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October 20, 2026, 4:05 AM
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Top News

Jason Hiner / The Deep View:
Inception debuts Mercury 3, a diffusion LLM that it says tops GPT-6 Luna, Claude Haiku 5.5, and GLM-5.3 Flash on agentic benchmarks while being 4x to 8x faster  —  W  —  hile the AI industry has bet heavily on LLMs and the massive data centers needed to scale them, one of the neolabs betting …
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare debuts Clairic, a System One-class extraction model it says processes unstructured data faster, more cheaply, and more accurately than normal LLMs  —  Today, we're announcing a preview of a new class of System One-style models: extraction models.
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 …
Sam Biddle / The Intercept:
Leaked documents detail ECHOTRIBBLE, a nascent US Army Cyber Command program for agentic AI to autonomously spread across networks to find and eliminate targets  —  Documents obtained by The Intercept show the military is trying to deploy autonomous AI agents to hack its adversaries.
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.”
Bloomberg:
Sources: Nscale is in talks for a second deal with Anthropic worth ~$45B to deliver 460MW of computing power at its West Virginia campus using Vera Rubin chips  —  Nscale Ltd., the AI cloud computing firm, is in talks to sell computing power to Anthropic PBC in a deal that could be worth about $45 billion …
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 …
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.
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 …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Ted Sarandos complained for months of a lack of new Netflix hit shows and US watch time being down; Netflix just fired its film chief and content chief  —  Company is overhauling creative leadership as it struggles to get domestic audiences to watch more  —  Netflix is writing a new script.
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.
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 …
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.
John Koetsier / Forbes:
Dream Labs, which offers an API for its Dream-1 robot foundation model trained on human videos, raised a $90M seed led by B Capital and Kindred Ventures  —  This voice experience is generated by AI.  Learn more. … Want to make your dumb robot smart? $3 an hour is all it costs.
Eric Newcomer / Newcomer:
Mercury CEO Immad Akhund says the fintech hit $1B in annualized revenue, up ~50% YoY, now has 450K+ customers, and is launching a payroll service  —  I sat down with Mercury CEO Immad Akhund  —  We just published my conversation with Mercury CEO Immad Akhund on the Newcomer Podcast.
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 …
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.

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 4:05 AM ET, October 20, 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

Blake Brittain / Reuters:
The NYT, the New York Daily News, and others sue browser maker Brave for allegedly scraping their articles for AI training and letting users bypass paywalls

New York Times:
A profile of Laura Belin, an openly liberal Iowa journalist long shut out by state Republicans who says Democrats also favor friendly influencers over reporters

Adam Chitwood / The Wrap:
Cinemark and Regal won't show Netflix's Cliff Booth, a two-week Imax release; Cinemark says the release model isn't “constructive” for the theatrical ecosystem

More News

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
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
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

Earlier Picks

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
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
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
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
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
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