The Information

[The Information] Joseph Bloom, head of model transparency at the U.K. AI Security Institute, said the ability to monitor AI models to detect what they are trying to do and why is increasingly hard to maintain. "In general, we're seeing monitorability—in various respects or from various angles—decrease," Bloom said on the latest episode of The Information's AI Deep Dive, in one of the first on-the-record interviews given by a member of technical staff at AISI. The institute is one of the world's largest government bodies focused on AI, and its work includes evaluating models from leading AI companies.

[The Information] DeepSeek has unveiled a prototype of a new autonomous coding agent, as the Chinese AI lab steps up efforts to compete with Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex and other popular coding tools, according to The Information. The DeepSeek Harness team open-sourced what it described as a "super agent" over the weekend.

[The Information] Chip designer Marvell Technologies agreed Monday to acquire laser maker Lumentum in an all-stock deal valued at around $80 billion, according to The Information. The deal underscores how the AI investment boom has lifted Lumentum's value. Marvell designs chips for data centers, networking and storage systems, and is buying one of the market's key players.

[The Information] Apple's new CEO, John Ternus, spent his first earnings call on Monday heavy on product marketing and light on information. Finance chief Kevan Parekh then projected 7% to 10% revenue growth for the December quarter, a marked slowdown from the 12% growth in the September period, and projected a drop in Apple's gross margin due to rising memory costs. Apple shares fell as much as 4% in after-hours trading. Parekh blamed limited component supplies for the expected revenue slowdown, saying Apple can't make as many devices as it could sell, but said that may not be the only explanation.

[The Information] U.S. export restrictions on AI chip shipments to China are porous, according to The Information, which reported on a technique gaining traction among smugglers involving a key type of memory chip. While U.S. export regulations ban shipping high-bandwidth memory chips on their own to China, including from countries such as South Korea, the rules contain a loophole allowing sales of those memory chips if they are packaged together on plates with cheap server processors whose performance falls below the export restriction threshold, according to the report. That is because the computing power of the package is determined by the server processor, not the memory chips, according to the rules.

[The Information] Apple's new CEO John Ternus wants the company to get serious about robots, but Apple's plodding progress on the first one it hopes to sell—a device with a nine-inch screen that swivels on an arm and resembles the Pixar lamp—suggests he could face an uphill battle, according to The Information. Apple began work on the robot in 2019, code-naming it J595, with modest ambitions: it was envisioned mostly as a video-call device whose robotic arm could follow someone around a room. Hopes ballooned once executives wanted to add AI capabilities. The current design envisions the robot using a camera and sensors to be fully aware of its environment and act autonomously—turning on lights when someone enters a room, perhaps even telling a cat to get off a table—while avoiding accidental collisions with nearby objects. Much of the hardware has been finished for around two years, but the software team has found it difficult to keep pace, people who have worked on the project said. The hardware team responsible for J595 has pushed to hurry up and release the product, while the software team has advocated delaying it and over the past year has tried to strip back some proposed features, focusing the product on a few capabilities related to FaceTime and automating home tasks such as switching on a light.

[The Information] OpenAI has signed deals with Magnite and PubMatic, whose software enables advertisers to place ads on websites and other digital platforms, to fill unused ad space on ChatGPT, according to three people familiar with the deals. Advertisers are using Magnite and PubMatic's software to set up those placements, the people said. OpenAI, Magnite and PubMatic did not comment.

[The Information] Annual contract renewal season has arrived, but some large enterprise customers are reluctant to raise their annual spending commitments with model developers, according to The Information. Software sellers traditionally use renewals to persuade customers to increase annual commitments, for instance by reminding them they exceeded usage limits this year or highlighting new features, and model developers have had success with that playbook in the past. This year is different, some customers said. An executive at a major financial services firm said the company was hesitant to increase its spending commitment with Anthropic, OpenAI or any other model provider, partly because the rapid pace of model releases means enterprises want the flexibility to switch quickly to whatever the best new model is, something that can change week to week.

[The Information] Anthropic reported nearly $17 billion in revenue in the third quarter ending September, up 47% from the second quarter, according to The Information, a sign that the AI company's once red-hot revenue growth is slowing ahead of a blockbuster IPO this month. The company reported a $23.3 billion net loss for the quarter.

[The Information] Oracle filed on Monday to raise $20 billion through fresh debt and equity offerings, its latest funding move as it spends heavily on AI infrastructure. According to The Information, the cloud and software firm is selling $10 billion worth of investment-grade bonds and $10 billion in common stock. Oracle shares ...

[The Information] OpenAI has hired former U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll as a senior advisor to help expand the use of the AI company's technology in national defense and other military applications, according to The Information. Driscoll stepped away from his Army post in September after reportedly clashing with the Defense Secretary.

[The Information] SpaceX is in talks with discount carrier Boost Mobile to expand its existing wireless coverage beyond its satellite network, according to The Washington Post. The outlet reported that the talks could result in either acquiring the mobile network, which is owned by EchoStar, or another arrangement.

[The Information] Apple reported slowing sales growth in its fiscal fourth quarter in its first earnings release under new chief executive John Ternus, according to The Information. Total revenue for the September quarter was $114.5 billion, up 12% from the previous year, marking its slowest sales growth of the year. The iPhone business ...

[The Information] Salesforce said Monday it plans to acquire Cresta, a nine-year-old provider of AI-powered contact center automation software, extending its recent acquisition spree. Salesforce did not disclose a price but agreed to pay $2.7 billion for Cresta, according to a person familiar with the deal.

[The Information] Salesforce said Friday it is acquiring Rune Technologies, a defense tech startup, to build out Missionforce, its suite of software tools designed for the military. The company is paying $375 million in cash and stock, according to online publication Resilience Media. The deal extends Salesforce's recent acquisition streak.

