Ah, yes. Friday. Wooo. Yeah. Great.
Anthropic's $2T Dream Slips to $1.5T
The company's investor day saw the $2T target fall to $1.5T. The T is for trillion, they'll be fine. Their Q3 revenue rose 45% to $16.8B, but it's a slower growth rate than the previous quarter. The US FTC is also investigating Anthropic over recent AI incidents, so, not great timing.
In related news, METR (independent AI evaluator) is getting employee-like access to assess Anthropic's models and safety practices. Maybe this'll stop AI from having a >10% chance of killing all humans within the next decade. METR can publish its findings without Anthropic's veto, though the company can redact customer data and trade secrets.
Meta's New Terms Allow Scraping
Meta's new and improved Terms of Service authorizes Meta to use automated scrapers to crawl "domains, web pages, or URLs" associated with business accounts, and to use that content to "develop, improve, research, train" its products. There's no opt out, businesses agree or stop using Meta's products for commercial purposes. A lot of news publishers have at least one Meta business account, so that could mean their websites get scraped too.
For context, Google pays publishers participating in its AI news program, which now includes 400+ publications, with CNN, the Financial Times, and Axios joining this week. Meta, meanwhile, is claiming the right to crawl content for free.
Hackers Hit 30K GitHub Repos
Roughly 1,900 GitHub accounts were compromised, and hackers planted credential-stealing workflows in more than 30,000 repos. The spike was caught around the 8th.
Attackers used stolen Personal Access Tokens or infostealer credentials to push malicious workflows disguised as security audits. Their targets were CI/CD secrets, cloud credentials, package registry tokens, and AI provider API keys. GitGuardian counted 3,174 secrets targeted for extraction.
GitHub started blocking the workflows on the 9th. Later attempts failed to extract any data, but some victims had already been hit, and old secrets could still be exposed.
African Startup Funding Rebounds
Across 315 disclosed deals, African startups raised $2.49B in the first nine months of 2026. That's up 7.8% from $2.30 billion across 403 deals in the same period last year. Nigeria led with $624M (up Naija!), Egypt followed with $396M, Benin with $345M, Kenya $297M, and South Africa had $279M.
Q3 2026 alone brought in $1.025B across 167 deals, up from $785M across 149 deals in Q3 2025. The money is increasing while the number of deals falls, so capital is flowing, but through fewer, bigger rounds. Benin ahead of Kenya and South Africa on the list is interesting, but it's a Ghanaian-founded company domiciled there, and a $50M seed round would push a country up the list fast.
African fund managers raised $3.08 billion in commitments between Q1 and Q3. That's money waiting to be deployed, if founders meet the bar for it. These are 2026 terms, not 2021.
Netflix Shakes Up Content Leadership
After nearly a decade, Netflix chief content officer Bela Bajaria is leaving, to be replaced by Peter Rice, formerly of Walt Disney Television and a 30-year Fox veteran.
Under Bajaria, we got hits like Bridgerton, Squid Game, and Arcane, and the expansion into live programming with WWE and NFL deals.
Rice inherits a company looking for its next global hit now Stranger Things has ended. Netflix is also making its biggest round of cuts since 2022, while losing market share to YouTube and TikTok.
No pressure, Peter. Sending best wishes.
That's all. Have a great weekend!
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