THE DEFOOR REPORT AS OF OCTOBER 22, 2026  ·  TODAY'S REPORT →  ·  ALL DAYS

Hackers Exploited the PHP Vulnerabilities Days Before They Were PatchedBlackstone’s Jas Khaira says fears over AI-buildout debt are overblownData centers could erase decades of air quality gains
Meta to create a new class of shares to fund AI push
DEFOOR REPORT

AI · ROBOTS · MONEY · JOBS · FOOD · SECURITY  |  UPDATED OCT 22, 2026 12:13 AM 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. Flapping Airplanes $1B
  3. Legora $550M · Series E
  4. ASI $325M · Series C
  5. Otter.ai $320M
  6. Arda Industries $232MChief Executive Bob McGrew

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 $82,829 ▲0.1%ETH $2,442 ▼0.0%SOL $105 ▼0.3%XRP $1.35 ▲1.0%24 hr · CoinGecko

Bitcoin gives back its run at $85,000 as Tesla and Meta fail to calm AI nervesOCC waiver rule puts active stablecoin issuers on noticeAerodrome and Velodrome merge to launch Aero across seven blockchain networksWhy earning XRP yield through this wallet could actually cost you moneyTesla–SpaceX merger talks could put 30,221 Bitcoin under one roofMore crypto news →Tether backs Bolivian fintech bringing USDT payments to food delivery and bankingTrump didn‘t mention ‘crypto’ once in White House cybercrime roundtableHere’s what happened in crypto todayAmerican Bankers Association accuses OCC of undermining Congress with final stablecoin rewards ruleBitcoin Hits Weekly High as Crypto Market Rebounds

AI AGENTS

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

MUSE Meta says Muse has over 10M users, with shopping a top activityMUSE Anthropic takes on Muse with Claude Duet, its new AI agentMUSE Tons of People Are Apparently Asking Meta’s Muse AI Agent to Shop for ThemWhile Amazon blocks AI agents, Walmart rolls out the welcome matWalmart is inviting AI agents to shop for youMore AI agent news →OpenAI says an AI agent lied about disabling its safety monitoring system

WHO WILL FEED US?

AG TECH, FOOD AND THE MONEY BEHIND THEM

AI Pharma, Mouthfeel & Anti-AI: Oatly Releases 2026 Future of Taste Trends Report & New LookbookROBOTS Layoffs at Carbon Robotics as firm “realigns costs due to broader economic conditions”AI Lumi AI finds new home at Newforma as agentic analytics gathers paceAI Penn State team develop AI tool to advance food scienceFUNDING Japan’s Kinish Scoops Up $3.1M in Funding to Ramp Up Rice-Based Ice Cream & Casein DevelopmentMore farm & food news →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 eyeBrevel teams up with The Wave Group to scale ‘illuminated fermentation’ in India

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
Misaligned!What’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

SkillEval: Learning Interpretable Ability Profiles of LLMs via Cognitive Diagnosis ModelsScaling Therapy Supervision: Assessing Psychotherapy Fidelity Using Large Language ModelsAMA Calls for Risk-Based GenAI Oversight to Protect Patients and Support Responsible InnovationThe $15 billion ad-powered AI startup your doctor may already be usingFDA Official Believes GenAI-enabled Tools Will Need to Be Assessed Like a PhysicianMore AI in health →Claude 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 more3 things healthcare leaders should know about AI-native EHRsWhy AI-driven payer intelligence is a revenue cycle imperative

AI LABS

Image: AWS Machine Learning

Securing Quick access from corporate networks with AWS PrivateLink 5 production challenges in multi-agent systems and how Deep Insight solved them Broad access through consistent standards NVIDIA Kumo Relational Outperforms Supervised Machine Learning on Relational Data, No Training Required How Specializing the Vocabulary of SLMs Can Cut Inference Cost by 77% in Real Applications
How AT&T is rethinking in-house legal work with OpenAI Empowering frontline maternal care with AI-assisted ultrasound Profiling TorchNeuron (Part 1): System-level profiling on AWS Trainium. More AI labs news →Granite Speech 5.0: Transcribe, Translate, and Attribute more Accurately and Faster ChatGPT Ads expands to 26 new countries as over 100,000 advertisers have used the platform

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 →

Bringing the Spark to Europe: Local Intelligence Powers Next Wave of Agents NVIDIA Cloud Partners Scale Across Europe — Sovereign, Open and Built for Safe AI Agents NVIDIA Confidential Computing Expands, Enabling Frontier Model Builders to Securely Scale Across Global Infrastructure NVIDIA Agent Toolkit Expands, Grounding Enterprise Agents in Company Data Patch the Planet: global response coordination as agents uncover critical vulnerabilities
How we built ChatGPT’s novel ad stack for user trust and relevance Using thousands of AI agents to uncover new leads in biological data Voxtral 3

THE LLM WARS

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

OPEN How Far Can the Gemma 4 Speech Encoder Go Without Changing Its Weights? Saudi and Gulf Arabic Speech Recognition with a Frozen and an Adapter-Augmented EncoderOPENAI OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and Google's Gemini 4 Argon found critical PHP flaw affecting millions of websitesANTHROPIC Claude DuetOPENAI OpenAI's latest AI models are coming to Google Cloud and AntigravityOPENAI PHP Armageddon: OpenAI, Google’s Wiz find ancient holes, panicking the internetMore LLM news →GOOGLE Conversational Gemini navigation comes to Apple CarPlayOPEN Mistral and Nvidia want to speed up industrial design with physics AIOPEN Mistral Advances AI for Engineering with NVIDIACHINA DeepSeek Wants Better AI at Lower CostANTHROPIC Claude Science tackles deadly scorpion stings by designing protein binders from scratchCHINA DeepSeek open-sources inference framework with support for Nvidia and Huawei chipsCHINA Tencent opens Yuanbao Search to developers building AI models and agentsGOOGLE Google’s more personalized Gemini AI is heading to your carGOOGLE Gemini's Personal Intelligence is coming to cars

WHO GOT HACKED

Google Chrome adds Gemini-powered scam detection, warns users of ClickFix attacksJapan's Onamae Desktop Cloud hacked, up to 27,000 servers affectedTiDB Breach Exposes Flawed Cloud Security AssumptionsLiteLLM Compromised in Supply Chain Attack Delivering Credential Stealer and BackdoorGoogle Hardens Chrome Against ClickFix Attacks, Insecure HTTP ConnectionsMore hacks & breaches →PHP2Shell Patches Land as First Exploitation Attempts Hit SensorsOVHcloud GitHub Compromise Tied to GlassWorm Threat Actors

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)

AI POLICY

LAWS, RULES AND GUIDANCE FROM GOVERNMENTS

Adaptive agentic intelligence framework using Strands AgentsWhat’s new in Homeland Security’s updated AI policyAnthropic pitches AI safety bill that may block a model if 50+ people could be killedGoogle launches Gemini for government services as new ‘agentic solution’WhatsApp's help pages hid LLM instructions: dont recommend a regulatorMore AI policy →GAO to monitor government AI use, hire AI experts in coming yearsAI sovereignty: preserving UK agency in an AI-enabled worldHybrid Reasoning Agents: LLM agents that think in latent space, act through text

INTERNATIONAL

EUROPE Ireland’s AI scene has buzz. Now it needs breakoutsEUROPE Yann LeCun and Arthur Mensch back Zurich robotics startup in $30m pre-seedUK ‘I’d consider replacing one of my children’: Taika Waititi on robot kids, his cheese-o-meter and Klara and the SunINDIA In absence of sovereign buyers, Indian chip firms find clients in Japan, EUINDIA Tesla aims to sell Cybercab robotaxis by end of year despite federal probeMore international news →KOREA AI gave the hacker the tools, weak security opened the door: CrowdStrikeCHINA China Telecom's TeleAI Spins Out Gamma Robotics to Build Self-Evolving Humanoid RobotsCHINA Qianjue Unveils Polibrain, a Predictive World Model Built to Run Across Robot Body Types

