THE DEFOOR REPORT AS OF OCTOBER 20, 2026  ·  TODAY'S REPORT →  ·  ALL DAYS

Anthropic pitches AI safety bill that may block a model if 50+ people could be killedHugging Face CEO warns that Netflix’s OpenAI hack documentary isn’t accurateGoogle’s more personalized Gemini AI is heading to your car
Meta drops the word "train" from its commercial TOS after AI backlash
DEFOOR REPORT

AI · ROBOTS · MONEY · JOBS · FOOD · SECURITY  |  UPDATED OCT 20, 2026 10:13 PM ET

A DeFoor Innovations publication  ·  Advertise

SHOW ME THE MONEY!

BIGGEST AI RAISES THIS WEEK

  1. Tenstorrent $1.5B · Series ETrace Capital, Innovation X
  2. Modal $750M · Series D
  3. ASI $325M · Series C
  4. Otter.ai $320M
  5. Arda Industries $232MChief Executive Bob McGrew
  6. Moss Intelligence $149MHuakong Fund

TOP INVESTORS · 30 DAYS

  1. Forerunner 2 deals · $113M in rounds
  2. Abstract Ventures 2 deals · $110M in rounds
  3. Forgepoint Capital International 2 deals · $78.5M in rounds
  4. Motive Partners 2 deals · $43.6M in rounds
All investments & investors →

CRYPTO

BITCOIN, ETHEREUM, STABLECOINS AND THE RULES

BTC $82,853 ▲1.6%ETH $2,451 ▲2.5%SOL $106 ▲1.8%XRP $1.33 ▲2.8%24 hr · CoinGecko

Kraken’s $80 stablecoin fee gap exposes hidden costsQubic restarts blockchain, opens recovery claims after $1.4M hackBNB Chain burns $1.2B in October tokens, leaving real supply impact hiddenJPMorgan Puts a Number on Bitcoin for the First Time: 10% a Year, With a Big CaveatU.S. CFTC sets agenda for AI forum, exploring trading and agentic financeMore crypto news →Bitwise, Hyperliquid seek SEC rule changes for token trading, airdropsJPMorgan models Bitcoin reaching $385,000 in 10-year bull case despite CEO Jamie Dimon’s criticismMicrosoft, Alphabet, Goldman Sachs Join Growing List of Companies Objecting to Tokenized StocksCrypto’s 2026 shutdown wave claims 82 projects. What went wrong?Swiss Regulator Approves First Retail Fund That Holds Bitcoin Directly

AI AGENTS

DOTS · MUSE · GROK BOT · INSTINCT · GEMINI SPARK · OPENCLAW

MUSE Meta pauses Muse sharing after researchers find AI chats on the webMUSE Meta’s Muse hits 10M U.S. downloads in 40 days, a milestone reached by only 11 other appsMUSE Meta Muse exposes users' personal and business secrets when they share conversationsMistral AI launches Voxtral 3, a full voice agent stack that listens, thinks, and talks in real timeAn AI Agent Joined a Listserv of Top Internet Researchers. The Reply-All Chaos Is Still UnfoldingMore AI agent news →Army Cyber Command's ECHOTRIBBLE would turn AI agents into self-spreading cyberweapons

WHO WILL FEED US?

AG TECH, FOOD AND THE MONEY BEHIND THEM

AI Reservoir Farms Expands to Washington State to Accelerate Physical AI for Tree Fruit, Blueberries, and Critical High-Value CropsFUNDING BloomX raises $13 million to expand robotic pollination in fruit cropsFUNDING Kodama nets $7m to scale physical AI for ‘intelligent forestry’ROBOTS New hoeing robot benefits from growers’ critical eyeFarm Progress Show 2026 spotlights digital ag tools

ESSAYS & BLOGS

THE WEEK'S AI WRITING, ONE POST PER WRITER

NOTABLE ESSAYS

  1. The Future Is for EveryoneMark Zuckerberg · Aug 2026
  2. Policy on the AI ExponentialDario Amodei
  3. The Adolescence of TechnologyDario Amodei · 2026
Anthropic Does Not Understand Why Its Draft Bill Was Unacceptable and TroublingWhat’s the ROI of software engineers’ spending on AI?More essays and blogs →Latest open artifacts (#25): DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017, American-made models, and new regulatory controls in the US & China30 Months on the Exponential (in Charts)New paper: Emerging trends in AI agent evaluationAI is ushering in an age of personal mediaImport AI 477: In which I tell the IMF the Singularity has begunCan a Million AI Agents Create Superintelligence?🔮 A world of many minds & the future of workYou Have No Idea How Close the AI Bubble Is to Popping

AI IN HEALTH

MEDICINE, WELLNESS, HOSPITALS AND THE FDA

FDA Official Believes GenAI-enabled Tools Will Need to Be Assessed Like a PhysicianNVIDIA Cosmos3-H-Dreams: Bringing Clinical Surgery to Life Through Generative SimulationClaude designed protein binders against scorpion neurotoxinsOpenEvidence, Doximity settle thorny AI legal battleSTAT+: Pharmalittle: We’re reading about drug launch prices, an AstraZeneca AI deal, and moreMore AI in health →3 things healthcare leaders should know about AI-native EHRsWhy AI-driven payer intelligence is a revenue cycle imperativeUPMC Enterprises Invests in VeloSource to Expand AI-Enabled Clinician Staffing PlatformHow AI Is Connecting MedTech’s Data Without Compromising ComplianceSTAT+: ‘AI sandboxes’ are all the rage. Advocates scramble to control their future

AI LABS

Image: AWS Machine Learning

Beyond the KV cache: Training and serving i14’s Laplace 3B linear attention model on AWS Trainium2 with native PyTorch How Octave built a secure multi-tenant AI foundation on Amazon Bedrock FairStress: A deeper evaluation of fairness in LLM decision-making ALTK-Evolve: How learned memory tops the τ²-bench leaderboard on customer service tasks without a frontier model Voxtral 3
Franchisee reconciles cash in 94% less time with ChatGPT Work Terminal X matches senior investor judgment 88.6% with GPT-6.1 OpenAI acquires Orchestra Bio More AI labs news →Hugging Face ❤️ TorchTPU: TPUs, Natively Germany Wants to Lead the World in Industrial AI: How NVIDIA Will Help

ON THE RISE

WHAT YOUNG PEOPLE ARE BUILDING

The next young builder featured here could be someone you know.

Know a young person building with AI? Tell us →

NVIDIA Advances Agentic Security for Media, From European Public Service Broadcasting to Global Content Production Advancing coding in low‑resource programming languages How Itaú is building generative AI for its entire customer base Grounding AI agents in biological reality: Building blocks for autonomous wet labs

THE LLM WARS

ANTHROPIC · OPENAI · GOOGLE · GROK · CHINA · OPEN MODELS

ANTHROPIC Anthropic’s cloud partnerships are getting messyGOOGLE Gemini's Personal Intelligence is coming to carsOPENAI ChatGPT now lets you lock your chatsANTHROPIC Eric Schmidt reportedly owns about half as much of Anthropic as CEO Dario AmodeiOPENAI Sam Altman reportedly pitched three endgames for AI safety, one involving a single firm melting everyone else's GPUsMore LLM news →OPENAI Access OpenAI GPT models on Amazon Bedrock from Canada with cross-Region inferenceCHINA US orders federal agencies to remove China’s DeepSeek AI from their systemsOPEN Translating in style: An open-weight alternative to GPT-4 for culturally aligned machine translationCHINA Tencent's Marvis AI Butler Lands in the Kylin Software Store With Support for Domestic CPUsCHINA MiniMax M3.1 Flash shows China's AI price race has no floor in sight

WHO GOT HACKED

Stolen UpdraftCentral keys used to backdoor WordPress sitesMozilla, Google, Apple block compromised eMudhra CA certificatesTech Giants Block eMudhra Certificates Tied to 8 Compromised KeysFBI says SafePay ransomware gang ‘among most active’ with more than 600 victims since 2024California warns all public school students of data stolen in contractor breachMore hacks & breaches →Eight eMudhra CA Keys Compromised, Triggering Emergency Fixes Across Browsers and SoftwareQilin and INC Ransomware Groups Exploit Palo Alto Networks Flaw to Bypass MFA

NEW IN HAVE I BEEN PWNED

Assurance Retraite: 70,372 accountsGîtes de France: 117,574 accountsCrunchbase: 559,908 accountsSharecare: 318,185 accounts

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

FAILED & FOLDED

AI COMPANIES AND PRODUCTS THAT SHUT DOWN OR WENT BANKRUPT

Too-Big-To-Fail 3.0: When AI Goes Bankrupt, Who Keeps Our Secrets?Character.AI bankruptcy filing reveals the rapid climb, stunning collapse of a once-major AI player

AI POLICY

LAWS, RULES AND GUIDANCE FROM GOVERNMENTS

Google launches Gemini for government services as new ‘agentic solution’Scaling Laws Roadshow at North Dakota Law: Justice Jerod Tufte on AI in the JudiciaryWhatsApp's help pages hid LLM instructions: dont recommend a regulatorGAO to monitor government AI use, hire AI experts in coming yearsAI sovereignty: preserving UK agency in an AI-enabled worldMore AI policy →First harmonised standard supporting the AI Act published in the Official JournalHybrid Reasoning Agents: LLM agents that think in latent space, act through textHow government and industry can leverage AI to transform the federal IT marketplace

