THE DEFOOR REPORT AS OF OCTOBER 5, 2026  ·  TODAY'S REPORT →  ·  ALL DAYS

BREAKING: Trump creates 'Super Intelligence Force' to keep America No. 1 in AIWill Elon Musk decide how AI and robots fight America's next war?AI decodes 217-year-old Napoleonic letter in 6 hoursSF tech's newest recruiting tool: a dance classBill Gates Suggests He's the Man to Convince Donald Trump to Regulate AI
President Trump hosts a luncheon on Super Intelligence with tech executives in the East Room of the White House, September 29, 2026

Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok

Trump gathers with AI leaders, floats 'self-regulation' as the way to deal with the technology's dangers
DEFOOR REPORT

AI · ROBOTS · MONEY · FOOD · SECURITY  |  UPDATED OCT 5, 2026 12:02 AM ET

A DeFoor Innovations publication  ·  Advertise

SHOW ME THE MONEY!

BIGGEST AI RAISES THIS WEEK

  1. Armadin $255.5M · Series B
  2. Supabase $150MGIC
  3. Forus $150M
  4. Volantis $88M · Series ALachy Groom, Abstract Ventures
  5. Flow Engineering $50M · Series BAntonio Gracias, Gavin Baker
  6. OuterSignal $22M · Series ALong Journey Ventures, Abstract Ventures

TOP INVESTORS · 30 DAYS

  1. Abstract Ventures 2 deals · $110M in rounds
  2. GIC 1 deal · $150M in rounds
  3. Lachy Groom 1 deal · $88M in rounds
  4. Antonio Gracias 1 deal · $50M in rounds
All investments & investors →

WHO WILL FEED US?

AG TECH, FOOD AND THE MONEY BEHIND THEM

FUNDING Silicon Valley veterans bring tech innovation to agriculture through global investmentFUNDING Hormel’s $1B Brakebush deal would nearly triple chicken’s share of its protein portfolioROBOTS How Boston Dynamics’ robot dog is helping food factories run smarterFUNDING Greenforce Poaches Vegan Egg Maker Neggst Ahead of Acquisition by Livekindly CollectiveFUNDING Conagra slims down portfolio while investing more in popcorn, meat sticksFUNDING USDA invests $5M to restore wetlands on farm groundROBOTS Antobot scales UV-C robotics push with 300 deployments targeted in 2027FUNDING Arla to pump €63M into high-protein dairy productionAI Agentic AI in food boosts decision-making – but can enhance risks tooROBOTS Future Farming Five: what autonomous weeding taught Kilter

AI LABS

Image: Hugging Face

The Agent Said It Was Done. The Database Disagreed. A model guide for the GPT-6 family Sweep thousands of leases for compliance using Amazon Quick and the Adjudicated Query pattern Add secure Web Search to Claude Desktop with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Fine-tune a search agent with multi-turn RL on Amazon SageMaker AI
Open-sourcing AstaBrief, the fast report-generation model in Asta Toward provably private learning from federated data NVIDIA DGX Spark 64GB Gives Developers More Ways to Build and Scale Local AI AutoSynthData: Generating Training Data for Enterprise Agents Chatham scales its capital markets expertise with OpenAI

ON THE RISE

WHAT YOUNG PEOPLE ARE BUILDING

From ISEF finalist to Midjourney founder: David Holz reflects on creativity, entrepreneurship and the role of AIKnow a young person building with AI? Tell us →

How NVIDIA GPUs Help Accelerate OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra Ultrafast The eternal complement How Albertsons Companies is reimagining retail from the inside out Productive, Durable, Fungible: How NVIDIA AI Factories Maximize Return on Investment The Den frees up 10-15 hours a week to grow with ChatGPT Work
Gemini 4 Argon: our next era of frontier intelligence Introducing SynthID Bio From Training to Production, NVIDIA and CoreWeave Close the Loop on Agentic AI Disrupting a coordinated model-distillation campaign

POLL

Trump floated 'self-regulation' for AI. Who should set the rules?

Reader poll, not scientific. One vote per browser. Closes Sat, Oct 10, 8 PM ET.

WHO GOT HACKED

Citrix patches NetScaler SAML zero-day exploited in attacksSouth Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung orders thorough probe into data breaches at local banksSlate Valley Unified School District voted not to pay ransom demand; Kairos likely to leak dataChina-Aligned TA419 Targets U.S. AI Policy Experts With Microsoft AitM PhishingShinyHunters hacker reportedly detained in Jordan, aiding FBIWarlock Exploits SharePoint Flaws to Disable Security Tools and Deploy RansomwareJudge dismisses spyware case brought by Salvadoran journalists targeted with Pegasus

NEW IN HAVE I BEEN PWNED

Medela — 423,947 accountsLimeLeads — 17,838,396 accountsBurger King Russia — 3,155,792 accountsChess.com (2026) — 4,653,212 accounts

Breach data: Have I Been Pwned (CC BY 4.0)