[The Information] Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, saw a $5.8 billion net outflow of assets after it resumed processing user withdrawals on Sunday morning following a historic $6.3 billion hack, according to The Information. The net outflow figure, tracked by crypto analytics platform DefiLlama, represents about 3% of its total assets.

[The Information] Can Apple, Uber and Palantir turn this stock market around? It sure needs it, according to The Information. Worries about excessive AI spending tanked Google's stock last week and sent the Nasdaq Composite to its worst month since March 2025. While the major indexes are still in the green for the year, a few more days like Friday's could change that. Palantir Technologies, which reports Monday, has told investors to expect an 83% jump in the third quarter from the year-ago period, a slowdown from the second quarter's 93% growth. Palantir spent only $22 million in capex in the first half. Apple has warned investors that supply constraints for advanced chip manufacturing would contribute to slower revenue growth, to a range of 9% to 11% in the September quarter from a year ago, slower than its 16% growth in the June quarter. Apple has also forecast iPhone revenue growth in the mid-teens versus 22% in the June quarter. An improvement on that outlook could buoy the mood, while a sharper slowdown in growth from either company could give investors another reason to sell tech stocks.

[The Information] The Trump administration declined to produce key documents related to its voluntary AI testing framework, according to The Information, despite a September agreement with the nonprofit Protect Democracy Project reached after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The nonprofit said the White House told it in a letter on Friday that it would not hand over the materials.

[The Information] The Information's annual WTF Summit, held a few days ago, gathered women leaders from Anthropic, Google, Goldman Sachs and dozens of other companies across technology and media to discuss the forces remaking those industries, according to The Information. Topics ranged from the state of tech M&A to chip financing to the geopolitics between America and China. Across the talks, attendees kept their eyes fixed on what lies ahead—perhaps none more so than Amanda Peterson Corio, Google's global head of data center energy, who told the room, "I live in 2031."

[The Information] Data centers in space could cost up to 100 times as much as those on Earth, Google's head of data center energy said this week. "Let's explore all the terrestrial options before we go extraterrestrial," Amanda Peterson Corio said at The Information's WTF summit, a gathering of senior women in the technology and finance industries. The comments came from a company that itself is testing AI server chips in orbit, and as SpaceX's orbital data center plans underpin part of its roughly $1.8 trillion market capitalization.

[The Information] U.S. stocks dropped sharply Friday as disappointing quarterly results from Amazon and Intel intensified the tech selloff of the past two days. The Nasdaq Composite dropped almost 3%, while the S&P 500 dropped almost 2% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq ...

[The Information] OpenAI has lowered the amount of capital it is seeking from investors in its latest fundraising round by $10 billion, according to a Friday report by The Financial Times. The company was initially seeking to raise $30 billion at a $1.4 trillion valuation. It lowered the valuation last week, according to the report.

[The Information] S&P Global Ratings lowered its credit rating outlook on Meta Platforms to negative from stable, saying the company's ability to monetize its fast-rising AI investments is "more limited than that of its peers." The announcement Friday comes after Meta last week reported negative free cash flow.

[The Information] California voters will vote next Tuesday on Proposition 40, a ballot measure that would impose a one-time 5% tax on billion-dollar fortunes to fund healthcare and education in the state. A fresh Politico poll found 45% of likely voters in favor, 43% against and 12% undecided, according to The Information, while prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi put the odds of passage at about 23%. A slew of Democratic-aligned groups and trade unions have voiced opposition, including Planned Parenthood, the California Teachers Association and the California Medical Association, and Governor Gavin Newsom has also said he opposes the measure. Building a Better California, the best-funded group opposing Prop 40, has raised $330 million from donors including Sergey Brin, Stripe's Patrick Collison, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Vinod Khosla and John Doerr. Both supporters and opponents expect lengthy court battles over its constitutionality even if it passes.

[The Information] Meta Platforms has built a prototype humanoid with Chinese robotics company Fourier and is already working on a second version, as the social media giant steps up efforts to develop robots for people's homes, according to people familiar with the initiative. Meta and Fourier built the roughly 106-pound humanoid, known internally as Max, in just three months, the people said. The goal was to help Meta develop a more polished future product at its robotics arm that it could eventually release as a product, one of the people said, adding that no launch target had been set.

[The Information] The Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Saturday, October 31, that North Korea was responsible for the $6.3 billion theft from crypto exchange Binance, the largest crypto hack in history. The FBI said it worked with the U.S. Secret Service and the criminal investigation arm of the Internal Revenue Service on the matter.

[The Information] At least one major-party nominee backs a data center moratorium in 21 of the 36 states electing a governor on Tuesday, according to The Information's analysis of candidate platforms and public statements. Both nominees back pauses in five states (Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon and Texas), and a candidate promising a pause is likely to win in three (Maine, New Mexico and New York), based on recent polls. In seven more (Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Wisconsin and Vermont), the race could be close between a candidate who backs a pause and one who does not. Those 15 states are home to more than a third of the U.S. population. Whichever candidates win, more doors are likely to close on the industry, leaving it with fewer places to build and higher costs where it still can, according to The Information.

[The Information] Amazon disclosed a new loan facility of up to $80 billion to purchase technology infrastructure assets in its third-quarter results filing. According to the filing, Amazon can borrow from the facility between the first quarter of 2027 and the third quarter of 2028, and the debt is due five years from the date Amazon borrows.

[The Information] Pension plans representing public employees in Orange County, Los Angeles, Massachusetts and South Carolina are positioned to receive sizeable payouts from Anthropic's expected initial public offering in November, thanks to their investments in Spark Capital, a major Anthropic backer, according to an analysis from The Information. Over the past year, politicians and AI executives have floated ideas for a sovereign wealth fund or other ways of giving the American public a stake in the AI boom; these pension plans stand to benefit long before those proposals come to fruition.

