Techmeme
October 2, 2025, 4:30 PM

Top News

Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:
Source: OpenAI completed a secondary share sale that let staff sell ~$6.6B at a $500B valuation, making it the world's most valuable startup, ahead of SpaceX  —  OpenAI has completed a deal to help employees sell shares in the company at a $500 billion valuation, propelling …
Reuters:
Source: OpenAI employees sold shares to a consortium of investors including Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer, Abu Dhabi's MGX, and T. Rowe Price  —  OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has reached a valuation of $500 billion, following a deal in which current and former employees sold …
Jason Koebler / 404 Media:
OpenAI's Sora 2 generates copyright infringing content, including numerous AI-generated clips featuring SpongeBob, Pokémon, Mario, Rick and Morty, and Star Wars  —  Within moments of opening OpenAI's new AI slop app Sora, I am watching Pikachu steal Poké Balls from a CVS.
M.G. Siegler / Spyglass:
Sora, which is fun and simple to use, shows that OpenAI remains good at creating viral products, unlike Meta, whose Vibes video feed feels half-baked and obtuse  —  Another viral product hit for OpenAI, this time in video...  It's been a long time since I've been this sucked into an app.
New York Times:
Bloomberg:
A Google executive and sources: a ransomware group that says it has Cl0p ties is sending extortion emails, claiming it stole data from Oracle's E-Business Suite  —  Executives and technology departments at large organizations are being extorted by a notorious ransomware group that claims …
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Russell Brandom / TechCrunch:
Anthropic hires former Stripe CTO Rahul Patil as its new CTO, taking over from co-founder Sam McCandlish, who will move to a new role as chief architect  —  Anthropic has a new chief technical officer, former Stripe CTO Rahul Patil.  Patil started at the company earlier this week …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Meta unveils communities on Threads, starting with 100+ dedicated spaces for casual conversations around topics like basketball, television, and K-pop music  —  Instagram Threads, Meta's X rival that now has over 400 million monthly active users, is officially launching a new feature …
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
Red Hat confirms a breach of a GitLab instance after the extortion group Crimson Collective claimed to have stolen ~570GB of data from 28K internal repositories  —  Correction: After publishing, Red Hat confirmed that it was a breach of one of its GitLab instances, and not GitHub.  Title and story updated.
Financial Times:
Asahi says most of its 30 factories in Japan have not operated since September 29 following a cyberattack, leaving Japan with just days of Asahi Super Dry stock  —  Vast majority of factories of nation's most popular beer have stopped work this week  —  Japan is just a few days away …
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple paused development of a lighter, cheaper Vision Pro to focus on smart glasses, including a no-display model for 2027 and one with a display later  —  Apple Inc. has hit pause on a planned overhaul to its Vision Pro headset to redirect resources toward a more urgent effort …
Maya Dharampal-Hornby / Sifted:
NYC-based Dash0, which offers AI agents to monitor and troubleshoot cloud, app, and infrastructure issues, raised a $35M Series A, taking its funding to $44.5M  —  The platform has over 300 paying customers including Starling and Porsche  —  Dash0, an AI-native observability platform …
Anna Nicolaou / Financial Times:
Sources: Universal Music and Warner Music are nearing landmark AI licensing deals with companies like Google, Spotify, ElevenLabs, Stability AI, Suno, and Udio  —  Universal and Warner seek payment structure similar to streaming as more disruption looms  —  Universal Music and Warner Music …
Charles Rollet / Business Insider:
Perplexity is making its AI browser Comet, previously $200/month with Perplexity Max, free, with rate limits; Perplexity says Comet has millions on its waitlist  —  Follow Charles Rollet … Saved  —  Add us on  — Perplexity is making its $200-a-month browser free for everyone.

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Bloomberg:
Matt Durot / Forbes:
Rebecca Szkutak / TechCrunch: