THE DEFOOR REPORT AS OF OCTOBER 24, 2026  ·  TODAY'S REPORT →  ·  ALL DAYS

Jensen Huang Brings Four Robot Ducks On Stage in Berlin. A Day Later, Preorders Pass 20,000OpenAI says it will no longer train its AI models on the live internet, citing “significant risks”Hottest toy for Christmas? Nvidia CEO plays with adorable Microduck robots, 20,000 sell
Jensen Huang Brings Four Robot Ducks On Stage in Berlin. A Day Later, Preorders Pass 20,000

Pollen Robotics / Microduck press kit

Jensen Huang Brings Four Robot Ducks On Stage in Berlin. A Day Later, Preorders Pass 20,000
DEFOOR REPORT

AI · ROBOTS · MONEY · JOBS · FOOD · SECURITY  |  UPDATED OCT 24, 2026 12:25 AM ET

A DeFoor Innovations publication  ·  Advertise

SHOW ME THE MONEY!

BIGGEST AI RAISES THIS WEEK

  1. DeepSeek $15BCATL
  2. Nvidia-backed Nebius $3.5B
  3. Tenstorrent $1.5B · Series ETrace Capital, Innovation X
  4. Flapping Airplanes $1B · Seed
  5. Legora $550MAtreides
  6. ASI $325M · Series C

TOP INVESTORS · 30 DAYS

  1. South Park Commons 3 deals · $72M in rounds
  2. Forerunner 2 deals · $113M in rounds
  3. Abstract Ventures 2 deals · $110M in rounds
  4. Forgepoint Capital International 2 deals · $78.5M in rounds
All investments & investors →

CRYPTO

BITCOIN, ETHEREUM, STABLECOINS AND THE RULES

BTC $80,796 ▼1.0%ETH $2,379 ▼1.0%SOL $102 ▼1.3%XRP $1.29 ▼2.1%24 hr · CoinGecko

New OCC stablecoin rule resets redemptions, and banks face big shiftsAave changes USDT borrowing rules and loan costs suddenly jumpWells Fargo and five others object to OKX-ICE tokenized stock listings: ReportNetanyahu Considering Crypto Plan to Dodge Banking Sanctions on IsraelIRS plans lower tax disclosure penalties, including for crypto: ForbesMore crypto news →UK’s FCA says crypto apps may need licenses when algorithms choose trade routesSenate Democrat Probes Tether Payments to Ex-White House Crypto Adviser’s FirmSEC Flags AI 'Super Intelligence' and Tokenization as Systemic Market RisksInitia halts blockchain after exploit reportedly drains over $2.6MNetanyahu seeking blockchain plan to prepare for possible sanctions

AI AGENTS

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

MUSE Meta’s Muse is popular, but personal agents still face barriers to adoptionMUSE Meta's Muse Could Transform Its AI Business. But Can It Make Money?CLAUDE Anthropic's Claude Duet AI agent manages work across thousands of connected apps — here’s howOPENCLAW OpenClaw creator puts last month’s token bill at $10M, The Register reportsGROK BOT Grok Bot can now control your lights, calendar and messagesMore AI agent news →CLAUDE Anthropic previews Claude Duet personal AI agent for subscribersMUSE Claude Duet: Anthropic’s Riposte to Meta Muse, OpenAI Dots and InstinctGROK BOT Grok Bot now adds app controls: reminders, messaging and smart home commandsCLAUDE Claude Duet vs Grok Bot vs ChatGPT Work vs Meta Muse: Which AI agent is worth using in India?

WHO WILL FEED US?

AG TECH, FOOD AND THE MONEY BEHIND THEM

ROBOTS FIRA USA draws agtech and robotics industry and growers to Yakima ValleyROBOTS Dutch robot builder AIGRO declared bankruptROBOTS Kubota and Agtonomy introduce autonomous M5L tractor for specialty cropsFUNDING Pythag Tech Gets $4.25M to Make Cultivated Meat Production Faster & Cheaper with AIROBOTS FieldSense FSR500: lightweight spraying robot designed for easy farm repairsMore farm & food news →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 scienceAI Reservoir Farms Expands to Washington State to Accelerate Physical AI for Tree Fruit, Blueberries, and Critical High-Value Crops

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
The HackeningThe internet’s Wuhan momentMore essays and blogs →All the king’s horses and all the king’s men haven’t been able to put CoreWeave back together againThe Pulse: Time to rethink software security because of AI?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?