[The Information] Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, said it was hit by a complex attack affecting an estimated $6.3 billion in funds, the largest crypto hack in history. The company said it will cover all losses and has reserved more than $6.3 billion of its own funds to cover the incident.

[The Information] Cyera, a five-year-old cybersecurity startup focused on protecting corporate data against AI-powered attacks, has spoken with investors about raising capital in a round that would nearly double its valuation to $20 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. The talks are still in progress, the people said.

[The Information] DeepSeek's nearly $16 billion funding round this month drew not only a flood of capital but a who's who of Chinese tech investors and some of the country's most powerful state-backed institutions, according to details of the round obtained by The Information. It was only the second fundraising round for the three-year-old company, which was the only major AI model developer to eschew external capital until its first fundraising in April. The new round included previous backers—Tencent and battery maker CATL remain DeepSeek's top two investors—as well as other tech companies, notably memory chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies and its chairman Zhu Yiming, according to details provided by two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

[The Information] DoorDash CEO Tony Xu on Thursday finally picked up Instacart, with DoorDash saying it would pay about $17 billion for the grocery-delivery business, according to The Information. Instacart founder Apoorva Mehta said on X that he and Xu had long discussed such a transaction. The Information reported in 2021 on talks between the two companies, when DoorDash at one point considered buying Instacart for more than $40 billion. Instacart sales grew 17% in the third quarter and it generated more than $300 million in cash in that period, a 13% increase. Also on Thursday, Josh Kushner's newly formed Thrive Holdings agreed to buy home security systems maker ADT for $7.6 billion. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani criticized the DoorDash-Instacart deal in a post on X on Thursday, saying such moves often bring higher prices for consumers and harsher exploitation for workers.

[The Information] Intel shares fell more than 23% in extended trading after the chipmaker reported third-quarter earnings and forecast a decline in revenue growth for its current quarter, due in part to slowing demand for PCs. According to The Information, the sell-off marks an abrupt change for Intel, whose shares had risen more than 130%.

[The Information] Private equity fundraising has split between haves and have-nots, as a prolonged slump in sales and IPOs of portfolio companies leaves investors with less cash for new funds. Giants such as Blackstone are still pulling in capital while some smaller firms struggle to attract investors, pushing newcomers to find ways to stand out, including betting on AI to transform companies and boost returns. Aldaron, a 12-person firm that calls itself a "transformation equity firm," uses an in-house engineering team to deploy AI at companies it acquires, emphasizing growth without job cuts. Co-founder Evan Mendez said "the core message that resonated with people is this transformation equity story." Aldaron completed its first acquisition in March, buying a majority stake in Oak Point Partners, and closed its first fund in October with $884 million from outside investors and more than $950 million including coinvestments, Mendez said. According to an August PitchBook report, private equity firms hold nearly 4,600 U.S. companies owned for at least five years, longer than the typical three- to five-year holding period. Mitchell Mansfield, a managing director at Kroll, said many managers are expected to exit the market as fundraising becomes more challenging.

[The Information] Nvidia is in talks to provide Nscale, a young AI cloud provider, with billions of dollars in credit guarantees for debt to develop a 460-megawatt data center that Anthropic plans to use, according to people with knowledge of the deal discussions. The deal is not yet signed, and terms could change. It is another example of how Nvidia has continued to provide financial support to so-called neoclouds such as Nscale, CoreWeave and Firmus, which have faced investor pressure over the debt they have raised to develop new facilities.

[The Information] Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, said Thursday it is investigating a "potential security issue" after more than $2 billion of various crypto tokens left Binance exchange wallets in a potential hack, according to an analysis of blockchain transactions. Tether has frozen more than ...

[The Information] Crosby, a two-year-old legal AI startup whose lawyers use AI to speed up contract review and other legal tasks, has submitted a bid for some of the assets of Weil, Gotshal & Manges following the law firm's sudden decision to wind down, according to a person familiar with the bid. Crosby submitted a letter of intent on Thursday to purchase some of Weil's assets, including internal data, its trademark and its brand, the person said. Terms of the bid could not be immediately learned. Crosby also hopes to hire some of Weil's 1,200 lawyers, according to the person.

[The Information] Coinbase reported third-quarter revenue of $1.2 billion, down 35% from a year ago and roughly flat versus the second quarter, as trading activity in the broader crypto market cooled. Its prediction markets business surpassed $200 million in annualized revenue, according to The Information. Net income was $719 million.

[The Information] Amazon Web Services revenue continued to accelerate in the third quarter, growing 39% to $46 billion, compared with a 37% growth rate in the second quarter, according to The Information. But the rest of Amazon's business segments, which depend on the company's giant ecommerce business, slowed in growth.

[The Information] Polymarket suspended trading on its prediction markets app outside the U.S. on October 29, 2026, after one of the company's vendors was "compromised" in an apparent hacking attempt that some customers said drained their funds. In a message to users in a Discord forum, Polymarket promised to cover the losses.

[The Information] Thrive Holdings, an AI-focused investment firm founded by OpenAI backer Thrive Capital, said Thursday it plans to acquire 152-year-old home security company ADT in an all-cash deal that values ADT's equity at about $7.6 billion. ADT shares jumped 34% on the announcement, according to The Information. Apollo Global was not further detailed in the summary.

[The Information] White & Case is "having to hold back" its rollout of one of the newest legal assistants made by AI startup Legora because lawyers are hesitant about using so-called AI agents, according to Isabel Parker, the law firm's chief innovation officer. Parker said a gradual rollout would ensure lawyers feel confident using the new agent, which can handle more complex legal work than the Legora agent lawyers currently use. She described lawyers as "skeptical," "time-poor" and "risk averse," with a strong conviction that their expertise is artisanal. Legora vice president of engagement Jillian Burnett said at the same event that the firm's lawyer client base is "very skeptical" and "very busy," and that Legora "didn't appreciate that fatigue enough." Parker said White & Case is investing "significant amounts" in AI tools and that 90% of its staff uses Legora products to some extent, with some tasks saving as much as 80% of the time previously required. Legora said it recently crossed $200 million in annualized recurring revenue.