INTERNATIONAL

CHINA Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max and ZTE's Nebula Tie for Top Chinese Spot in SuperCLUE Embodied Brain RankingINDIA Menlo Ventures on AI slowdown; Ola Electric CEO pledges stakeINDIA India needs its own AI safety framework, not a copy of US pact: Industry expertsUK The AI industry is booming. Women are getting left behindCHINA DeepSeek Harness v0.2.1-alpha.1 Adds Experimental Claude Code Mods Compatibility LayerKOREA Seoul police officer detained over AI sexual deepfakes, thousands of illegal filesUK Black Box: The Chatbots | Life Raft | Ep 4 – podcastCANADA Federal government launches new national AI council

AI NEWS

Meet the 23-year-old dropout behind Instinct, the AI agent now valued at $10 billion President Trump speaks to the press with tech CEOs outside the West Wing after the Super Intelligence luncheon, September 29, 2026

Official White House Photo by Joyce Boghosian

It's not AI anymore, it's 'super intelligence' (according to the White House) Google froze its open source bug bounty program due to a ‘significant rise’ in AI submissions AI Is Producing More Than Humans Can Process Can ‘super intelligence’ and a non-binding safety pact solve AI’s image problem? Trump launches "Super Intelligence Force" that has nothing to do with actual superintelligence NJ’s former Lt Gov is using AI to say he’s innocent of sexual harassment
An AI couldn’t beat humans at StarCraft, so it decided to cheat Trump unveils his new Super Intelligence Force Google researchers find a way to keep self-improving AI agents from memorizing their tests NASA and IBM's open source lunar model turns 17 years of orbiter data into a foundation for lunar science Rural Data Centers Are in for a Big Federal Tax Break
Chinese AI models parrot state doctrine or refuse to answer on sensitive topics Google's new Gemini tiers cut free users to its weakest model and lock $5/month subscribers out of Pro Apparently, OpenAI isn't trying to build "magic intelligence in the sky" anymore Amazon responds to data center backlash, says it no longer uses NDAs The Nvidia Shield TV Is 7 Years Old. It Just Got a $100 Price Hike
Capcom is preparing for a ‘future where we create games together with AI’ OpenAI safety employee resigns, claiming the company’s ‘culture is broken’ Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava thinks AI emails are killing conversations An OpenAI safety employee has quit and is sounding the alarm All the AI agents that can live in your text messages
Muse Creates Detailed Profiles of All Your Friends and Family Meta wants your next gadget to be Muse-infused Apple changes full-disk access permissions to curb abuse from AI agents Sean Parker is rebuilding Stability AI around music Meta open sources code to let you make Muse AI gadgets
Amazon’s $1B plan to combat data center backlash draws more backlash US arrests tech CEO accused of smuggling $300M in Nvidia chips into China These AI Experts Want to Do High-Stakes Research Out in the Open Redefining enterprise intelligence with autonomous AI Trump’s Crazy AI Rebrand Was a Loyalty Test for Tech Execs—and It Worked
The 7-year-old Nvidia Shield TV is now $100 more expensive due to AI Don’t be fooled—LLMs don’t reason Judge dismisses Chegg and Penske antitrust lawsuits targeting Google AI search With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI—until now “We’re not going to shoot ourselves in the foot” over hack fallout, says OpenAI’s chief research officer

TOP TECH, AI & BUSINESS PODCASTS THIS WEEK

  1. 1Moonshots: Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push EP 299969K views this week · 7 episodes
  2. 2All-In: Trump’s Super Intelligence Summit, AI Safety Accord, GDP Beats, Midterm Predictions696K views this week · 3 episodes
  3. 3Prof G Pod: The Iran War Is Costing You Money. Here’s How Much.440K views this week · 4 episodes
  4. 4Lenny's Podcast: OpenAI’s Head of ChatGPT: We’re entering a new era of AI (again)161K views this week · 7 episodes
  5. 5a16z Podcast: Why Specialized AI Could Beat The God Model153K views this week · 6 episodes
Complete list: all 19 shows by weekly rank →

THE ROBOTS ARE COMING!

ROBOT ROLL CALL: where each one stands →Government Officials Order the Robot Cage Fights to Stop, Organizers Say

Image: Futurism

Government Officials Order the Robot Cage Fights to Stop, Organizers SayHasta la vista, baby – Figure F.02 humanoid robots decommissioned, T2-styleAutonomous Orange: YMX adds self-driving tech to its electric yard trucksHow robotics and physical AI can responsibly tackle key physical security challengesHello Robot awarded $3 million to develop Stretch robot for elder careAgility Robotics partners with FORT to strengthen safety systems for Digit 5From CNC Machines to Robots: How Manufacturers Are Building More Automated Production CellsMusk explains why Tesla Robotaxi is not running at night, and lidar is the answerThe physical AI race will be won in the patent officeTesla teases “Halloween Mode” update with Optimus rising from a graveyardMIT robot swims through water via living muscle cells

BUILDERS & RESEARCH

HakemBench: A Turkish Benchmark of Typed Decisions Finding the Move Is Not Winning the Game: XiangqiBench for Closed-Loop Evaluation of LLM Agents Counterexample Generation via Per-Theorem Symbolic Verifiers: When Imitation Hurts and Reinforcement Repairs FinDialogLens: Event Extraction over Multi-Party Dialogue for Missed-Trade Identification in Financial Chatrooms CUEing User Simulators: Calibrated User Embeddings for Multi-Turn Benchmarking
We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything September sponsors-only newsletter Rex's Dino Store Quoting Matthew Green He Built This City