's coverage focuses on what the filing means for pending lawsuits.

Sources: openclassactions.com

Research

ARC Prize rejects OpenAI's claim that GPT-6 Astra scored 99.9 percent on its AGI test

According to Startup Fortune, the benchmark's organizers dispute the score OpenAI claimed for Astra. The excerpt does not say on what grounds.

Sources: Startup Fortune

Study finds elaborate coding-agent harnesses raise cost without clearly improving results

Two Shandong University researchers ran five models through Claude Code, OpenCode and mini-SWE-agent. Swapping harnesses moved pass rates little more than rerunning the same setup, which varies by up to six points on SWE-bench Verified, while cost per task can triple, The Decoder reported.

Sources: The Decoder

OpenMobile-2 authors say training on more varied apps matters more than more data for phone agents

The open environment has more than 110 applications, including 35 replicas of popular apps. On real Android devices the model scores highest among open agents, according to its authors, The Decoder reported.

Sources: The Decoder German · The Decoder

Safety and security

PHP Foundation says it has seen no successful PHP2Shell exploitation, WIRED reports

Cloudflare counted millions of exploit attempts within hours of publication, but many circulating exploits appear ineffective, WIRED reported. Calif researchers first found the flaws in early August, partly with OpenAI's AI tools; OpenAI and Wiz later found them independently.

Sources: The Economic Times · NPR Technology · WIRED AI

Three OpenAI safety researchers fired over alleged leaks deny sharing confidential information

Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni and Jasmine Wang told the Wall Street Journal that OpenAI never said in writing what they mishandled, The Decoder reported. OpenAI says security found disappearing Signal chats on their phones and that the firings were unrelated to safety concerns they had raised.

Sources: Inshorts · WinBuzzer · The San Francisco Standard · The Decoder

OpenCode says 1.4 percent of Console users were breached, some seeing $1,000 AI charges

According to The Cool Down, the coding-tool maker disclosed the breach and that some affected users were billed for AI usage they did not make. The excerpt gives no cause.

Sources: The Cool Down

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Then, from YouTube

What AI YouTube said

Coverage: 51 videos from 23 of 111 monitored channels reviewed (0 partial or status unknown); videos under 45 s were not reviewed. Dates are UTC upload dates. Vendor claims are labelled as such.

Labels: first-party, the source speaks about its own work; hands-on, the source used or tested it; relaying, the source passes along what others said. They are not accuracy ratings.

New today

Presenters relay Microsoft report of China-aligned group using AI models to reach cloud admin access

Nate B Jones and Wes Roth each relayed a Microsoft post, which Roth dated Oct. 21, describing a China-aligned actor tracked as Storm 0940 that used several models, some Chinese open-source, against hundreds of organizations. Roth said the actor reached powerful cloud administrative privileges about three hours after initial targeting; Jones said some attacks reached privileged access in a couple of hours. Both said Microsoft reported that most attacks failed. Neither showed the Microsoft document, and Jones's captions garble the agent framework's name.

Evidence: 0 first-party, 0 hands-on, 2 relaying

Watch: Wes Roth: it's WORSE than we thought... (high hype)

Continuing stories

Kimi K3.1 Pro draws mixed hands-on results; Moonshot's benchmark and price claims relayed

New tests of Moonshot AI's Kimi K3.1 Pro, released by Oct. 23, found it below the leading closed models on creator benchmarks.

Evidence: 0 first-party, 3 hands-on, 2 relaying

Watch: AI Code King: Kimi K3.1 Pro is REALLY BAD!

Two critical PHP flaws patched Oct. 21; Cloudflare reportedly saw exploitation attempts earlier

Nate B Jones and Wes Roth repeated that PHP released fixes on Oct. 21 for two critical flaws, and that UK and European agencies told organizations to isolate unpatched systems.

Evidence: 0 first-party, 0 hands-on, 2 relaying

Watch: Nate B Jones: Black October Isn't Just A PHP Bug. Attackers Want Your AI Keys.

Nate B Jones repeats eMudhra weak-key report; says Helme used Claude to recover keys

Nate B Jones repeated that researcher Scott Helme recovered eight eMudhra private keys in under a second, one being the number four, and said Helme used Claude with a single prompt.

Evidence: 0 first-party, 0 hands-on, 1 relaying

Watch: Nate B Jones: Black October Isn't Just A PHP Bug. Attackers Want Your AI Keys.

LiteLLM disclosure says distributed release held credential-stealing malware; AI tool exposure noted

Nate B Jones repeated a LiteLLM disclosure that a distributed release carried credential-stealing malware while the official source tag was clean.

Evidence: 0 first-party, 0 hands-on, 1 relaying

Watch: Nate B Jones: Black October Isn't Just A PHP Bug. Attackers Want Your AI Keys.

Wes Roth relays security claims: Quest breach, honeypot traffic, Altman and Clinton warnings

Wes Roth relayed Quest Diagnostics' confirmation that patient personal and health data was compromised, with no cause, date or size given, and an anonymous post claiming a honeypot took 14,000 non-human hits in six hours.