[The Information] Kalshi said it has raised $1 billion in funding at a $40 billion valuation, in a round led by Wellington and Sequoia, confirming an August report from The Information. Other investors in the round include Baillie Gifford, Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue and Morgan Stanley Investment, among others.

[The Information] The Information editor Steve LeVine moderated a discussion with William Mao, vice president of energy infrastructure at Delta Electronics; Allan Schurr, chief commercial officer at ERock; and Brian Janous, co-founder of Cloverleaf Infrastructure, on powering AI data centers. Janous said the grid is underused by about 45% on average because it must accommodate usage peaks, and that a utility saying there is no power for five years means it cannot meet the coldest winter nights and hottest summer days. Schurr said going off-grid is a high-carbon, high-cost commitment and promoted microgrids as a bridge until grid connections arrive, saying a transmission substation takes three to four years to build while a 350 MW microgrid is built in 16 months. Janous said Cloverleaf has delivered about 7 GW of sites in 18 months, with another 10–12 GW in the pipeline. Mao said AI loads are measured in megawatts and fluctuate in milliseconds, and that Delta's solid-state transformers cut conversion stages.

[The Information] US officials found that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had a "close relationship" with a Chinese businesswoman who allegedly shared intelligence with Beijing authorities, the New York Times reported. President Donald Trump was briefed on the findings about a year ago and did not take action, according to the report.

[The Information] Sebastian Thrun, the computer scientist who pioneered several AI projects at Google, has co-founded a new startup focused on building AI models for engineering, according to a person with knowledge of the project. Thrun and co-founder Adrian Aoun started the company, Dulo, earlier this year in San Francisco, and in recent days closed a $130 million seed funding round, the person said. Investors in the round include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Kleiner Perkins Chairman John Doerr, and venture firms DST Global, Construct Capital and Lowercarbon Capital.

[The Information] OpenAI and Anthropic both said Monday that their internal AI models had disproven the Exponential Time Hypothesis, a longstanding computer science theorem that predicts the minimum difficulty of solving a certain category of problems, according to The Information. Cryptographers had long assumed the hypothesis was true and built other findings on that assumption. Matthew Green, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University and founder of encryption startup Zeutro, said disproving the hypothesis won't endanger any current encryption methods, but the finding is a big theoretical step showing that some problems are easier to solve than cryptographers had thought. That means cryptographers could also be wrong about other assumptions underlying core encryption methods such as elliptic curve encryption, a method underlying the majority of internet traffic, which would create a scramble to find new ways to keep information on the internet secure.

[The Information] As AI agents crowd onto the web, advertisers and publishers are beginning to deliver ads that only AI can see. According to The Information, the first publisher to experiment with these invisible ads was Time magazine, which continues to generate a significant portion of its revenue from ads on Time.com. The ads—for Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute, a trade group for project managers—first appeared online in August and were developed in partnership with Mobian, a New York-based ad tech startup. They were designed to give agents information about the institute's expertise in project management and Ally Bank's online banking services and ATM network. Time Chief Operating Officer Mark Howard said that following the ads' debut, Time has had over 30 meetings with brands about doing similar ads for AI agents, and several new advertisers are launching them now. Some of the agents' developers have voiced consternation, fearing marketers could try to sway agents to take actions without their users' knowledge.

[The Information] Microsoft hopes to raise as much as $25 billion in a bond sale as it seeks new ways to finance its ongoing AI spending, according to a person with knowledge of the plans. The debt offering reflects how data center operators are looking for new methods to fund their massive capital expenditures.

[The Information] OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, the most powerful model the company has released, has drawn strong demand since its early-September launch, and one growing customer base is Chinese AI labs seeking to extract its capabilities. DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, two of China's leading AI developers, relied heavily on outputs from Astra when training their latest models, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. The practice, known in the industry as distillation, remains one of the biggest contributors to progress by Chinese open-weight models despite repeated criticism from OpenAI and rival Anthropic, according to The Information.

[The Information] Artificial intelligence has thoroughly infiltrated business and politics, but it is also starting to divide companies and investors, according to leaders speaking at The Information's WTF Summit this week, a gathering of senior women in the technology and finance industries. Investors are increasingly picking AI winners and losers and favoring companies that can train models and control the chips and data centers underpinning them, said Kim Posnett, Goldman Sachs' global co-head of investment banking. "What you're seeing is not a change in AI sentiment," she said, but "a repositioning and differentiation across the AI trade."

[The Information] ServiceNow shares fell 19% after the company reported third-quarter earnings, according to The Information. The drop came even though the IT service management software provider slightly beat its earlier revenue growth estimate for its September quarter and forecast a 2% uptick in growth for its current quarter. It is the latest sign of investor sentiment.

[The Information] DoorDash said it agreed to buy grocery delivery app Instacart for roughly $17 billion, mostly in cash financed by borrowing. According to people familiar with the matter, DoorDash and Instacart rushed to seal the deal at a roughly 30% premium to where Instacart shares traded before The Information reported the companies were in talks, and wanted to sign before both reported quarterly earnings, originally scheduled for next week; both companies reported earnings today instead. A deal could take a year or longer to close. The people said DoorDash leaders had over the years considered buying Instacart to bolster grocery sales, and that Uber, which had also talked to Instacart about an acquisition, pulled away from the talks in September. Instacart's annual revenue growth has slowed considerably since going public, to 11% in 2025, while third-quarter sales rose 17%, according to the earnings report released today. According to market research firm eMarketer, Walmart accounted for nearly 32% of all online grocery sales in 2025 and Amazon almost 23%. The people familiar said Instacart's leaders believed this year was the right time to sell and did not want to miss a window to merge with a competitor during the Trump administration, which they viewed as friendlier to such deals.