DAVID AND GOLIATH

SMALL TEAMS TAKING ON THE GIANTS

ADOBE The strangest new Photoshop competitor wasn't built the usual wayTHE 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 MakerMore David and Goliath stories →MICROSOFT This Is My Favorite Microsoft 365 Replacement and It’s Free on Linux, Mac and WindowsADOBE What is ArtCraft? Free AI-built software offers alternatives to Adobe Photoshop, Premiere Pro and moreADOBE I tried replacing Photoshop, Lightroom, and Acrobat with free vibe-coded alternatives, and they're surprisingly goodADOBE About That AI-Powered Clone of Adobe Creative Suite …THE BIG APPS Strafe: A new open-source, E2E Encrypted, and federated alternative to Discord

AI NEWS

Photo: Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile for Collision via Getty Images / TechCrunch

Recursive launches Flint, a laptop coding model it says was largely built by AI The Work Moves Outward Judge rejects Trump’s wild claim EPA can dismiss data center pollution lawsuits Google Cloud now offers OpenAI models alongside Gemini and Claude, becoming the only major provider with all three Blacksmith hits unicorn valuation after Sequoia leads Series C
Deepmind founder Hassabis shortens AGI timeline from five to two to three years This Startup Is All In on Recursive Self-Improvement. Its Latest Model Is Scary Good Jensen Huang’s Vision for Europe Runs on Plug-In Data Centers More AI news →Inception's Mercury 3 diffusion model claims to beat GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 at a fraction of the wait ‘This Is Not a Drill’: Critical PHP Vulnerabilities Are Setting the Internet on Fire
AI promises productivity, but for managers, it’s mostly a headache for now AI Guardrails Aren’t Stopping Criminal Hackers Nvidia's DSX POD could cut AI data center setup from six months to as little as 14 days Meta drops the word "train" from its commercial TOS after AI backlash The new economics of enterprise AI
AI adoption by industry shows what other sectors can learn A visit to Samsung’s massive new semiconductor hub Making the internet better for AI agents might make it worse for everyone else

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AI AND JOBS

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

It’s A Wash: AI Will Create As Many Jobs As It Eliminates, Study SuggestsAI reshapes construction teams more often than it cuts jobs: reportYour Most AI-Fluent Employees Are The Most Afraid. Your Silence Is WhyYYForce Unveils "Workforce OS" Robotics Architecture Powered by NVIDIA Physical AIHireology Launches AI Hiring Intelligence Suite; AI Match Customers See 20% Reduction in Time to Hireisolved Places AI Agents on the Org Chart Alongside People, Advancing Workforce Capital ManagementCitadel founder Ken Griffin says AI is coming for white-collar jobs, but not at his firmsWhy workers in India are training their AI robot replacementsMore AI and jobs news →Will AI take my job? Ask an economist! (NPR+)Korn Ferry Report: AI Isn't Eliminating the Entry-level Job, It's Redefining ItAI Is Exposing a Leadership Blind Spot: Who’s Actually Responsible for Making Employees More Capable?AI Is Taking Entry-Level Jobs. Who’s Training Your Next CEO?Disney agrees to hire the majority of Character.AI’s workforceAI is now the top reason for layoffs. For some workers, it’s also a path to starting a business.It's a 'paradox': How AI hiring tools try to prevent biasDisney agreed to pay $60 million to 66 employees from an AI startup that filed for bankruptcy, weeks after tech layoffs

NOW HIRING

1,371 open AI roles · 310 new this week · most wanted: Solutions & customer · top pay $850K

INTEL AI Model Optimization Engineer India, BangaloreCOHERE Senior Software Engineer, Agent Infrastructure TorontoNVIDIA Senior Software Engineer, GPU Code Generation for Machine Learning Inference 2 LocationsOPENAI Applied AI Engineer Sydney, AustraliaCITI Senior Machine Learning Data Scientist - Assistant Vice President Pune Maharashtra IndiaAll active AI listings →Hiring for AI? List your jobs →

