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October 20, 2026, 5:55 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.
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.
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 …
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 …
Bloomberg:
Sources: Eric Schmidt, who owns ~1% of Anthropic after investing tens of millions in its Series A, is poised to have one of the largest windfalls from its IPO  —  Former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt owns around 1% of Anthropic PBC thanks to his early investment in the startup …
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 …
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:
Korean data-center company Elice falls 30%+ in Kosdaq trading debut; sources: Australian data center operator AirTrunk delays real estate investment trust IPO  —  Shares of data-center infrastructure company Elice Inc. plunged in their trading debut, underscoring lingering concerns about whether …
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 …
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.
OpenAI:
OpenAI says its new models show major performance leaps in low-resource legacy languages like COBOL, Fortran, and Visual Basic, used by banks and governments  —  Our latest model advances bring stronger capabilities for building and migrating software in low-resource programming languages such as COBOL, Fortran, and Visual Basic.
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.
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.

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 5:55 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

Rajeev Syal / The Guardian:
A UK jury convicts two Iranians of assisting Iranian intelligence in a plan to “eliminate” journalists at London-based Persian broadcaster Iran International

Finya Swai / The Hill:
In an unprecedented move, Reporters Without Borders calls for impeachment of FCC Chair Brendan Carr, accusing him of politically tinged investigations and more

Mark Stenberg / Adweek:
Q&A with WaPo Executive Editor Matt Murray, who says the outlet is close to breaking even financially and expects 2027 will be its best year in seven years

More News

Paige Smith / Bloomberg:
Ramp says it applied to the US OCC for a trust bank charter that, if approved, would allow it to offer fiduciary investment management and digital asset custody
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
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
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

Earlier Picks

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
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
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
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
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
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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