Techmeme

Kelcee Griffis / Bloomberg:
Sources: SpaceX is in talks with at least one major cellular infrastructure firm to secure a minimum of 80K US cell sites, as it eyes a wireless carrier launch  —  SpaceX aims to secure a minimum of 80,000 cell sites across the US, and it's in talks with at least one major cellular infrastructure company …

Anthropic:
Anthropic donates the Agent Skills open standard to the Agentic AI Foundation and says 70+ platforms have integrated it, after donating MCP to the AAIF in 2025  —  Today, we're donating Agent Skills, the open standard that gives AI agents specialized knowledge and workflows, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF).

Kate Rooney / CNBC:
Sources: OpenAI nears an up to $30B round led by investors from the UAE and Coatue at a $1.25T pre-money valuation, as an “opportunistic” bridge ahead of an IPO  —  OpenAI is closing in on a funding round that could value the artificial intelligence giant at more than $1 trillion ahead …

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Canva launches Craft, its first image generation model, trained on human-designed templates, available to all users, with plans to support third-party chatbots  —  Design platform Canva released its first image generation model, called Canva Craft, developed by its research team to compete …

Camila Grigera Naón / Fortune:
Microsoft and Alphabet join 14 other companies objecting to a plan by OKXICE, a venture of OKX and ICE, to trade blockchain-based versions of their shares  —  A growing number of companies are pushing back against tokenized trading of their shares.  Microsoft and Alphabet are the latest …

Alfred Ng / Politico:
Amazon issues refunds from a 2025 settlement, crediting “President Trump's Federal Trade Commission,” the first time an FTC refund has been tied to a president  —  Millions of Americans are expected to receive a settlement check from Amazon credited to “President Trump's Federal Trade Commission” …

Robert Hart / The Verge:
Microsoft says its GPT-5-powered Diagnostic Orchestrator uses agents that mimic panels of experts to diagnose conditions up to 4x more accurately than doctors  —  'We're going to build something that is indistinguishable from human performance ... in the next couple of years,' Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman tells The Verge.

The Information:
Sources: Datadog offered to acquire Israeli cloud cybersecurity startup Upwind Security for nearly $4B; Upwind is finalizing a $300M round at a ~$3.8B valuation  —  Enterprise software firm Datadog recently offered to buy Israeli cloud cybersecurity startup Upwind Security for nearly $4 billion …

Maria Diaz / ZDNET:
Amazon rebrands its Kindle Unlimited subscription as Kindle+ and expands access to audiobooks, including titles narrated by AI  —  Unlike narrated audiobooks from Audible and other providers, the audiobooks created with Virtual Voice in Kindle+ will instead be narrated by AI.  —  ZDNET's key takeaways

The Information:
Sources: SoftBank's SB Energy is considering going public as soon as December or waiting until 2027, as it closely watches Anthropic's IPO, expected in November  —  SB Energy, the SoftBank Group-controlled developer of a massive planned Ohio data center project for OpenAI …

Wall Street Journal:
US officials say Trump asked Elon Musk to lift Starshield restrictions; Ukraine officials said it was not fully fixed Thursday but was working at higher speeds  —  Military-grade system appeared to be working more normally on Thursday, soon after the call  —  WASHINGTON—President Trump …

Natalie Breymeyer / Axios:
Chicago-based Formic, which provides robots-as-a-service automation to manufacturers, raised $50M, including a $40M Series B and $10M in asset-backed financing  —  Formic, a physical AI commercialization platform, raised $50 million in financing, CEO Saman Farid tells Axios exclusively.

Jay Peters / The Verge:
The Browser Company says it will shut down its Arc browser on December 22, launched in 2023, shifting attention to its AI-focused Dia browser, launched in 2025  —  New feature development for the innovative web browser ended last year.  Now The Browser Company is telling users to try Dia, Arc's replacement.

Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Microsoft says it is closing The Garage, which for 17 years gave employees worldwide space and tools for side projects and ran the company's Global Hackathon  —  Microsoft is winding down The Garage as a companywide program, ending a 17-year run for the effort that gave employees space …

Lauren Feiner / The Verge:
Filings: Nvidia, Anthropic, and OpenAI had their highest-spending lobbying quarter between July and September, spending $2.2M, $2.1M, and $1.5M, respectively  —  Collectively, they spent nearly $6 million around cybersecurity, child safety, and more. … It was a busy summer for AI lobbyists.

Rocket Drew / The Information:
Atlanta-based Tractian, which uses AI and sensors to predict machine failures and recommend maintenance plans, raised a $130M Series D at a $1.4B valuation  —  Tractian, a 7-year-old physical AI startup based in Atlanta, Georgia, has raised $130 million at a valuation of $1.4 billion …

Anzar Mehraj / Reuters:
METR says a pilot test of OpenAI's monitoring system found vulnerabilities, including an exploit that could have let AI agents hide hundreds of recent actions  —  AI safety research group METR said on Thursday a pilot exercise to stress-test OpenAI's internal monitoring system uncovered several …

Rohan Goswami / Semafor:
Sources: Elon Musk has invested ~$1B in Ellisons' Skydance; in 2022, David Ellison's father, Larry Ellison, invested $1B in Musk's deal to take Twitter private  —  Elon Musk has invested roughly $1 billion in Skydance, according to people familiar with the matter, providing …

Rebecca Torrence / Bloomberg:
Warp Sciences, founded by former OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil to speed up drug development using AI, emerges from stealth with $215M at an $865M post-money valuation  —  Kevin Weil, the former OpenAI executive who led the ChatGPT maker's AI-for-science efforts, is launching a new startup aimed …

Madison Mills / Axios:
Sources: US banks are restricting third-party AI agents from accessing customer accounts, after some agents appeared to act independently of users' instructions  —  Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents operating inside customer accounts, with some agents attempting …