AI & TECH IN EDUCATION

SCHOOLS, TEACHERS, STUDENTS AND CAMPUSES

Is Anyone Enforcing the Cartel? What Reinforcement Learning Teaches LLM Agents in MarketsHow K–12 Districts Can Use Student Voices To Guide Ed Tech PurchasesHow AI Is Breaking the Way We Reward High-Achieving StudentsHigh schoolers oppose full-day cellphone bans amid safety concernsIPS board candidates discuss school closures, AI, and legislative funding at forumMore AI education news →Nearly half of employers say AI will make college degrees more importantNew Jersey picks Rutgers to lead social media research centerTeachers Pay Teachers to ban AI-generated classroom resources as changes to platform spark backlashVibe coding: 3 easy steps to classroom magic

TOP TECH, AI & BUSINESS PODCASTS THIS WEEK

RISING FAST Hard Fork up 932% on last week · now #3

  1. 1All-In: Arvind Krishna & Nikesh Arora: Quantum Threat, Open vs Frontier AI, AI Cyber Warfare & SaaS Collapse984K views this week · 3 episodes
  2. 2Moonshots: Chamath: Bitcoin Goes to Zero, Robots vs. $40T Debt, Elon’s SpaceX Shares for 72M Kids601K views this week · 3 episodes ▲3
  3. 3Hard Fork: Why Nathan Fielder's ‘You Can See Everything’ Left Us Reeling398K views this week · 1 episode NEW
  4. 4Prof G Pod: Why Rich People Want More Debt, Not Less — With Morgan Housel308K views this week · 5 episodes ▼1
  5. 5BG2 Pod: Jensen Huang | Does AI Revenue Justify Capex, '27 AI Bottlenecks, Singularity, Open vs Closed & more287K views this week · 1 episode ▼3
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 scaleNASA’s Moon mission with four drones moves closer to spacecraft production in 2028Humanoid robot cuts model processing delay 8x with NVIDIA tech in internal testsTesla fires up Optimus robot production with Musk eyeing 20,000 units per week by 2027Tesla pushes unsupervised FSD to Q2 2027, and only inside Robotaxi zonesTesla FSD ‘subscriptions’ hit 1.74M, counted the way Musk’s pay package wantsMore robot news →Tesla starts Optimus robot production in California as profit falls 43%Lucid’s 25,000 Bolt robotaxis will run on Nvidia’s self-driving softwareAGCO to deploy Agility Digit humanoid in Kansas factoryGenerative Bionics to Build Europe’s Largest Physical AI Data FactoryHumanoid Strengthens Collaboration with NVIDIA to Advance Next-Generation Humanoid Robots

AI FOR ENTERTAINMENT

HOLLYWOOD, MUSIC, TV AND GAMES

The new human-crafted Apple Music brand matters in an AI worldGen Z Feels ‘Doomed’ Watching AI, but Gen Alpha Feels DifferentlyVivrato: 97% of studio leaders use AI in some form during development in EU and North AmericaJapan Actors Union announces guidelines addressing unauthorised use of generative AI to replicate voice performancesThe AI state of play: AI laws and game development

AI AND RETAIL

ONLINE AND BRICK-AND-MORTAR

AI boosts discovery but reviews still seal the deal, new research showsTarget’s holiday push stresses affordability, exclusives and an AI assistantBeyond the hype: What retailers actually learn when agentic AI hits the sales floor

BUILDERS & RESEARCH

Translation and data ethics Today's PHP Security Release, and How We're Strengthening PHP Security Panache — RTS Belle Époque pour mobile Using Claude to reduce the attack surface of code eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise
Battle Drones - a vibe coded RTS with audio-based multiplayer Claude designed protein binders against scorpion neurotoxins My obituary for programming More builders & research →Harness Engineering 101: The LLM is the brain, the harness is the body Tmux and Claude Code: Sessions, Send-Keys, and the Ceiling
llm-tools-datasette 0.1.1 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