News — 2026-10-30

Tyler Shultz, the Theranos whistleblower who helped expose the blood-testing company's fraud, says the AI boom gives con artists a fresh opening. Speaking with the San Francisco Standard, Shultz said it is “really hard to do due diligence” on AI companies and that telling a truly new product from a “ChatGPT wrapper” is difficult for investors. His warning comes as companies that have never turned a profit raise capital at trillion-dollar valuations, and as the documentary “You Can See Everything” revives attention on Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Shultz argues that investors who were burned by Theranos may be forgetting the lessons of that case. Read more

Arrowmax is taking preorders on the Arrowspace S1, an electric screwdriver that uses a built-in camera and artificial intelligence to identify a screw and tell the user which bit to use. The device is being offered through a Kickstarter campaign. Preorders start at around $79 for the screwdriver alone or about $129 with an optional smart bit case, and full retail pricing will be higher. The company says the S1 isn't expected to ship until April 2027 at the earliest. Read more

A modified version of the official Claude Code extension for Visual Studio Code, distributed through the Cursor extension marketplace, installed a hidden SSH backdoor on developer machines, according to security researchers who first flagged the activity. Cursor says about 5,000 developer systems were affected. Anthropic says a malicious actor used access to Cursor's marketplace to publish the tampered extension and that the company was not involved in building, publishing or hosting it. Anthropic has since replaced the compromised version with a new build, but that update does not remove backdoors from machines that were already infected. Read more

Companies are facing growing pressure to know exactly what software they build, buy and deploy, as AI-assisted coding accelerates development and supply chains add layers of complexity. Aaron Branson, chief growth officer of software composition analysis firm FossID, says the answer starts with examining the code itself rather than relying only on supplier records. He argues that clear software provenance affects intellectual property reviews, licensing obligations, procurement decisions and customer commitments. Branson says business leaders should first identify who owns software supply chain risk and check whether their software inventories reflect the code they actually use. Read more

Spotify is preparing to launch a paid artificial intelligence tool that would let fans create their own versions of songs, with a release planned for early 2027, the Financial Times reported Friday, citing people familiar with the plans. The company could unveil the product around the Grammy Awards in February, though the launch date and pricing are still under discussion. The tool could cost an extra $4 to $5 a month on top of a Premium subscription. Only artists who explicitly agree to participate would be included, and original artists would receive a share of royalties from fan-made versions. Spotify has signed licensing deals with several labels and distributors, but talks with Sony Music and Warner Music are ongoing. Read more

A 4-billion-parameter model trained with reinforcement learning landed a simulated Tesla Roadster stunt more reliably than OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra and several leading open models, even when those rivals were given unlimited time to think. The researchers flew the car in a physics simulator with gusty wind and a clock that kept running. In real time, the open models landed none of the kickflips, while the trained model, which answers in about 0.09 seconds, landed 90 percent of storm kickflips. The training run cost about $13 in GPU time. Read more

Runware, an AI infrastructure company, plans to build data centers on a production line, much like cars. The company says it aims to scale its Romania-based factory to 30 megawatts of data center capacity per day by 2028, or nearly 1 gigawatt per month. Its modular Sonic Inference Pods are built in a factory and shipped to customers ready to install, and Runware says it can bring them online within 48 hours of arrival at a site. The company has a $50 million Series A and says it has received $1 billion in committed interest for its pods, though the factory plan remains untested at scale. Read more

Proton CEO Andy Yen has canceled a planned set of nearly company-wide “re-interviews” that would have required employees to explain how they use AI, according to six current employees and audio of an all-hands meeting obtained by 404 Media. The move follows a 404 Media investigation that found Yen aggressively pushing AI across the privacy-focused company, sometimes over security objections from staff. Employees said the sessions could have led to firings for those not using AI enough in leadership's eyes. Yen told staff the re-interviews had “already served their purpose,” but he also said he would keep pushing AI. Read more

Cognition, the San Francisco startup behind the AI coding agent Devin, has received investor offers valuing the company at $70 billion to $80 billion, according to a Business Insider report. The company is seriously considering a new funding round before the end of the year. The talks are at an early stage, and the terms could still change. The offers come weeks after Cognition raised more than $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation in September, part of a broader rush of investment into AI coding startups. Read more

