Techmeme
October 19, 2026, 5:05 PM

Top News

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.
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.”
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 …
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
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 …
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.
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.
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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

Sponsor Posts

Command Line:
Copilot to autopilot: Why no single safeguard is enough  —  Microsoft designed a layered model that lets an AI agent resolve network incidents on its own within defined boundaries.
Will Reed:
The best sales leaders aren't job hunting.  Here's how to reach them without months of cold outreach.  —  Our team came from Box, Square, and Brex, so we already know the GTM leaders worth meeting.
Zoho:
UK tax compliance with Zoho Books  —  The evolving tax landscape in the UK has added an additional responsibility to business owners, accountants, and bookkeepers to ensure their choice of accounting software supports compliance …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Grit:
The 20-Year Bet to Make Fusion Energy Work | Jeff Lawson
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Acquired:
Seinfeld
Learn the playbooks that built the world's greatest companies - and how you can apply them as a founder, operator, or investor.
Subscribe to Acquired.
Lenny's Podcast:
Inside the black box of AI: How AI models actually think | Emmanuel Ameisen (Anthropic)
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Big Technology Podcast:
Anthropic IPO Panic, A Spy At OpenAI?, The Great Food Slop Debate
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Great Chat:
What happened to tech's backbone?
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
The Upstarts Podcast:
The $7B Startup Mapping Your Health In Just One Hour | Neko's Hjalmar Nilsonne
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 5:05 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.

More News

Maddy Varner / Wired:
Caroline Haskins / Wired:

Earlier Picks

Allie Garfinkle / Fortune:
Krisztian Sandor / CoinDesk:
Zack Abrams / The Block: