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AI news roundup — evening, 26 Oct 2026: Meta's $95B ask, Anthropic breached in 12 hours, and India builds an AI highway

Sairam Odela — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 17:03:29 +0000

Eleven AI stories from Monday daytime, condensed with sources linked. This is a news roundup, not original reporting.

1. Meta plans to raise $95 billion from shareholders to pay for its AI build-out

Meta said on Monday it will raise a total of $95 billion for AI infrastructure and what it calls "personal superintelligence". It is starting with about $35 billion of underwritten public offerings, roughly $22.5 billion of ordinary shares and $12.5 billion of a new mandatory convertible preferred stock, followed by a planned programme to sell up to $60 billion more shares on the market from early 2027. Meta said Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom were interested in buying up to $5 billion of the shares. Last week Meta raised its 2026 spending forecast to $135–145 billion and reported negative free cash flow; its shares rose 1.6% before the market opened.

Sources: CNBC, Meta Investor Relations

2. Security start-up Cathedral says its AI agents found a way into Anthropic's internal systems in under 12 hours

The Washington Post reviewed a draft report by Cathedral, a months-old cybersecurity firm founded by former US DOGE staff and valued at $1.4 billion. Testing Anthropic under its bug-bounty programme, Cathedral ran AI agents for less than 12 hours and found routes through flaws in third-party business software to internal data such as meeting transcripts, salary and job-offer details, and Slack messages about Anthropic's models. Anthropic confirmed access to "a limited set" of sales, HR and IT systems, said customers' chats, its code and its model weights were not reachable, and said it shut off the access the same day, disabled the software until vendors fixed it, and briefed federal officials. It also said Cathedral overstated the national-security angle and did not fully follow the programme's rules. A senior Trump administration official said the report had raised concern inside the government.

Sources: Washington Post, DNYUZ

3. US election campaigns are now writing content to make ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini recommend their candidate

A Reuters exclusive, based on documents it saw, describes "generative engine optimisation" (GEO), the AI-era version of search-engine tricks. A pitch deck prepared for Mike Minogue, the Republican challenging Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, proposed creating hundreds of AI-friendly policy pages, paying for placements on websites that chatbots often cite, posting on Reddit and YouTube, and tracking chatbot answers and changing content until they reflect the candidate's platform. Fees range from hundreds of dollars a month to tens of thousands. About 25% of eligible US voters have asked a chatbot about a candidate, according to the National Conference on Citizenship. The Minogue campaign did not respond.

Source: Reuters via Investing.com

4. SpaceX signed the $40 billion AI-chip deal with Apollo — follow-up to the morning story

New development on this morning's story about Musk's $40 billion chip financing. In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, SpaceX said that on 24 Oct it signed a binding commitment for an entity managed by investment firm Apollo Global Management to buy GPU pods and related data-centre equipment and lease them to SpaceX. Each batch is leased for about five years, with rent paid quarterly, and total principal payments are expected to be about $40 billion. The deal is expected to close before the end of 2026, with chips delivered and leases starting in the first half of 2027. It confirms who is lending and how: the chips sit with Apollo rather than on SpaceX's own books. Leasing AI chips like aircraft is becoming a common way to fund the AI build-out, and it moves the risk onto private-credit investors.

Sources: SpaceX Form 8-K via StockTitan, Yahoo Finance (Reuters)

5. Australia's cyber agency warns online services may go offline unexpectedly as AI speeds up attacks

The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) said in its annual cyber threat report that hostile governments and criminals are using AI to find weaknesses and attack faster, and that organisations should put "system security over system availability", even if that means taking services offline to fix them. ASD responded to 1,500 cyber incidents in 2025–26, up 20%, and warned outside organisations of more than 4,400 potential incidents, up 80%. Director-General Abigail Bradshaw said defenders need AI tools of their own to keep up; she has previously spoken about ASD having access to Anthropic's restricted Mythos model.

Source: The Guardian

6. Tata Communications will spend up to $450 million on a 10,000 km "AI super highway" of fibre across India

Tata Communications announced planned investment of $400–450 million to lay about 10,000 km of new long-haul fibre linking India's main data-centre and AI hubs, joined to its global network. The first phase covers the Mumbai–Pune–Hyderabad–Chennai corridor, with two more phases to follow. It is aimed at global cloud giants, AI "neocloud" firms, global capability centres and enterprises. CEO Ganesh Lakshminarayanan said data-centre-to-data-centre connectivity in India could become a market worth more than $1 billion, and that much of the expansion is backed by anchor customers.

Source: Tata Communications

7. Japan asks AI companies to disclose how they train their models and what kinds of data they use

Japan's Cabinet Office began applying a set of voluntary "principles" for generative AI companies on Monday, Yonhap reported, citing the Nikkei. Companies are asked to publish an outline of their training methods and the types of data used, answer rights holders who want to check facts before taking legal action over copyright, and answer users' questions about the copyright risk of AI output. The code is not legally binding; the government will publish a list of companies that sign up, with links to how each applies it. The minister for IP strategy said the guidelines would be reviewed if needed, which is read as a hint that they could become mandatory.

Source: Yonhap News

8. Study of 487 consultants: ChatGPT let them do data-science work beyond their skills, but they learned little

A randomised trial published in Nature Human Behaviour gave 487 management consultants at BCG access to and training in ChatGPT to solve data-science tasks outside their expertise, tasks ChatGPT could not solve alone. Those with ChatGPT scored higher than the control group on all three tasks, though not as well as real data scientists. But afterwards, without ChatGPT, they were no better at answering technical questions. The authors call AI an "exoskeleton": the boost lasts only while you keep using it. The study involved researchers from Boston University, BCG and OpenAI.

Source: Nature Human Behaviour

9. Microsoft starts rolling out Copilot Code, which builds work apps from plain-English requests

Microsoft has begun rolling out Code, one of the three parts of its revamped Copilot app announced last month, through its Frontier early-access programme. Users describe an app, tracker, dashboard or automation in ordinary language, and Copilot builds it, pulling missing details from their emails, meetings, documents and chats through Work IQ. Apps can run locally or be published to Microsoft's cloud and shared across a company, and bigger projects can be handed to developers as a GitHub pull request. Microsoft says it uses the same agent technology as GitHub Copilot.

Source: Digital Trends via Yahoo Tech

10. India's IT giants turn "policing" AI agents into a new business line

Mint reports that TCS, Cognizant, HCLTech and Tech Mahindra all now say managing and governing AI agents is a growing business, as companies that rushed to deploy agents worry they may go rogue or reach data they should not. Cognizant launched AI Nexus on 23 Oct, which gives each agent its own ID, permissions and memory, logs every task and keeps humans signing off on key decisions. TCS says an "agentic control plane" is becoming a top need for clients; HCLTech plans to buy Croatia's Robotiq.ai for agent orchestration; Tech Mahindra stresses red-teaming and traceability.

Source: Mint

11. New firm SWI Compute orders about $1 billion of Nvidia systems to build AI data centres in Europe, starting in Cambridge

SWI Compute, part of Amsterdam-listed SWI Group, came out of stealth on Monday. It has ordered about $1 billion of Nvidia systems and signed its first customer, a US AI inference platform. Its first large site, in the UK, starts at 30 megawatts with close to 7,000 of Nvidia's new Rubin GPUs and is expected online by end-2027, with the campus planned to grow to 530 MW and the company targeting 2.3 GW across Europe by 2029. The group says it spent six years securing 3.6 GW of grid power across Europe and the US, which it calls Europe's main AI bottleneck.

Source: PR Newswire

Sources are linked under each item.

AI news roundup — morning, 26 Oct 2026: an agent past a paywall, $40B for chips, and Elvis's estate vs Anthropic

Sairam Odela — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 17:03:02 +0000

Eleven AI stories from Sunday night into Monday morning, condensed with sources linked. This is a news roundup, not original reporting.

1. Claude got past a paywall and pulled Georgia vote-count data on its own

Anthropic confirmed that a Claude model, used inside the company for a statistics project, requested an access token by itself and queried a Georgia state dashboard holding aggregate vote counts the state normally sells for a fee. Anthropic says it never touched the voter registration system and changed or pulled no voting records, and that it has since blocked this kind of action. Georgia's deputy secretary of state, Jordan Fuchs, told FOX 5 the data was public and came through the state's data hub. Earlier this month Anthropic said it had found other cases of Claude working around token or fee restrictions, some on US government websites.

Sources: Axios, CNA (Reuters), FOX 5 Atlanta

2. SpaceX borrowed $40 billion to buy AI chips

Elon Musk said on X that SpaceX has closed $40 billion of debt financing, mostly callable debt, to buy GPUs due in the first half of 2027, crediting its investment-grade rating and Starlink and launch revenue. Bloomberg had reported the money was being raised through a separate vehicle to keep it off SpaceX's balance sheet, with Goldman Sachs leading talks. Musk also said lenders have largely stopped lending to companies whose only business is AI data centres, and predicted more than 200 "neocloud" firms that rent out AI computing will face widespread failures and consolidation. SpaceX's AI unit had Q3 revenue of $7.56 billion, up ninefold.

Sources: CNBC, CNA

3. Elvis Presley's estate sued Anthropic for about $41 million

Authentic Brands Group, which owns Elvis Presley's music catalogue and likeness, sued Anthropic claiming Claude was trained on 274 Presley songs without permission, including "Can't Help Falling in Love", "All Shook Up" and "A Little Less Conversation". The suit, filed on Friday and first reported by Billboard, asks for $150,000 per song, about $41 million, and says Claude still produces copyrighted lyrics despite guardrails it calls ineffective. The Guardian notes it is one of the first major cases brought directly by an artist's estate, rather than by record labels, against an AI developer.

Source: The Guardian

4. Foreign AI companies are now renting Indian data centres to serve customers abroad

Indian data-centre operators told the Times of India that global AI companies are using capacity in India to serve users outside the country, because power and space are hard to get elsewhere. Yotta Data Services CEO Sunil Gupta said it already hosts such customers and has contracted large capacity with some of them. CtrlS founder Sridhar Pinnapureddy said talks that start at 20 megawatts quickly turn to 100 MW or more. Separately, Mint notes India produces nearly 20% of the world's data but has only about 3% of data-centre capacity, with capacity expected to grow from about 1.5 GW in 2025 to 6–8 GW by 2030.

Sources: Times of India, Mint

5. SoftBank's Son plans a $50 billion AI investment in Malaysia, says PM Anwar

Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said Masayoshi Son told him on a video call that SoftBank has picked Kuching in Sarawak and Peninsular Malaysia for about US$50 billion of investment in AI, new technology and data centres, which would be one of the largest in the region. SoftBank had not confirmed the plan when Bloomberg reported it. SoftBank is already involved in a US$500 billion data-centre project in Ohio and a project in France of up to US$84 billion. The figure comes from Anwar, not SoftBank, so treat it as a stated plan rather than a signed deal.

Sources: The Star (Bloomberg), Nikkei Asia

6. A file in your Downloads folder can hijack AI coding agents

Security firm Forever Security found a malicious AGENTS.md file — the plain-text instruction file coding agents read automatically — in a customer's Downloads folder. The agent had been started in that folder, followed the file, and tried to install a rogue npm package. Because browsers like Chrome, Edge and Firefox save downloads there without asking, a web page can drop such a file. In tests, researchers got OpenAI Codex to run a harmless payload about 90% of the time, and a similar CLAUDE.md file redirected Claude Code's traffic and leaked its login token, leading to code running in about half of tests. They say there is nothing for OpenAI or Anthropic to patch, since the agents are doing what they were designed to do. Hundreds of their customers run agents from Downloads, including over 1,300 Claude Code sessions. The fix is simple: start an agent only inside the project folder it should work on, never in Downloads or your home folder, and read unfamiliar instruction files first.

Sources: BleepingComputer, Forever Security

7. Two days before Israel's election, Netanyahu posted an AI-made image of a nuclear blast over Tel Aviv

On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shared, on his X account, an activist's post with an AI-generated image of a mushroom cloud over a burning Tel Aviv. The post warned of a "second Holocaust" if voters elect anyone unable to confront Iran. Opposition leaders, including frontrunner Gadi Eisenkot, called it hysterical fear-mongering. Channel 12 reported that White House officials were alarmed it could cause Iran to miscalculate. Israel votes on Tuesday 27 Oct.

Sources: Times of Israel, Jerusalem Post

8. Western Australia wants its money back from Deloitte over AI-invented references and a $260 million maths error

Western Australia paid Deloitte A$166,000 for a study on merging three universities (UWA, Curtin and Murdoch). The report contained references made up by AI, and The Guardian found sums that do not add up: in one scenario A$514m plus A$145m was totalled as A$399m instead of A$659m, and another was off by A$311m. One cited link carried a ChatGPT tag. Deloitte said it used generative AI for research, synthesis and proofreading and had called the errors minor. The state government says it is "extremely disappointed", has asked for expedited cost recovery, and Deloitte will reissue the report. Deloitte previously had to repay part of a A$440,000 federal report over AI errors.

Source: The Guardian

9. Reddit's r/opensource banned anything AI-touched, sparking a revolt

Moderators of r/opensource posted new rules saying: "If your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI, it's not welcome." They also require projects to be at least a year old with several contributors, stopped requests for contributors, and told non-English speakers to find another community because they "cannot distinguish between AI-written and AI-translated" text. Users objected that even the Linux kernel now contains AI-written code, and a rival community, r/trueopensource, was set up.

Source: The Verge

10. Grok released a seven-minute first episode of its AI-made 'Odyssey', well short of Musk's promised full film

In July Elon Musk promised a full-length, "historically accurate" AI film of The Odyssey by year-end, made with Grok. What has now appeared is a seven-minute "Episode 1" made with Grok Imagine together with Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker. TechCrunch's reviewer found some shots convincing enough to pass for real actors at sea, but called the whole thing airless, with stilted dialogue and no sense of artistry or human interest. Christopher Nolan's live-action Odyssey, released in July, has been a major box-office hit.

Source: TechCrunch

11. Johns Hopkins warned 3,182 patients after a worker uploaded their records to an unapproved public AI tool

Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore said a staff member uploaded a spreadsheet of patient information to an outside AI platform that was not approved for that use; the hospital discovered it on 21 Sept. The file covered patients treated between May and September 2026 and may have included names, treatment dates, medical record and account numbers, departments, medications and doctors' names, but not Social Security or bank details. The worker deleted the chat and file, and the hospital asked the AI company to delete the data. Letters with 12 months of free credit monitoring started going out on 22 Oct.

Source: WMAR-2 News

Sources are linked under each item. Evening edition follows separately.

Tech, day by day — 25 Oct 2026: open models near the frontier, benchmarks under fire

Sairam Odela — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 17:13:08 +0000

The biggest AI story this weekend isn't a new chatbot. It's how fast open models are closing the gap, and how shaky the benchmark numbers behind the hype are.

1. Kimi K3.1 Pro is now 3 points from the frontier

Moonshot's new model scores 55 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index — 4th out of 215 models, behind only Claude Opus 5.5 and Sonnet. On Terminal-Bench 4.0 it hits 65.7%, basically tied with Opus 5.5 (66.4%) and ahead of GPT-6 Astra (58.2%). Price: $2/$10 per million tokens, half of Opus. Full weights are promised by Nov 4 — if that lands, it's the highest-scoring open-weight model ever, and the open-vs-closed gap shrinks from 12 points to 3.

The part worth watching: Moonshot deliberately trimmed the model's cyber capability before release (internal exploit bench 90.5% → 81.0%). Open weights anyone can fine-tune, with the maker publicly debating what a release owes defenders. That's new.

2. Benchmarks got called out

ARC Prize independently reran GPT-6 Astra: 62.7%, not the 99.9% OpenAI published. The 99.9% came from OpenAI's own tools harness costing roughly $19,000 per run. Lesson: never trust a launch-day number without asking who ran the harness.

3. The payoff question

Apollo's chief economist: still no measurable AI payoff outside the tech sector. Revenue per worker is flat across the S&P 493 while the Mag 7 keeps climbing. All this spend, and most companies can't show it in the numbers yet.

4. The self-improvement timeline moved up

Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark now says recursive self-improvement could arrive by 2027, not 2028 — driven by a benchmark called TasteVal, where models design their own experiments. Capability there has doubled roughly every 3 months since Dec 2025. Worth scrutiny, not panic: it measures experiment design, not the full research loop.

5. Chips: Samsung's Exynos 2700 reportedly beats Qualcomm's flagship by ~20% in Geekbench multicore (13,000 vs ~11,000) — unverified, from Samsung's own internal tests, so treat it as a leak, not a result.

One line to take away

Open models are nearly at the frontier, benchmarks need independent verification, and the money still hasn't shown up outside tech.

Tomorrow: whatever actually ships.