AI IN HEALTH

MEDICINE, WELLNESS, HOSPITALS AND THE FDA

STAT+: AI drug firm Pathos raises $237 million, pushing valuation to $3 billionDevelopers, not doctors, should be held accountable for generative AI medical devices, providers sayAMA Calls for Risk-Based GenAI Oversight to Protect Patients and Support Responsible InnovationFDA Official Believes GenAI-enabled Tools Will Need to Be Assessed Like a PhysicianClaude designed protein binders against scorpion neurotoxinsMore AI in health →UPMC Enterprises Invests in VeloSource to Expand AI-Enabled Clinician Staffing Platform

AI LABS

Image: Google Research

Bringing foundational models to the front lines of TB screening Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning on Amazon SageMaker AI: A hands-on guide Rapidly scaling online storage to serve over 1 billion ChatGPT users (Part II) Orchestrating SageMaker AI endpoint auto scaling with AWS CDK Visualize points and routes with GeoJSON in Amazon Quick Sight layer maps
LitPivot: Developing research ideas through dynamic contextualization within the literature landscape Securing our frontier model training environment Kazakhstan Expands Compute for Its AI Future More AI labs news →Does Your Model Run on AWS Trainium? Look It Up Turning Database Grading into RL Rewards: Post-Training Agents with ThinkingBox

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 →

Build more responsive apps with the Decisions API NVIDIA Unveils Minerva to Bring End-to-End Observability for AI Factories Beyond tree cover: mapping the world’s forest types Ensemble forecasting with IBM Granite time-series models What FDE means at OpenAI
NVIDIA Cosmos Opens New Tools to Train, Evaluate and Deploy World Models Broad access through consistent standards How AT&T is rethinking in-house legal work with OpenAI Empowering frontline maternal care with AI-assisted ultrasound Mistral Advances AI for Engineering with NVIDIA
Voxtral 3

THE LLM WARS

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

CHINA OpenAnolis Builds Anolis OS 27 Agent-Native as Alibaba Cloud Says Agents Write 95% of New CodeOPENAI OpenAI now trains its frontier AI models with no internet accessCHINA Chinese AI model Kimi K3.1 Pro is closing in on Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5OPENAI Three-week on-site audit at OpenAI reveals major gaps in AI safety monitoringANTHROPIC Anthropic says its unreleased model is both more capable and better aligned than Mythos 5.1More LLM news →CHINA ByteDance launches Seedance 2.5 4K video model for film productionOPEN MiHoYo team open-sources GameScaling models that control games through keyboard and mouse actionsANTHROPIC Anthropic's Claude now writes code and proves it safe automaticallyGOOGLE Google's Agent Compute Engine gives every Gemini agent its own hardware-isolated micro virtual machineGROK Grok Bot can now add events, set reminders, and even turn off your lights for youOPEN Hugging Face’s New AI Biology Model Lets You Chat With DNAOPEN Leading European Financial Services Organizations Embrace Open Models to Build Proprietary IntelligenceANTHROPIC Claude Now Works with Google Docs, Sheets, and SlidesGOOGLE Gemini's Personal Intelligence is coming to cars

WHO GOT HACKED

Abandoned Popcorn Time app exposed millions of devices to RCE attacksExposed to PHP2Shell? Cyber Experts Weigh in With AdviceMicrosoft Teams to get AI-powered, context-aware phishing detectionExposed Infrastructure Reveals How Ransomware Affiliates Used AI Agents to Execute IntrusionsAI Tools Are Generating Massive Attacks for Little CostMore hacks & breaches →In Other News: Tor Exit Relays Hijacked, Banks Spot Rogue AI Agents, Self-Rebuilding macOS RansomwareHackers Breach Enterprise Firewalls and VPNs, Exposing Over 70,000 Credentials

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

12 Million Monthly Users Couldn't Prevent Character.AI’s BankruptcySurvey shows Google shutting down Assistant for Gemini could be one of its bigger blundersAn AI chatbot files for bankruptcy. Is it a bad omen for the industry?Disney offers jobs to Character.AI staff after chatbot startup's bankruptcy

AI POLICY

LAWS, RULES AND GUIDANCE FROM GOVERNMENTS

Virginia governor orders statewide plan to address AI cyberattacksSwedish government offices to ban ChatGPT and ClaudeOpenAI urges Newsom to strengthen California’s AI safety law with additional safeguardsAI’s hidden storage bill: What inference leaves behindWhat’s new in Homeland Security’s updated AI policyMore AI policy →AI sovereignty: preserving UK agency in an AI-enabled world