[The Information] DoorDash is acquiring Instacart in a deal valued at roughly $17 billion, according to The Information, a combination that would make the merged company a constant presence for shoppers ordering groceries and restaurant meals online for home delivery. Instacart went public in 2023 and has lately seen slower revenue growth, according to the report.

[The Information] As AI agents crowd onto the web, advertisers and publishers are beginning to deliver ads only AI can see. According to The Information, the first publisher to experiment with these invisible ads was Time magazine, which still generates a significant portion of its revenue from ads on Time.com. The ads—for Ally Bank and Project Management Institute, a trade group for project managers—first appeared online in August and were developed in partnership with Mobian, a New York–based ad tech startup. They were designed to give agents information about the institute's expertise in project management and Ally Bank's online banking services and ATM network. Time Chief Operating Officer Mark Howard said that following the ads' debut, Time has had over 30 meetings with brands about doing similar ads for AI agents, and several new advertisers are launching them now. Some of the agents' developers have voiced consternation, fearing marketers could try to sway agents to take actions without their users' knowledge.

[The Information] DoorDash is acquiring Instacart in a deal valued at roughly $17 billion, according to The Information, a combination that would make the merged company a constant presence in the lives of shoppers who order groceries and restaurant meals online for home delivery. Instacart went public in 2023 and has lately seen its revenue growth slow.

[The Information] DoorDash said it agreed to buy grocery delivery app Instacart for roughly $17 billion, mostly in cash financed by borrowing. According to people familiar with the matter, DoorDash and Instacart rushed to seal the deal at a roughly 30% premium to where Instacart shares traded before The Information reported the companies were in talks, and aimed to sign before both reported quarterly earnings; both reported today instead. A deal could take a year or longer to close. DoorDash leaders had over the years considered buying Instacart to bolster grocery sales, the people said. Uber, which had also talked to Instacart about an acquisition, pulled away from the talks in September, people close to Uber said. Instacart's annual revenue growth has slowed to 11% in 2025, while third-quarter sales rose 17%, according to its earnings report today. According to eMarketer, Walmart accounted for nearly 32% of U.S. online grocery sales in 2025 and Amazon almost 23%.

[The Information] Artificial intelligence has thoroughly infiltrated business and politics, but it is also starting to divide companies and investors, according to leaders at The Information's WTF Summit this week, a gathering of senior women in the technology and finance industries. Investors are increasingly picking AI winners and losers and favoring companies that can train models and control the chips and data centers underpinning them, said Kim Posnett, Goldman Sachs' global co-head of investment banking. "What you're seeing is not a change in AI sentiment," she said, but "a repositioning and differentiation across the AI trade."

[The Information] ServiceNow shares fell 19% after the IT service management software provider reported third-quarter earnings, according to The Information. The company slightly beat its earlier revenue growth estimate for its September quarter and forecast a 2% uptick in growth for its current quarter. It is the latest sign that investor concerns about software-as-a-service stocks persist.

[The Information] OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, the most powerful model the company has released, has drawn strong demand since its early-September launch, and one growing customer base is Chinese AI labs seeking to extract its capabilities, according to The Information. DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, two of China's leading AI developers, relied heavily on outputs from Astra when training their latest models, people with direct knowledge of the matter said. The practice, known in the industry as distillation, remains one of the biggest contributors to progress by Chinese open-weight models, even as OpenAI and rival Anthropic have repeatedly criticized such efforts.

[The Information] Google Cloud's quarterly revenue more than doubled to over $30 billion, with operating income tripling to $11.12 billion, closing in on Microsoft Azure's $33 billion in the same period, which grew 48%, according to The Information. Alphabet's overall revenue rose 25% to $127.58 billion, slightly short of Wall Street forecasts, while heavy AI spending pushed free cash flow to negative $9 billion from positive $24 billion a year earlier. Search revenue grew 12% to $63.35 billion, the softest growth since the second quarter of 2025, and Google shares fell nearly 10% in after-hours trading. Microsoft shares rose about 3% after hours. Google said strong AI Mode query growth had an impact because of lower monetization in AI Mode.

[The Information] Shopify said it has added agentic payment technology developed by Visa, Mastercard and American Express to its Shop Pay checkout feature, a move that runs counter to how Stripe mainly handles agentic shopping and credit cards, The Information reported. Visa, Mastercard and American Express have introduced agentic payment technology.

[The Information] Chipmaker Marvell Technologies is in advanced talks to buy data center optics maker Lumentum, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. A deal for Lumentum would rank as one of the largest semiconductor deals, as Lumentum has a market capitalization of more than $80 billion. A transaction could be announced ...

[The Information] Alphabet said on Wednesday that it sold $12.4 billion worth of stock in the third quarter as part of an at-the-market program it announced earlier this year. The Google parent company issued 12 million class A shares for $4.3 billion and 24 million class C shares for $8.1 billion through the program.

[The Information] Oracle shares rose more than 10% on Wednesday after the company laid out a timeline for slowing its capital spending on data centers and returning to generating cash, according to The Information. Oracle described future capital spending in fiscal 2028 and 2029 as "a period of peak capex," The Information reported.

[The Information] Microsoft said revenue rose 19% to $92.3 billion in the September quarter, 1 percentage point faster than the growth it reported in the second quarter. According to The Information, accelerating sales in its Azure cloud unit, driven in part by server rental revenue from OpenAI, offset slight revenue decreases in its Xbox and other businesses. Data center spending weighed on cash flows.