INTERNATIONAL

CHINA METASTONE Launches TokenFleet to Schedule LLM Inference Across GPU Clusters and Data CentersCHINA SenseTime Open-Sources SenseNova-RoboRSI Embodied AI Harness and a 27B Robot Brain ModelKOREA Seoul shares open sharply higher ahead of Meta earnings amid AI woesINDIA Indian IT firms eye $20m–$60m US and European AI targets in outbound M&A pushKOREA S. Korea's UN envoy named co-chair of global AI governance dialogueMore international news →INDIA New UN initiative will aim to tackle the military uses of AICANADA Families of Wes Hall, Patsy Anderson make $3-million donation to SickKids’ AI initiativeEUROPE Nvidia backs four German startups as European spending spree continues

DAVID AND GOLIATH

SMALL TEAMS TAKING ON THE GIANTS

THE BIG APPS I replaced Notion, Obsidian, and Todoist with Anytype; now I handle my notes and tasks in one appADOBE A developer used AI to build 7 free Adobe alternatives, and subscription software has a new problemADOBE I tried the free Adobe Acrobat clone – and finally have a pro PDF editor on LinuxADOBE Free Open Source Alternative For MS Office Released By Adobe Dupe MakerMICROSOFT This Is My Favorite Microsoft 365 Replacement and It’s Free on Linux, Mac and WindowsMore David and Goliath stories →ADOBE I tried replacing Photoshop, Lightroom, and Acrobat with free vibe-coded alternatives, and they're surprisingly goodADOBE What is ArtCraft? Free AI-built software offers alternatives to Adobe Photoshop, Premiere Pro and moreADOBE About That AI-Powered Clone of Adobe Creative Suite …THE BIG APPS Strafe: A new open-source, E2E Encrypted, and federated alternative to DiscordMICROSOFT After a month of using this open-source Microsoft 365 alternative, I only missed one thing

AI NEWS

Photo: SpaceX / SpaceX / TechCrunch

SpaceX’s AI business is beating expectations The Work Moves Outward Elevenlabs releases two new speech-to-speech models designed for real-time AI conversations Deepseek open-sources the inference engine that powers its fastest and cheapest AI model Google has joined Amazon in attacking Nvidia’s stronghold with AI app developers
French Government Calls Emergency Meetings With Platforms Over Protests Meta tries to scapegoat staff who downloaded torrents to spare execs OpenAI says GPT-6 is much better with legacy programming languages such as COBOL and Fortran More AI news →The new economics of enterprise AI Adobe Lightroom mobile can now open closed eyes in photos with a simple tap
AI adoption by industry shows what other sectors can learn A visit to Samsung’s massive new semiconductor hub CoreWeave’s debt is becoming the whole AI industry’s problem Making the internet better for AI agents might make it worse for everyone else AI game clones are making indie developers afraid to show their work
WhatsApp Help Pages Leaked Hidden Instructions for a Meta Chatbot JB Pritzker thinks AI could help us live to 100 — or threaten us like nukes Democrats think cracking down on AI could give them an edge OnlyFans Creators Are Pissed That Meta Lets Muse Talk Dirty Data Centers Have a New PR Plan: Your Kid’s Field Trip

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AI AND JOBS

WHO'S HIRING, WHO'S CUTTING, AND THE WORK ITSELF

Citadel founder Ken Griffin says AI is coming for white-collar jobs, but not at his firmsWhy workers in India are training their AI robot replacementsWill AI take my job? Ask an economist! (NPR+)Callings.ai Launches Outplacement 2.0 at HR Tech 2026, Turning Employee Exits Into Lasting Talent RelationshipsCompanies Are Racing To Embrace AI, And Employees Still Feel LostAI is exposing a leadership blind spot: Who’s actually responsible for making employees more capable?Investing Expert: ‘AI Is About to Expose Millions of Useless White-Collar Jobs’Tech layoffs 2026 update: Job losses pile up at Netflix, HubSpot, Flock Safety, and others in OctoberMore AI and jobs news →Everyone’s panicking about the AI job apocalypse. Here’s the reality

NOW HIRING

1,290 open AI roles · 301 new this week · most wanted: Solutions & customer · top pay $675K

