Techmeme

Walter Schulze / Startup Fortune : Anomaly Innovations, behind coding agent OpenCode, says a breach hit ~1.4% of OpenCode Console users and their API keys, in a “large scale distillation attack” —  A large-scale distillation attack against the company behind the open-source coding agent OpenCode exposed stored OpenAI …

Zack Abrams / The Block : Turkish police detained Hex and PulseChain founder Richard Heart on Oct. 14, seizing $7M+ in cash and six cold wallets; HEX fell nearly 50% on initial reports —  Turkey's justice minister said Heart's wife and three bodyguards were also detained, and that searches turned up guns, ammunition, watches and jewelry.

Steven Zeitchik / The Hollywood Reporter : Bleecker Street says TikTok suspended the Musk documentary account for “political policy” violations and called the suspension “permanent”; Bleecker's appealing —  Move comes just as Alex Gibney doc film expands to nearly 500 screens.  Distributor Bleecker Street says it is appealing.

Chase DiBenedetto / Mashable : MapQuest adds a Surveillance Layer to its mobile app showing license plate readers and cameras from 10+ companies including Flock, using OpenStreetMap data —  MapQuest will not go gentle into that good night.  —  The navigation software — which debuted in 1996 and was later eclipsed …

Terrence O'Brien / The Verge : Meta removes ToS language that suggested it could scrape websites “associated with” business accounts, saying it applied only to “ads and business products” —  Language that experts say allowed the scraping of news sites to train its AI has been removed from Meta's terms.

Saritha Rai / Bloomberg : DeepSeek releases V4.1-Flash-1017, an update it says offers “stronger benchmark performance, faster task completion, and shorter outputs” than its predecessor —  DeepSeek released an update of its AI model this weekend that it says is faster and leaner, ramping …

Bloomberg : Zelenskyy says Starshield restrictions remain and are affecting only Ukraine, leading him to believe they are a “planned operation” rather than technical issues —  Restrictions on Ukraine's military use of SpaceX's Starlink system appear to be deliberate and not the result …

Jean Eaglesham / Wall Street Journal : As AI giants rack up potential legal liabilities of tens of billions amid safety incidents, insurers worry claims may outpace limits on existing coverage —  The artificial-intelligence industry's phenomenal rate of growth means claims have the potential to outpace the limits on existing coverage

Preeti Singh / Bloomberg : A profile of Blackstone President Jon Gray, who is making AI his biggest bet, has built a $200B data center empire, and is building a cloud venture with Google —  From data centers and chip financing to AI advice on potential deals, the technology is everywhere at the alternative-investment giant

Nilay Patel / The Verge : An interview with YouTuber Benn Jordan, who recently testified in Congress against license plate readers, on Flock, privacy, the surveillance backlash, and more —  Today, I'm talking with Benn Jordan, musician, YouTuber, researcher, and investigative journalist.

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg : Sources: Apple has hired Scott Tucker, Meta VP and deputy general counsel, as its new litigation chief, as part of a shakeup in its legal team —  Apple Inc. has tapped a longtime Meta Platforms Inc. executive as its new litigation chief, bolstering its legal team at a time when the iPhone maker faces a growing array of lawsuits.

Michael Acton / Financial Times : Apple says demand for iPhone Duo has been “nothing short of extraordinary”; deliveries slipped to late January within hours of preorders opening —  Deliveries of the $2,000 Duo slip to 2027 within hours of going on sale  —  Apple on Friday said its foldable iPhone Duo had seen …

Theodore Schleifer / New York Times : Filings: Meta reduced its $65M midterms budget by $25M through refunds, primarily from a super PAC it launched in 2025 with $45M to fight state AI bills —  The company outlined a $65 million budget last year when it embarked on an effort to elect state politicians friendly to the A.I. industry.

Anthropic : 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 —  “It's just timestamps”: the decades-old mystery of the origins of one of the most popular cryptographic standards has been explained.