[The Information] Alphabet's overall revenue grew 25% to $127.6 billion in the third quarter, a slower-than-expected pace that disappointed investors, according to The Information. Operating profit rose, but net profit fell nearly a quarter to $26.2 billion, well below analysts' estimates. Google Cloud revenue doubled from a year earlier to $30.7 billion in the quarter, powered by demand from AI customers, and the company said sales of its tensor processing unit AI chips meaningfully contributed to growth, according to The Information. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Google expects the vast majority of TPU revenues to be realized in 2027, The Information reported. Google's services business, its largest, which includes core search advertising, grew less than 11% in the quarter, the slowest rate since the first quarter of last year. The company reported negative free cash flow of $9 billion, marking a second straight quarter of negative cash flow and a big increase from the prior quarter's negative $5.9 billion deficit.

[The Information] Apple has announced its first touchscreen Mac computer, but it will come with a massive spike in price. According to The Information, the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display will start at $2,899. On Tuesday, Apple also introduced a new MacBook Pro with the M6 chip and no touchscreen that will start at $1,999.

[The Information] CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss said Wednesday that critics of her leadership of the network should "judge us by the journalism," speaking in a wide-ranging interview with Jessica Lessin of The Information. Weiss, speaking at The Information's WTF Summit, a gathering of senior women in the technology and finance industries, acknowledged the "unusual" and "exceptionally loud year" she has had. She has grabbed headlines for months over her efforts to reshape CBS News, including venerable programs such as "60 Minutes." "Change is hard," she said. What has received much less attention, she said, is that the majority of producers, journalists and correspondents at CBS "have shifted to a much more entrepreneurial mentality and culture."

[The Information] Anthropic's highly anticipated megalisting has been looming over the broader initial public offering market and holding back other companies preparing to go public, Lynn Martin, president of the New York Stock Exchange Group, said Wednesday at The Information's WTF Summit. Martin said the IPO pipeline has been held back as a result.

[The Information] Google unveiled Gemini 4 Carbon, which the company said is significantly more capable than the model it released less than a month ago, as it steps up efforts to contend with the leading frontier labs. The back-to-back launches come after nearly a year in which Google did not release a new flagship model.

[The Information] Amazon has significantly expanded its Shop Direct program, which lets Amazon shoppers browse listings from other retailers, The Information reported on Wednesday. Amazon now offers more than 250 million products from rival retailers through Shop Direct, up from about 100 million previously, according to The Information.

[The Information] Ray Kurzweil does not want to die, but at 78 he has been thinking about it more, a preoccupation he describes as a "major motivating force of human beings." Over the past year, Kurzweil, whose observations and 2005 bestseller "The Singularity Is Near" made him one of the most influential prophets of the AI age, has devoted himself to a project to ensure a version of himself lives on by creating an AI replica. He calls it Rai. The AI is accessible through a browser on a computer or smartphone, and interacting with it is much like a Zoom call: once opened, a three-dimensional image of Kurzweil appears against a cosmos-themed backdrop and responds to a person's voice.

[The Information] Meta Platforms said it is slightly increasing the size of its planned stock sales to fund AI investments to a total of $97.5 billion from $95 billion. The company is raising the common stock offering in its fundraising plan to $25 billion from $22.5 billion, according to Meta.

[The Information] Anthropic on Monday filed its long-awaited IPO prospectus. According to The Information, two details stood out: how Anthropic is running its models more efficiently than before, and changes it made to its already-unusual governance structure. The filing shows Anthropic generated $3.5 billion in free cash flow in the first half of 2026 from $16.3 billion in revenue, compared with a $1.6 billion cash burn in the same period a year earlier. Anthropic said it is generating an 85% gross profit margin from powering existing models, a figure that excludes the cost of developing new models. The company is doing so even as it relies almost entirely on computing it rents from cloud providers, which themselves need to generate a profit. According to The Information, the IPO filing is a reality check on AI skeptics' longtime view that a business model founded on selling models on a pay-as-you-go, consumption basis would not be profitable.

[The Information] Google will sell its tensor processing units to Oracle and OpenAI, a move that challenges Nvidia's hold on the AI chip market. OpenAI is planning to buy Google's TPUs, according to The Information. Google said on October 27 that it would also partner with Oracle to make Google's TPUs available on Oracle's cloud.

[The Information] OpenAI is trying to chip away at Anthropic's lead in the enterprise market by positioning itself as a cheaper, more flexible provider, according to The Information. But Anthropic's impressive IPO prospectus, filed Monday, shows OpenAI will need to do much more than that to really move the needle, the report said. OpenAI has succeeded in getting companies such as Rippling to switch to its cost-efficient models from Anthropic's, according to the report. Compared with Google and Anthropic, OpenAI has released the least expensive models this year for completing tasks in evaluations run by research firm Artificial Analysis, according to the report.

[The Information] OpenAI said on Monday that its models had disproved a foundational theory in cryptography, according to The Information, and the company also announced two other breakthroughs in physics and mathematics. The findings follow OpenAI's release of more than 700 math papers earlier this month, in which its AI models found novel results. Anthropic also claimed a cryptography breakthrough the same day, according to The Information.

[The Information] Some senior employees at Anduril Industries have told investors that the autonomous weapons maker hopes to raise a new funding round in the first quarter of next year, The Information has learned. The company has considered doing so at a valuation of around $120 billion, according to people with knowledge of the conversations. With the prospective round still months away, it is too soon to know whether it will happen at that price.