INTEL AI Data Science / Software Engineering PhD Intern New 2027 US, Oregon, HillsboroHARVEY Business Development Manager, Cloud & AI San FranciscoPNC Data Scientist - Anti-Money Laundering Analytics & Modeling 7 LocationsDATABRICKS Lead Solutions Architect – MedTech (Strategic Account) Amsterdam, NetherlandsSALESFORCE Summer 2027 Intern - AI Research California - Palo AltoAll active AI listings →Hiring for AI? List your jobs →

AI & TECH IN EDUCATION

SCHOOLS, TEACHERS, STUDENTS AND CAMPUSES

High schoolers oppose full-day cellphone bans amid safety concernsIPS board candidates discuss school closures, AI, and legislative funding at forumNearly half of employers say AI will make college degrees more importantNew Jersey picks Rutgers to lead social media research centerEducators who use AI say it frees up time to interact with studentsMore AI education news →Teachers Pay Teachers to ban AI-generated classroom resources as changes to platform spark backlashVibe coding: 3 easy steps to classroom magicA university-branded boot camp promised tech jobs. It delivered only debt

TOP TECH, AI & BUSINESS PODCASTS THIS WEEK

RISING FAST Hard Fork up 1,361% on last week · now #3

  1. 1All-In: Dylan Field: Is AI Replacing Designers?, Design is the New Code & Democratizing Creativity1.2M views this week · 3 episodes
  2. 2Moonshots: Flying Tesla Car, Robot Brains Halving in Cost Every 3 Weeks, and Why Incentives Decide AI Alignment484K views this week · 2 episodes
  3. 3Hard Fork: Why Nathan Fielder's ‘You Can See Everything’ Left Us Reeling370K views this week · 2 episodes NEW
  4. 4Prof G Pod: The 996 Grind Gets Time All Wrong — with Oliver Burkeman336K views this week · 5 episodes ▼1
  5. 5BG2 Pod: Jensen Huang | Does AI Revenue Justify Capex, '27 AI Bottlenecks, Singularity, Open vs Closed & more280K views this week · 1 episode NEW
Complete list: all 19 shows by weekly rank →

THE ROBOTS ARE COMING!

ROBOT ROLL CALL: where each one stands →Nine humanoid robots side by side, drawn to scaleWhy Your Robot’s Power Supply is the Real BottleneckReservoir launches new agricultural robotics incubator for Washington growersBattle Drones - a vibe coded RTS with audio-based multiplayerUkraine’s drone rescue of wounded soldier puts much touted idea into practiceExotec expands warehouse robotics business in Japan with two major Skypod installationsMore robot news →RoboBusiness rebrands as Robotics Summit & Expo WestEx-Nvidia-turned-VC Amulya Vishwanath: ‘Physical AI is in it’s LEGO era’2027 TRR50 Robotics Innovation Awards open nominationsAGCO to Deploy Agility Robotics’ Digit Humanoid Robot at Kansas FacilityAllegro MicroSystems Introduces New Power and Sensing Technologies for Humanoid Robotics

AI FOR ENTERTAINMENT

HOLLYWOOD, MUSIC, TV AND GAMES

WGA East Moves to Block AI Models from Training on Members’ Work with New Software Partner Cloak: ‘Give Agency Back to Writers’ICMP says AI firms are trying to ‘strong-arm’ Australia on copyright – and that Kylie Minogue’s songs have already been used to train AI (report)Spotify inks licensing deal with Believe for AI covers and remixes toolSpotify has pulled more than 50m ‘AI slop and spam’ tracks out of its recommendations this yearJapan Actors Union announces guidelines addressing unauthorised use of generative AI to replicate voice performancesMore AI entertainment news →The AI state of play: AI laws and game developmentUKIE partners with Sheridans on AI Compliance and Accreditation Service to guide UK studios in using AI lawfully and responsibly

AI AND RETAIL

ONLINE AND BRICK-AND-MORTAR

Beyond the hype: What retailers actually learn when agentic AI hits the sales floor

BUILDERS & RESEARCH

eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise Modeling Human Behavior in the Prisoner's Dilemma with Large Language Models Composable Parametric Demographic Injection for Values Survey Simulation The Window Is in the Reasoning: When LLM Agents Decide to Follow Prompt Injections Discuss More, Comment Less: Boosting Automated Research via Multi-Perspective Collaborative Review
My obituary for programming Harness Engineering 101: The LLM is the brain, the harness is the body Tmux and Claude Code: Sessions, Send-Keys, and the Ceiling More builders & research →llm-tools-datasette 0.1.1 llm-echo 0.5
If you don't run your own LLM proxy, how do you know whats going on? Hybrid Reasoning Agents: LLM agents that think in latent space, act through text Inline rendering with document​.currentScript Show HN: Llmspeed – feel how fast a local LLM runs before you buy the hardware How the Claude Code team does code review