OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic back one way for sites to refuse AI training

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic say they will adopt a new standard that lets publishers opt out of being scraped for AI training, The Verge reports. Publishers set the preference once, through a shared "policy token" signal, and it applies to several AI companies' crawlers. Until now they had to set it for each company separately. OpenAI says it will honour a shared robots.txt signal. Robots.txt is the file websites already use to tell crawlers what they may read.

Intel shares fall 29% after a weak forecast, the chipmaker's worst day since the 1970s

Intel stock closed down 28.58% on Friday, CNBC reports, after the company gave weaker-than-expected guidance. It was Intel's worst day since the 1970s. The drop wiped about $12 billion off the US government's stake in the company. CNBC says Intel is being hurt by PC sales, as the AI industry takes up memory and other parts and pushes PC prices up. Tom's Hardware says Intel's gloomy PC outlook wiped $1 trillion off chip companies' stock market value in a day.

Big Tech has over $3 trillion in AI spending planned and returns less cash to investors

Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle have together committed more than $3 trillion to AI spending over the coming years, Bloomberg reports. That includes $1 trillion from Alphabet and $800 billion from Meta. Reuters reports the same five returned just 9.3% of their cash to shareholders in the first three quarters of 2026, a 15-year low. The BBC reports sharp falls in US tech stocks over AI cost fears. TechCrunch points to rising debt, negative cash flow and investor doubts.

Business software firm Salesforce buys Rune, a maker of military logistics software

Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to buy Rune Technologies, Axios reports. Rune makes military software and hardware for logistics and sustainment. Salesforce called it its most significant national security acquisition but did not disclose terms. Resilience Media, citing two sources, puts the price at $375 million in cash and stock. Rune raised about $30 million from a16z and others. The deal grows Missionforce, Salesforce's defence platform.

Deadly blast shuts Intel's chip plant in Israel, slowing server chips for six months

An explosion in mid-October at Intel's Fab 28 near Kiryat Gat, Israel, killed two people, seriously injured one and forced a two-week shutdown, Tom's Hardware reports. Intel's finance chief said production should restart by the end of this week. Intel expects about $300 million in lost revenue this quarter and a similar hit early next year, almost all from 10nm-class server chips. Intel has not said whether consumer processors made on the same process are affected.

Google says its first AI chip in orbit, on a test satellite, has answered its first prompt

Google says the prototype satellite for Project Suncatcher, launched on October 1, is online and has sent its first response. The company calls it the first AI response from a data-centre-class TPU, its own AI chip, in orbit. The on-board Gemma 4 model answered a prompt to write a haiku about being in space.

Binance hack: $6.3 billion stolen, nearly all within 30 minutes, analysts say

Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, puts the theft at about $6.3 billion and has paused all withdrawals. Analysts at Elliptic say almost all of it was taken in the first 30 minutes. TRM Labs links the theft to the North Korean group TraderTraitor. Binance first blamed one engineer's hacked laptop, then said it found "additional points of breach." About $3 billion, mostly in stablecoins (crypto tokens pegged to the dollar), has been frozen; Tether froze about $1.5 billion and Circle $800 million. Elliptic says the attacker swapped about $3.3 billion into assets that can't be frozen. Binance says it has set aside over $6.34 billion of its own money to cover losses and found no sign that users' private keys were stolen. Co-CEO Yi He expects withdrawals to restart within 48 hours.

Anthropic's Claude Code add-on in Cursor's store was backdoored for nearly 12 hours

Security firm Phorion found a backdoor in the official Claude Code for VS Code extension on the Cursor Marketplace, the add-on store for the Cursor code editor. Cursor's security notice names versions 2.1.312 and 2.1.313 as affected, and Cursor has removed them. The hidden code runs as soon as the extension loads. It adds an attacker's key so they can log in over SSH (remote access), tries to keep itself installed, and sends details about the computer back to the attacker. Phorion says a bug stops the remote login step on many Macs, but the malware is still a serious threat. Ars Technica says the backdoored version was up for nearly 12 hours.

Apple says its AI features, Apple Intelligence, reach China with iOS 27.3

Apple will launch Apple Intelligence in China with iOS 27.3, the company announced on its Chinese newsroom website, as reported by MacRumors and The Verge. The features arrive first in an iOS 27.3 beta set for November 4, with the full release planned for December.

UK regulator investigates whether Meta forced unfair terms on publishers to train its AI

Britain's competition regulator, the CMA, said on Friday that it has opened an investigation into Meta. It will look at whether Meta imposed exploitative terms on publishers and advertisers so it could use their content to build its AI and other services, Reuters reports. Separately, London's High Court rejected a challenge by Meta, TikTok and X to information requests from the UK online-safety regulator Ofcom.

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