[The Information] Vijay Rayapati, CEO of enterprise software startup Atomicwork, said he gathered his roughly 30 software engineers last week and told them to drop everything and prioritize cybersecurity after a series of incidents in the prior 48 hours: eMudhra, a root certificate authority that websites and software makers rely on to prove their identity to users, had been hacked; LiteLLM, a popular open-source tool for routing requests to different AI models, was compromised; and a security vulnerability had been found in PHP, a programming language used by roughly 70% of websites. According to Rayapati, the startup ultimately verified it was not directly impacted by the threats, but last week's scramble "shows nobody's ready." He plans to hire one cybersecurity engineer for every three technical hires and projects the number of cybersecurity-focused engineers will roughly triple to 27 in the year ahead.

[The Information] OpenAI plans to buy Google's AI chips, according to a person familiar with the matter, in a boost for a rising competitor to OpenAI backer Nvidia. Financial terms and other details of OpenAI's planned purchase couldn't be learned. But any deal for it to buy tensor processing units would be a big win for Google's chip business, which is a growing challenger to the Nvidia graphics processing units that have dominated the market for AI computing power. OpenAI has been one of the most valuable customers for Nvidia, which in turn has invested tens of billions of dollars in the startup.

[The Information] Google's in-house AI chips, tensor processing units, are set to be a focus when parent Alphabet reports third-quarter earnings on Oct. 28, according to The Information. Google said Oracle will become the first major cloud provider outside Google itself to offer TPUs to customers through its own data centers, and The Information's Ryan Barwick reported that OpenAI plans to buy Google's TPUs. Anthropic's IPO prospectus disclosed a plan to spend $114.5 billion with Google Cloud, an estimated additional $125 billion to $150 billion on TPUs with Google and other providers, and $161.2 billion for TPU compute with Broadcom. Google CFO Anat Ashkenazi said on a prior earnings call that the vast majority of revenue from TPU agreements would kick in next year. TD Cowen's John Blackledge estimated in a report this month that TPUs will generate $9.4 billion in sales in the second half of this year, about 13% of the roughly $70 billion he forecast for Google Cloud in that period, and could be a $138 billion business by 2028, or 34% of estimated Google Cloud revenue that year. Nvidia separately said it would expand its partnership with Meta and invest $3 billion in Meta's stock offerings announced this week.

[The Information] Anthropic said it acquired Mithril Medicine, a one-person startup developing treatments for two rare forms of muscular dystrophy, according to the company. Anthropic said the deal signals the AI developer's growing ambitions in drug discovery. The company also said it is working with Bristol Myers Squibb, BigHat Biosciences and four other organizations.

[The Information] Semiconductor component maker Onsemi has been discussing an acquisition of 16-year-old chip startup Ferric for close to $1 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, a deal that reflects growing demand for technology that can manage the intense energy needs of AI chips. Onsemi's talks with Ferric follow a similar acquisition by rival Analog Devices, which in May agreed to pay $1.5 billion to buy Empower Semiconductor, a 12-year-old startup whose devices help AI chips manage electricity more efficiently. It isn't clear how the Onsemi deal is being structured; it could include payments to Ferric based on performance targets.

[The Information] Weak spots are emerging within the broader AI market as the cost of capital is set to keep rising, Kim Posnett, Goldman Sachs' global co-head of investment banking, said Tuesday at The Information's WTF Summit. Posnett said she is "hugely bullish" on AI overall, while pointing to "repositioning" in the market.

[The Information] Bumble cofounder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd said on Tuesday that a sale of her 12-year-old dating app was important for the "longevity of Bumble's mission," given how public markets had treated the company, whose stock had dropped to near $2. Herd said she would "disassociate" from watching the stock price but was newly optimistic about Bumble's future after new tech investment firm Ithaca Holdings agreed to take the company private in a $1.3 billion deal announced earlier this month. "I felt like I was stuck under a wave for like five years," she said at The Information's WTF Summit, in her first interview since Bumble agreed to a sale. "But now I'm on the beach."

[The Information] Malaysian customs seized about 49.5 million ringgit ($12.11 million) worth of advanced AI chips this month while investigating a syndicate suspected of routing the chips through the country's main airport, Reuters reported. Malaysia tightened export controls on advanced chips last year.

[The Information] Amazon has stepped up its Shop Direct initiative, which promotes products from brands that don't sell on Amazon's site, potentially giving shoppers less reason to turn to outside AI tools that can buy across retailers, according to The Information. The company now has 250 million listings that link to products sold elsewhere, about 2.5 times as many as in March, and is highlighting the goods more prominently through curated style edits and other displays on its site. The report said Amazon has for more than a year blocked outside shopping agents from its site while finding ways for its own customers to shop elsewhere, and that a new wave of AI assistants such as Meta's Muse is raising the stakes.

[The Information] Foundry, a startup founded less than a year ago, has raised a new round totaling $100 million to build automated factories, the company told The Information exclusively. Marlinspike Partners led the Series A round, with Khosla Ventures, which led Foundry's seed round, participating. According to Foundry, its factories are designed around AI-powered robots rather than slotting robots into existing production lines; the robots are organized into work cells focused on skills such as cabling, fastening and precise placement, rather than making a particular product.

[The Information] Nvidia will invest $3 billion in Meta Platforms' equity offering as the two companies expand their technological collaboration to maximize the performance of Meta's Muse personal agent app and foundation models, according to The Information. Meta plans to expand its deployment of Nvidia's advanced Vera Rubin AI hardware.

[The Information] Anthropic, SpaceX and Meta Platforms each unveiled plans on Monday to raise large sums to fund their AI ambitions, in efforts that could collectively add up to almost a quarter of a trillion dollars, The Information reported. Anthropic filed an S-1 for its initial public offering but did not say how much it plans to raise; Reuters has previously reported the figure could be as much as $100 billion. Meta said it aims to raise as much as $95 billion through stock offerings, and said in a prior filing that timing was important to secure capital before competitors saturate various funding options. SpaceX, meanwhile, reached a $40 billion financing agreement with an entity managed by Apollo Global Management to lease graphics processing units for its data centers; SpaceX said it is the largest GPU financing in history.