Evidence: 0 first-party, 0 hands-on, 1 relaying

Watch: Wes Roth: it's WORSE than we thought... (high hype)

CrowdStrike executive repeats 27-second breakout time and says remediation cost fell to three cents

A CrowdStrike executive on an NVIDIA panel cited a fastest measured breakout time of 27 seconds last year and said specialized models cut per-remediation cost from $10 to three cents over about three months.

Evidence: 0 first-party, 0 hands-on, 1 relaying

Watch: NVIDIA: NVIDIA GTC Berlin 2026 | Live Keynote Pregame

Also notable

Shapiro relays Anthropic post on Claude Code merge volume, AI review layers and approval rules

David Shapiro, reading Anthropic's Oct. 15 post, said merged Claude Code pull requests more than doubled from June to September while the revert share fell over 40%, and that Claude writes about 90% of Claude Code.

Evidence: 0 first-party, 0 hands-on, 1 relaying

Watch: David Shapiro: Anthropic Is Living In The Future

Cloudflare engineer says internal AI code reviewer has run over a million reviews, now costs $0.67 each

A Cloudflare engineer said the company's internal AI code reviewer, built on OpenCode and GitLab, has run over a million reviews since March, covering about 350,000 merge requests across just under 7,000 repositories, with about 16,000 merges blocked in four months.

Evidence: 1 first-party, 0 hands-on, 0 relaying

Watch: Cloudflare Developers: It's time to build, not buy (Cloudflare Connect 2026)

Dylan Davis says Claude's auto permission mode becomes default; cites Anthropic approval study

Dylan Davis said on Oct. 24 that Claude's auto permission mode, which approves actions the model judges safe and prompts for unsafe ones, becomes the default within a week or two.

Evidence: 0 first-party, 1 hands-on, 0 relaying

Watch: Dylan Davis: Claude Stopped Asking Permission. Change This Setting First

Speakers say model cyber safeguards hinder defenders; cite 29,000 Anthropic-found candidate vulnerabilities

Nate B Jones said safeguards meant to stop offensive use trip up defenders and force emergency use of other models.

Evidence: 0 first-party, 0 hands-on, 2 relaying

Watch: NVIDIA: NVIDIA GTC Berlin 2026 | Live Keynote Pregame

GLM 5.3 cyber scores and an abliterated variant relayed; Anthropic reportedly found 50 of 410 exploits

Julian Goldie relayed z.ai's table with CyberGym rising from 77.2 to 84.5 and ExploitBench from 24.4 to 54.4 between GLM 5.2 and 5.3, an unseen Anthropic evaluation in which 50 of 410 ExploitBench attempts produced end-to-end exploits, and an announced refusal-removed 'Abliterated Model Large V2' with a claimed 1 million-token context.

Evidence: 0 first-party, 0 hands-on, 1 relaying

Watch: Julian Goldie: Abliterated Model Large-V2 Just Dropped! (high hype)

Models and learning

Prompt Engineering reviews Harness Squared paper: evolved harnesses lifted scores, grader rubric fetched

Prompt Engineering's presenter described the Harness Squared paper's propose, probe and compose loop and its reported results: no single harness won across four, and an evolved harness lifted accuracy 35 to 50 points on legal redlining and budget tasks, letting a smaller GLM 5 beat Gemini 3.5 flash on its default harness.

Evidence: 0 first-party, 0 hands-on, 1 relaying

Watch: Prompt Engineering: Harness² Explained: Self-Improving Agents Without Training

Bridgewater describes Vault data platform, search benchmark and AI analyst tools

At the AI Engineer conference, Bridgewater said its Vault holds over 100 million documents from 135 external sources plus internal data.

Evidence: 0 first-party, 0 hands-on, 1 relaying

Watch: AI Engineer: How Bridgewater Turned 100 Million Documents Into an Edge - Sam Green…

Sentry talk warns error telemetry can carry prompt injections; small encoder tops 90% in shadow tests

A Cloudflare event speaker said attackers can plant instructions in error telemetry that make debugging agents install malicious packages.

Evidence: 1 first-party, 0 hands-on, 0 relaying

Watch: Cloudflare Developers: Sentry at Cloudflare Connect: The prompt is lava (Connect 2026)

Mirza test finds Nemotron-3.5 Bolt E4B missed a planted bug and claimed success

Fahd Mirza tested NVIDIA's Nemotron-3.5 Bolt E4B, a Gemma 4 E4B post-train with 8B total and 4B active parameters.

Evidence: 0 first-party, 1 hands-on, 0 relaying

Watch: Fahd Mirza: NVIDIA'S Small Model: Nemotron-3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB Locally

Coverage

458 videos inventoried in the Oct. 21 to Oct. 25 scan window; 51 newly transcribed and read in full (all uploaded in the 24 hours before Oct. 25 02:13 UTC, so no late finds), 337 already covered in earlier editions, 41 live streams deferred, 64 under 45 seconds skipped and 6 without transcripts.

Sources reviewed (51 videos)

All 51 videos read for this edition, grouped by channel. Tags: what the video was, plus sponsored (paid placement), vendor (a company on its own product), self-promo (the creator's own offer), high hype or partial transcript where they apply.