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October 19, 2026, 4:30 PM
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Connor Hart / Wall Street Journal:
The US DHS orders all federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek's tech from their IT systems and prohibits future procurement of its products and services  —  The Department of Homeland Security has ordered federal civilian agencies to remove artificial-intelligence technology developed …
Kai Nicol-Schwarz / CNBC:
Elon Musk says “I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America” in 2027, a gift worth ~$10.5B, after Anthropic committed 5% of its shares to APBF  —  Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.
MiniMax:
MiniMax launches M3.1 Flash, saying it delivers “a generational leap” in agentic tasks, coding, computer use, and cybersecurity, with weights due October 23  —  Space Bunny 🐰, which processed more than 200 trillion tokens while operating anonymously, was an early version of MiniMax M3.1 Flash.
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Microsoft debuts new security tools in Microsoft 365 E7 and its Project Perception system that treat AI agents as potential insider threats via risk assessments  —  Microsoft is coming out with new security tools that treat AI agents as potential insider threats, continuously assessing …
Raphael Satter / Reuters:
Researcher: a Chinese-speaking hacker used AI agents to target 1,200+ websites and breach 100+ entities, like Deere and SharkNinja, spending ~$5,000 in tokens  —  Over the past couple of weeks, a cybersecurity researcher watched as a Chinese-speaking hacker broke into websites belonging …
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
Apple announces a “Pro and tell” event on October 28 at 10am PT in LA, where its first touchscreen MacBook, a 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6, and more are expected  —  Apple today announced its second experience of the month, taking place next Wednesday, October 28 at 10 a.m. PT. The tagline for this event is: “Pro and tell.”
Matthias Bastian / The Decoder:
Google DeepMind says four Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft without any human help in 27 hours and 14 minutes, costing $1,620 at Argon's planned 2027 price  —  The Google Deepmind team dropped the agents into a randomly generated world without assigning roles, strategies, or game-specific tools.
Dominic-Madori Davis / TechCrunch:
Town, which develops enterprise AI assistants, raised a $108M Series B at a $1B valuation, after announcing a $55M Series A in June  —  Town, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based startup developing AI assistants, nabbed a unicorn valuation on Monday, announcing a $108 million Series B funding round co-led …
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Amazon launches TorchNeuron, an open-source framework that lets developers run PyTorch code on Amazon's Trainium chips with no rewriting needed, in public beta  —  A new software tool from Amazon aims to make switching from Nvidia to the company's own AI chips about as simple as changing a setting.
Stephanie Palazzolo / The Information:
Source: Anthropic is preparing a model with better intuition and reasoning that can discern underlying intentions and is better at thinking outside of the box  —  In the last month, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have released more than a dozen new models.  If you thought that pace was crazy …
Financial Times:
Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, and Vodafone agree to explore a joint bid to offer “direct-to-device” satellite service in Europe, challenging Starlink  —  Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone to explore joint bid for spectrum to provide mobile satellite coverage
Bloomberg:
AI chip startup Tenstorrent raised a $1.5B Series E led by Trace Capital and Innovation X at a $6.2B valuation, up from $2.6B after raising $700M in 2024  —  AI chip startup Tenstorrent Inc., after attracting takeover interest earlier this year, has raised $1.5 billion from investors …
Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:
Sources: US investigators pursuing ShinyHunters, which stole FBI data, identified executives at two ransomware negotiation firms who had unusually close ties  —  U.S. federal investigators pursuing the ShinyHunters hacking group that recently stole highly sensitive data from the FBI …
Dan Mangan / CNBC:
Filing: US prosecutors say OpenAI suspect Abdulrahman Alfozan maintained frequent WhatsApp contact in 2025 and 2026 with an unnamed Saudi Royal Family member  —  The Saudi national charged with planting a recording device in a sensitive OpenAI executive conference room in San Francisco was …
Engineering at Meta:
Meta details Prometheus, its gigawatt-scale supercluster in Ohio, which will have ~1M GPUs at full scale and was used to train its Muse foundational models  —  - With the recent release of the Muse family of foundational models, we want to take you inside the infrastructure that has made it all possible.
Alex Konrad / Upstarts Media:
Tolan, an AI assistant focused on users that are not tech-savvy, raised $30M from USV, Khosla Ventures, and Homebrew, and says 70% of its users are women  —  Far from Silicon Valley's echo chamber, about 250,000 everyday people turn to AI app Tolan as a friendly voice, or to help organize their lives and families.
ProPublica:
Sources: DHS officials asked CISA to hack a voting machine to report vulnerabilities to the White House without telling the vendor; the request wasn't acted on  —  Reporting Highlights  — An Unusual Request: Political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security wanted the agency …
Blake Brittain / Reuters:
SCOTUS rejects an appeal by BMG, Sony Music, UMG, and Warner Music, upholding a decision that copyright termination rights apply globally, not just in the US  —  The US Supreme Court rejected on Monday a challenge by a group of music labels to a judicial decision that said a law allowing creators …
See also Mediagazer
Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros / SemiAnalysis:
Analysis: companies are set for a massive acceleration of 50GW+ in data center capacity additions in 2027; 24GW+ across 40 campuses are in the advanced stages  —  60GW Under Construction, SemiAnalysis Leading Indicators, 1.3T of Lease Contracts Signed YTD, The Shortage Could Move to Chips
Zack Abrams / The Block:
Sam Altman's World debuts a World ID verification suite for banks, bundling tools for verifying human and agent identities, its first industry-specific offering  —  The identity project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman named Bain Capital and VanEck Funds among its design partners …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Developers and vibe coders are using AI tools like Claude Code to get rid of sponsored ads on their smart TVs, disable tracking features, and more  —  The latest use case for AI?  Dumbing down your smart TV to get rid of the bloat.  A number of developers and vibe coders have recently …

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 4:30 PM ET, October 19, 2026.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

From Mediagazer

CNN:
Source: UFC CEO Dana White has declined Trump's offer to become press secretary

Washington Post:
Sources: Trump ally Laura Loomer was paid, including via wire transfers worth ~$60K, for political social media posts without publicly disclosing the payments

Corbin Bolies / Variety:
Elvis Presley music rights holders and the publisher of many of Eminem's records file new federal lawsuits against Suno, adding to the AI company's legal woes

More News

Maddy Varner / Wired:
Character.AI's Chapter 11 court filings indicate a two-part deal with Disney to transfer talent and tech, shielding Disney from Character.AI's legal liabilities
Caroline Haskins / Wired:
How the data center industry courts kids amid a backlash: 11+ firms and groups hosting field trips since 2025, flag kits and cards for first graders, and more
New York Times:
Analysis: 11K+ accounts on X, Bluesky, Discord, Telegram, and others made nearly 25K posts to unmask a Cornell sexual assault accuser, after she named seven men

Earlier Picks

Allie Garfinkle / Fortune:
Abby Care, which runs an AI-powered platform that trains and certifies family members as paid caregivers, raised an $82M Series C led by Transformation Capital
Krisztian Sandor / CoinDesk:
Allium: stablecoin payments rose 45% YoY to $482B YTD through September 30, with transactions up 71% to 1.04B, while circulating supply grew just 0.4% to ~$305B
Osmond Chia / BBC:
China's GDP grew 4.5% YoY in Q3, up from Q2's three-year-low growth rate of 4.3% but below Q1's 5%, as AI-driven exports helped offset weak domestic spending
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