Bloomberg : Sources: SoftBank weighs buying US security services giant Allied Universal at an ~$18B equity valuation, as Masayoshi Son explores deploying AI-powered robots —  SoftBank Group Corp. is considering an acquisition of Allied Universal, the largest security services company in the US …

Joe Barnes / Telegraph : Sources: Elon Musk approached Trump with the idea of slowing down Starshield in Ukraine; source: Trump agreed, paving the way for DOD to execute the slowdown —  SpaceX founder had publicly blamed president for chaos over restrictions, but sources say he initiated them

Lindsay Clark / The Register : The PostgreSQL Global Development Group delays the general availability of PostgreSQL 19 after LLM-assisted code reviews uncovered architectural defects —  Core devs revert up to 10 features, push release to November, and blame better tooling rather than vibe coding

Dylan Sloan / Bloomberg : Three CoreWeave co-founders have sold $3.3B in stock since its March 2025 IPO, including $2.4B in 2026 alone; CoreWeave stock fell 60%+ from its June 2025 peak —  Three CoreWeave Inc. co-founders have sold $3.3 billion in company shares since last year's initial public offering …

Matt Marshall / VentureBeat : Reflection AI releases Apache 2.0-licensed weights for Beam, a 501B-parameter model, trained with RL that penalized unnecessary tokens —  Reflection AI today released the weights of Beam, its first open model, and is pitching it against the Chinese open models that many U.S. companies …

John Harney / Bloomberg : In its first meeting, Trump's Super Intelligence Force says it plans to commission a report on AI risks and develop protocols for labs to provide early warnings —  President Donald Trump's artificial intelligence task force in its first meeting agreed on Thursday to address risks related to cybersecurity …

Rebecca Rubin / Variety : Netflix Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria is leaving the company and will be replaced by former Disney and Fox executive Peter Rice, who starts October 26 —  In a major executive shakeup, Bela Bajaria is out at Netflix after 10 years at the streamer, most recently serving as its chief content officer.

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch : Bluesky expands Attie, its AI tool for building custom feeds, with a “social vibe coding” feature to create sites, games, quizzes, and more on the AT Protocol —  Open social network Bluesky is once again expanding beyond its flagship app.  At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 on Thursday …

Reuters : Sources: some Anthropic investors discussed a ~$1.5T valuation for its IPO, down from ~$2T they had expected, after disclosures showed slowing Q3 revenue growth —  Some current Anthropic investors and prospective investors in its upcoming initial public offering are weighing a lower valuation …

Nieman Lab : Experts say Meta's new terms of use will allow scraping of websites, including news sites, “associated with” business accounts on its platforms, with no opt out —  Starting October 30, business accounts will consent to Meta scraping their websites if they continue using Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp.

Jaspreet Singh / Reuters : Thoma Bravo-owned cybersecurity company Proofpoint plans to buy data security firm Varonis Systems in an all-cash deal valued at about $6.3B —  Thoma Bravo-owned cybersecurity company Proofpoint will buy data security firm Varonis Systems (VRNS.O) in all-cash deal valued at about $6.3 billion, the companies said on Thursday.

Kate Sullivan / Bloomberg : A US official says Trump didn't order any limitations on Ukraine's access to SpaceX's Starshield; Elon Musk said any limits are ultimately decided by POTUS —  President Donald Trump didn't order any limitations on Ukraine's access to SpaceX's Starshield satellite technology, according to a senior US official.

Nick Cammarata / Goodfire : A researcher says modern neural networks are far more interpretable than believed, with most neurons understandable in models up to trillions of parameters —  The cause of polysemanticity in early model organisms wasn't superposition, but several ordinary, mostly fixable issues.

Reed Albergotti / Semafor : Perplexity open sources SPACE, its AI agent sandbox, and says partners including CoreWeave, Akamai, and Crusoe agreed to offer SPACE to customers —  THE SCOOP  —  Perplexity is giving away the software it has been using to combat rogue AI agents, the company told Semafor Thursday.

Ben Penn / Bloomberg Law : Sources: top DOJ officials halt career prosecutors' Biden-era investigation of Meta over facilitating illegal drug sales and are weighing more lenient options —  Top Justice Department officials have sidelined career prosecutors' long-running grand jury investigation of Meta Platforms …

Andrew Deck / Nieman Lab : Google says it has 400+ publications in its News AI pilot, which tests features like overviews; participants include Financial Times, CNN, and The Texas Tribune —  In December, Google launched its News AI pilot program, which licenses content from select publishers and uses it to test new AI features in Google News.