INTERNATIONAL

INDIA Why AI data centers are powering a boom in fuel-cell demandCHINA Huawei Upgrades Celia With Save-Anything Notes and Proactive Suggestions in More Than 100 AppsUK UK to invest £100m in 'world first' AI Biosecurity LabUK Blue Planet III features cloudier footage to prove authenticity amid AI boomINDIA HMD 2660 Flip Senior Edition with AI Companion: What it offers specifically for senior citizensMore international news →CANADA Mila, federal researchers develop AI tool to better predict wildfire behaviourCANADA Dayforce to acquire Ribbon AI to bolster AI recruitment capabilities

DAVID AND GOLIATH

SMALL TEAMS TAKING ON THE GIANTS

MICROSOFT My favorite alternative to Notion isn't Obsidian or OneNote, it's something that works offline and still syncs everywhereTHE BIG APPS Uber rival inDrive eyes 2027 robotaxi tests in Central Asia with Pony AI and NvidiaMICROSOFT Europe built a Microsoft Office rival, and the open-source world is already fighting over itMICROSOFT My top 5 Linux alternatives to Windows (none of them are Mint)OPENAI Gerty: Private ChatGPT alternative that sets itself up on your MacMore David and Goliath stories →ADOBE Can free AI clones really replace Photoshop? I put LightCraft and PhotoCraft to the testTHE BIG APPS I replaced Notion, Obsidian, and Todoist with Anytype; now I handle my notes and tasks in one appADOBE I tried the free Adobe Premiere clone on Linux – and DaVinci Resolve has competitionMICROSOFT I tried the free PowerPoint clone on Linux – and it beats LibreOffice and Google SlidesADOBE Free Open Source Alternative For MS Office Released By Adobe Dupe Maker

AI NEWS

Updated Google privacy policy says your Gmail might be used for advertising The Work Moves Outward Jack Dorsey’s Block made an AI model that talks to you like an awkward new friend From Toast to Bessemer: Who founders will hear from at TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 The iPhone Duo should have been an iPad
Now Google says it might use your Gmail and Google Photos data to target ads OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says advanced AI will inevitably escape its sandbox, and only alignment can save us Meta delays new business terms after publisher pushback on AI scraping More AI news →OpenAI lowers valuation target, raises up to $30 billion Left alone with nothing to do, AI agents started playing
OpenAI working on new $30B raise at $1.25T valuation ahead of IPO Designing an AI serving harness built to last The Social Society Helping Women Join the AI Boom 1Password launches a way for AI agents to log in on your behalf without seeing your password OpenAI makes its Jev competitor widely available as decision model competition heats up
The Foundations of Scalable AI Hackers got a four-day head start on epic PHP2Shell vulnerability Meet Mori, a Cute Robot Mushroom That Doesn’t Really Say (or Do) Anything Making the case for context-aware AI Hackers Exploited the PHP Vulnerabilities Days Before They Were Patched
OpenAI's latest AI models are coming to Google Cloud and Antigravity Judge rejects Trump’s wild claim EPA can dismiss data center pollution lawsuits This Startup Is All In on Recursive Self-Improvement. Its Latest Model Is Scary Good

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AI AND JOBS

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

CIOs unprepared for agentic workforce shiftAI could take your job. Here's how Congress wants to help workers.Tech Layoffs 2026: 196,000 Workers Affected as Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft Cut JobsBarclays Plans 5,000 Job Cuts as AI Boosts ProductivityUber doubles down on ChatGPT for workers after last month's layoffsGoldman Sachs sees AI-fueled layoffs displacing nearly 10% of workersLayoffs linked to changes in corporate AI spendingBarclays is latest to redirect spending toward AI as it trims its workforceMore AI and jobs news →VetClaims.ai Surpasses 80,000 Veterans’ Claims Developed, Expands AI-Powered Services With 438-Person WorkforceThe best enterprise AI is the AI employees barely noticeAmerican Express Becomes the Latest Company To Announce Massive Layoffs Over the AI BoomAmerican Express is cutting 5% of its workforce to prepare for AIElectronic Arts lays off 400 in latest blow to beleaguered gaming industryCEOs say they’re not yet seeing transformational change from AIAI is splitting HR into 2 archetypes, study showsAI Job Boom Favors Men As Female Employment Growth Stalls

NOW HIRING

1,378 open AI roles · 365 new this week · most wanted: Solutions & customer · top pay $850K

TRUIST Senior Associate AI & Data Consultant – Program Governance 2 LocationsOPENAI Principal Software Engineer, ChatGPT Education and Learning San FranciscoCITI Machine Learning Analyst-Python and SQL Gurugram Haryana IndiaXAI AND X Supercompute Operations Engineering Southaven, MS; Memphis, TNINTEL Deep Learning Hardware Engineer 2 LocationsAll active AI listings →Hiring for AI? List your jobs →

AI & TECH IN EDUCATION

SCHOOLS, TEACHERS, STUDENTS AND CAMPUSES

NYC’s AI ban confusion: what’s allowed and what’s banned in city schoolsOpinion: Educators Need to Engage With AI in Order to Learn the Best Ways to Use ItAI is stealing students’ ability to think critically–Journalism 101 may be an antidoteI run an edtech platform I hope you barely useThe Trump official who compared ed-tech to the tobacco industryMore AI education news →How 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 forum

TOP TECH, AI & BUSINESS PODCASTS THIS WEEK

RISING FAST The Cognitive Revolution up 515% on last week · now #12

  1. 1Moonshots: SpaceX’s AI Business Up 830%, OpenAI Agents Lie, and Startup Turns Mercury Into Gold704K views this week · 3 episodes ▲1
  2. 2All-In: AI Cyber Panic, Ken Griffin’s Bubble Warning, The Fall of France?331K views this week · 3 episodes ▼1
  3. 3Prof G Pod: AI Stock Market Crash: Are We Repeating 1873?324K views this week · 5 episodes ▲1
  4. 4Dwarkesh Podcast: What will computer chips look like in 2045?138K views this week · 1 episode NEW
  5. 5a16z Podcast: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on the Infrastructure the AI Era Needs128K views this week · 4 episodes NEW
Complete list: all 20 shows by weekly rank →

THE ROBOTS ARE COMING!

ROBOT ROLL CALL: where each one stands →Ten humanoid robots side by side, drawn to scaleUS Army’s new interceptor targets drones with ramjet propulsion, seeker techAI-directed robots at US lab to mix, melt and test materials to find novel alloysIntel gets waiver after worries fuzzy US ban on foreign-made robots may hit fabsTesla reveals Optimus Academy, where robots teach themselvesCanton Fair at 70: Service robots get dedicated zone as buyers demand real-world performanceMore robot news →Unitree Unveils Fearsome Bodyguard RobotRobot Talk Episode 167 – Automating construction, with Jan PetršETH scientists set to bring Terminator-style robots to life with lab-grown muscles

AI FOR ENTERTAINMENT

HOLLYWOOD, MUSIC, TV AND GAMES

From Spotify’s giant profits to yet another legal fight for Suno…it’s MBW’s Weekly Round-UpRetro gaming is being overrun with AIThe new human-crafted Apple Music brand matters in an AI worldVivrato: 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 performances

AI AND RETAIL

ONLINE AND BRICK-AND-MORTAR

Walmart unveils AI agent shopping controls, spending limitsEtsy updates AI use policies to emphasize craftsmanshipWalmart welcomes external AI agents — with some guardrailsMore than a Store: Can AI plan my Thanksgiving meal?AI boosts discovery but reviews still seal the deal, new research showsMore AI retail news →Target’s holiday push stresses affordability, exclusives and an AI assistant

BUILDERS & RESEARCH

baseVultra: Compact Nonlinear Recurrence with Reallocated Capacity Lighthouse: On Building a Trustworthy Digital Assistant for Exploring History with Civil Rights Archives TauIndianBankBench: Procedure-Aware, Action-Oriented Evaluation of Tool-Using Conversational Agents FusionEval: Benchmarking Model Fusion for Large Language Models Measuring Research Progress and Linguistic Inclusion in Low-Resource Languages
Quick Study Introducing Kimi K3.1 Pro Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation More builders & research →Quoting Armin Ronacher Claude Duet
Today's PHP Security Release, and How We're Strengthening PHP Security Show HN: Omnara – Open-source alternative to Claude Managed Agents Panache — RTS Belle Époque pour mobile Using LLM for confidence scoring is a bad idea Using Claude to reduce the attack surface of code