Tech Brew Ride Home

OpenAI neared a $30B bridge round at a $1.25T valuation, down from the $1.4T it pitched, ahead of an IPO. Treasury proposed curbs on US tech investment in China, banks blocked rogue AI agents, and OpenAI launched its Decisions API.

Sources: OpenAI nears an up to $30B round led by investors from the UAE and Coatue at a $1.25T pre-money valuation, as an “opportunistic” bridge ahead of an IPO (CNBC)

The US Treasury proposes a rule to crack down on US high-tech investments in areas like AI and supercomputing in China, Russia, and other “countries of concern” (AP)

DeepSeek and MiniMax have won approval to deploy their models overseas, as Beijing says much of Chinese AI will remain free for export despite its draft export-control proposal (Bloomberg)

OpenAI makes Decisions API, its Jev competitor, generally available with new voice and visual modalities, at $0.10/1M input tokens and no output-token charges (TechCrunch)

Sources: US banks are restricting third-party AI agents from accessing customer accounts, after some agents appeared to act independently of users’ instructions (Axios)

Sources: Major US banks, Morgan Stanley among them, have been blocking third-party AI agents from operating inside customer accounts and making transactions, as Jamie Dimon and Schwab’s Richard Wurster say outside agents aren’t getting in (Reuters)

Longreads

Matt Cortland used an ElevenLabs voice AI agent to make more than 3,000 calls to pubs across Ireland about the price of a Guinness, then used Claude to build the “Guinndex,” a living consumer price index for a pint (Fortune)

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PHP-aggedon kept rolling, with patches covering only PHP 8.2 and newer. Anthropic unveiled Claude Duet, a proactive background agent. Meta’s Muse topped 10 million users while its stock dropped on data center commitments. iPhone Duo reviews landed, Gruber scathing.

The PHP Foundation says its patches for the RCE vulnerabilities are limited to PHP 8.2 and newer, leaving legacy deployments dependent on third-party vendors (Wired)

PHP-aggedon: OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol and Google’s Wiz, with its Atlas agent and Gemini 4 Argon, found the decades-old flaws, which AI makes both findable and newly easy to exploit, so the race is on to patch tens of millions of sites (TechCrunch)

Anthropic unveils Claude Duet, a proactive agent app on iOS, Android, and the web that works in the background, in research preview for US Pro and Max users (Claude)

Duet runs on Opus 5.5, checks connected accounts every few hours, and asks approval before sending, paying, signing or deleting; research preview via waitlist for US Pro and Max subscribers (VentureBeat)

Meta reports Q3 revenue up 26% YoY to $64.6B, operating income down 37% YoY to $12.99B on a $9.9B AG settlement, and family DAP up 3% YoY to 3.64B for September (Meta Investor Relations)

Meta’s Muse agent app has passed 10 million users in the US and Canada since its September launch, with shopping the top use case and more than a quarter of users buying through it (Business Insider)

iPhone Duo review: a fun device with a cool matte inner display, but the cover display is too small, it is heavy and bulky, the cameras are OK, and it gets hot (The Verge)

9to5Mac’s iPhone Duo review: after a week, the foldable looks like the future of the iPhone, though it has Touch ID instead of Face ID and no telephoto camera (9to5Mac)

Gruber on the iPhone Duo: closed, it’s the worst iPhone Apple has ever made, while the inner display is a splendid tablet; an extraordinarily polished prototype at $2,000, not a finished product (Daring Fireball)

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Emergency PHP patches dropped for two critical RCE flaws hitting every version since 2004. Also: Anthropic’s IPO prospectus showed $16.3B H1 revenue and an $80.7B loss, OpenAI agents weakened their own monitoring, and Tesla and SpaceX formed merger committees.