[The Information] Anthropic's seven founders said they are committed to keeping Claude free of advertising. Claude's only incentive is to give people helpful answers, they said in a letter included in the company's IPO prospectus on Monday. "Once advertising becomes part of a company's revenue targets, the pressure to ..." the letter said, according to the founders.

[The Information] Anthropic said its payment processing fees rose by $222 million in the first half of this year compared with the same period a year earlier, according to its S-1 filing. The company pointed to the increase as a driver of its overall expenses, highlighting the surging costs of processing AI-related payments as it grew.

[The Information] DoorDash is in advanced talks to buy Instacart for around $17 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. A deal could be announced in the coming days, assuming it doesn't fall apart at the last minute, some of the people said. The Information first reported on Friday that Instacart was in play.

[The Information] OpenAI on Monday unveiled the latest iteration of its GPT-6.1 model, a mid-priced version that the company said is significantly cheaper and more efficient than the version of this tier it released three months ago. According to OpenAI, GPT-6.1 Terra costs up to 50% less per token to use than the prior version.

[The Information] Anthropic publicly filed a preliminary prospectus for its planned initial public offering, according to The Information, offering a look inside its business for the first half of this year along with new details on its governance and more than 90 pages of risk factors. The Monday filing sets the stage for Anthropic to begin its investor road show in about two weeks, leading up to an IPO the company is expected to target for the week of Nov. 16, ahead of Thanksgiving. The stock is to be listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker symbol ANT.

[The Information] SpaceX has agreed to pay $40 billion to lease artificial intelligence chips from an entity affiliated with Apollo Global Management, according to The Information. Under the arrangement, Apollo will sell debt to buy the chips and then lease them to SpaceX, giving the company access to Nvidia's cutting-edge computing.

[The Information] Microsoft said Monday it is offering voluntary buyouts to about 27% of its staff, or roughly 60,000 employees, according to The Information. The company aims to reduce expenses amid its investments in developing and running AI, The Information reported. The buyout offers represent one of the largest potential staff reductions among large tech firms in recent history, according to the report.

[The Information] Nearly every AI startup financing these days has multiple tranches in which different investors get in at different valuations, according to The Information. At first, two tranches were unusual; now extra-hot funding rounds with three or more tranches are appearing. Some investors are unhappy with these multi-tranche rounds, specifically those who cannot get in at the lower valuation. They argue the practice allows bigger venture capital firms to flex their power and force smaller VC firms into the second, more expensive tranche. They also say it allows the startup to claim a bigger valuation even though some or most of the new capital came in at a lower price. But founders and many investors told The Information that the unique capital needs of AI companies, which are eternally starved of enough servers, are driving these unusual structures.

[The Information] Goldman Sachs has officially won the lead left role on Anthropic's IPO, according to The Information, putting the bank in the top position again after it won the top job for SpaceX's listing. Morgan Stanley was named stabilization agent for the Anthropic IPO, a role that involves overseeing the early hours of trading and working to ensure the stock gets off to a steady start, according to the report.

[The Information] According to people close to the credit card companies, as AI assistants such as Instinct and Meta Platforms' Muse gain traction in shopping scenarios, Stripe has taken a leading position in how AI agents complete payments, which is unsettling the credit card giants. These people said that in many cases Stripe supports AI agent shopping through one-time virtual cards, which could weaken the card networks' control over the shopping and payment process. Mastercard and Visa have developed their own agentic shopping payment technologies that will use customers' existing cards, giving the card companies more insight into who is buying what, but that approach is still at an early stage.

[The Information] Meta Platforms announced plans to raise up to $95 billion through an equity offering, adding another entry to the already massive financing plans of AI companies in order to support the data center construction boom. According to The Information, the plan includes an underwritten public offering of about $35 billion, of which about $22.5 billion will...

[The Information] According to The Information, Anthropic publicly filed a preliminary prospectus for an initial public offering on Monday, paving the way for its planned IPO. The prospectus disclosed details of the company's business conditions in the first half of this year, new details about its governance structure, and more than 90 pages of risk factors. The submission of this S-1 filing lays the foundation for the subsequent listing process.

[The Information] Anthropic may make its initial public offering (IPO) filing public as early as Monday, according to The Information. The outlet said that draft IPO documents and recent investor meetings over the past several weeks had already revealed some financial information, so parts of the S-1 are not new, but many questions remain unanswered. The Information said its colleagues are focused on: a more detailed path to profitability, cash flow and other financial metrics; Google's and Amazon's investments, the appreciation of their stakes, and the compute fees Anthropic pays them; revenue concentration and the revenue mix from Claude subscriptions and reseller channels; and governance arrangements, including how the plan works for the Long-Term Benefit Trust to appoint a majority of directors and for the seven co-founders to hold a combined 50.1% voting power. In addition, the outlet said Anthropic had considered extending the lock-up period beyond the customary 180 days and may allow some shareholders to conduct secondary sales at the time of listing.

[The Information] According to The Information, as AI assistants such as Instinct and Meta Platforms' Muse gradually gain traction in shopping scenarios, Stripe has taken a leading position in how AI agents complete payments, which is making the credit card giants uneasy. According to people close to the credit card companies, Stripe in many cases supports AI agent shopping through one-time virtual cards, which could weaken the card networks' control over the shopping and payment process. Mastercard and Visa have developed their own agentic shopping payment technology, which will use customers' existing cards and give the card companies a clearer view of who is buying what, but the approach is still at an early stage.

[The Information] Meta Platforms announced on October 26, 2026, that it plans to raise up to $95 billion through an equity sale, adding another massive round of financing to the AI data center boom. According to The Information, the plan includes an underwritten public offering of approximately $35 billion, of which about $22.5 billion will...