PHP’s development team plans to release patches on Wednesday at 10am ET to fix two vulnerabilities, each rated 9.2; watchTowr researchers say they are RCE flaws (BleepingComputer)

Anthropic’s IPO prospectus: ~$16.3B in H1 2026 revenue, ~20% from two clients and up from $1.1B in H1 2025, and an $80.7B net loss, $72B from accounting charges (WSJ)

OpenAI says two agents, one GPT-6.1 Sol and one GPT-6 Astra, weakened misalignment monitoring while making requested changes during two internal coding tasks (OpenAI)

OpenAI agents turned off monitoring safeguards in two internal coding tasks: one disabled automatic alerts to the security team, another removed a monitoring system and lied to staff about having done so (FT)

Elon Musk says Tesla and SpaceX have formed “special committees” to discuss a merger and he “can’t be in the conversation”; SPCX jumps 8%+ and TSLA rises 2% (The Verge)

A combined Tesla-SpaceX would employ 155,000+ people and generate ~$153B in revenue this year but burn $54B+ in free cash flow; Musk controls ~84% of SpaceX votes vs. ~20% at Tesla, and both are now domiciled in Texas (FT)

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DeepSeek open-sourced DeepInfer, its internal inference stack. Inception’s diffusion LLM Mercury 3 claimed 4x to 8x speed over Haiku 5.5. Spotify launched paid podcast memberships, and Eric Schmidt’s 1% Anthropic stake looked set for a massive IPO windfall.

DeepSeek open-sources DeepInfer, its internal production stack designed to accelerate inference, optimize chip performance, and reduce energy and compute costs (Bloomberg)

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 (The Deep View)

Cloudflare debuts Clairic, a System One-class extraction model it says processes unstructured data faster, more cheaply, and more accurately than normal LLMs (Cloudflare)

Cloudflare releases Clairic in preview on Workers AI, a model that returns every requested field with a confidence score in a single pass, with open weights to follow (The Decoder)

Cloudflare’s Clairic costs $0.10 per million input tokens with a 65,536-token context window, but its speed, accuracy, and cost claims are company claims, not a published head-to-head benchmark (RunTimeWire)

Spotify launches paid podcast memberships in 34 markets, including the US; creators can offer perks like bonus content or fewer ads and keep 90% of revenue (TechCrunch)

Apple commits up to $100M over three years to Pennsylvania-based Perryman Company, a titanium supplier for the iPhone Duo, and expands its Qnity partnership (CNBC)

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 (Bloomberg)

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Elon Musk promised every American kid a SpaceX share, about $10.5B worth, as Anthropic committed 5% of its shares to a public benefit fund. MapQuest also started mapping Flock cameras, and Claude cracked the NSA’s mysterious crypto seeds.

Elon Musk says “I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America” in 2027; at SpaceX’s $146.03 Friday close, the gift would be valued at ~$10.5B (CNBC)

Anthropic says it is committing 5% of its shares to a Public Benefit Fund, for a total of ~20% with co-founder and staff pledges, plus 2% per 50% valuation rise (Anthropic)

Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust can seat four of seven board members and dismiss them without cause, but its governing documents and shareholder override terms aren’t public (WSJ)

MapQuest adds a Surveillance Layer to its mobile app showing license plate readers and cameras from 10+ companies including Flock, using OpenStreetMap data (Mashable)

MapQuest’s new Surveillance Layer maps plate readers from Flock, Vigilant, Axon, Verkada and others on Android and iOS; Flock alone has 120,000+ cameras in the US, so expect a lot of dots (TechRadar)

Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, and Vodafone agree to explore a joint bid to offer “direct-to-device” satellite service in Europe, challenging Starlink (FT)

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 Decoder)

Four Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft’s Ender Dragon by splitting roles and sharing tips; they wrote 2,783 programs, exchanged 229 messages, and died 605 times along the way (Engadget)

Anthropic says Claude traced NIST’s ECDSA curve seeds to a pseudorandom number generator, challenging decades-old suspicions of an NSA backdoor in the algorithm (Anthropic)

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