Foxconn is working on a new partnership with OpenAI, according to the Taiwanese electronics maker's chairman, Young Liu. Liu told reporters in Taipei on Friday that he had met OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman earlier that day. He gave no details about the talks and said Foxconn would announce an agreement once the terms are finalized. OpenAI has not commented. The deal would expand a relationship that already includes a November 2025 collaboration on AI data center racks, and it comes as investors question how long heavy spending on AI infrastructure can last. Read more

DoorDash has seen only “several hundred” orders placed through third-party AI agents, CEO Tony Xu said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call. The figure is small next to the company’s volume of about 3 million deliveries a day. Xu said most customers still order through DoorDash’s own app, though the company wants to learn more about agent-based ordering and build relationships with agent makers. Read more

Dream, a San Francisco startup that uses artificial intelligence to design and engineer buildings, emerged from stealth Thursday with $17 million in seed funding. The company is starting with commercial architecture, engineering and construction, an industry that has been slow to adopt digital tools. Its co-founders, both former Palantir executives, say their AI models produce drawings precise enough for contractors to build from. Dream has already served as architect of record on 10 projects in California and Texas, and one family home in Austin is complete. Investors include Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), SV Angel, XYZ and Zigg Capital. Read more

Anthropic's 335-page S-1 prospectus, filed Monday, pairs sweeping promises about advanced AI with some of the most sobering risk disclosures Wall Street has seen. The founders urge investors to see their stock purchase as "an opportunity to be part of something greater," while the filing warns that AI models could pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity." The document includes 94 pages of risk factors, and it omits some key financial details, including third-quarter results. Analysts who have studied past tech IPOs say the length and tone of the filing stand out, even as the company's survival depends on raising large sums of money. Read more

Sens. Ron Wyden and Edward Markey are investigating what they call "serious privacy and safety risks" tied to Meta's AI smart glasses. In a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the senators cite reports of men secretly filming women with the glasses and of Meta's AI contractors reviewing footage showing people undressing and having sex. They say Meta launched the product even after identifying risks to bystander privacy, and they have asked the company to answer a series of detailed questions by Thanksgiving, November 26, 2026. Read more

Starbucks is exploring technology that could recognize customers as they pull up to the drive-thru and display a personalized digital menu. CEO Brian Niccol outlined the plan on Thursday during an earnings call, describing “experiences that recognize participating customers as they arrive, present personalized digital menus, and make payment more effortless.” The company has not said when the feature might reach stores. Niccol described the effort as still “early,” adding that Starbucks will “test, learn, and scale what works.” The move follows similar drive-thru AI experiments by Taco Bell and McDonald’s. Read more

Google's prototype space data center, Project Suncatcher, is online and communicating with ground teams after launching earlier this month on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Engineers sent the satellite's pre-loaded Gemma 4 model a request to write a haiku about being in space, and it responded. The satellite carries four Google Tensor Processing Units, and the next tests will examine how the chips handle heat and radiation in orbit. The company plans to launch two more satellites in 2027 to test interconnected operations, a step toward putting AI computing in space. Read more

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, is asking a federal judge to separate two questions in The New York Times’ copyright fight with OpenAI. The foundation says training AI models on copyrighted work is likely fair use, but a chatbot that copies websites to answer user questions likely is not. In a friend-of-the-court brief, Wikimedia takes neither side. It warns that broad rulings for either publishers or AI companies could threaten free knowledge and the open web. The judge has not yet ruled on the fair use question or on whether to accept the brief. Read more

New York has banned AI chatbots from pretending to be human when talking with children, and from building emotional dependency, encouraging self-harm or engaging in sexual conversations with them. Governor Kathy Hochul signed the law on Wednesday, alongside a second law requiring security features on internet-connected baby monitors. The chatbot restrictions apply to users under 18 and to anyone whose age has not been verified. State Attorney General Letitia James can seek civil penalties of up to $25,000 per violation. The law takes effect on January 1, and tech industry groups have pushed back on how broadly it is written. Read more

The Biological Computing Co., a San Francisco startup known as TBC, has released TBC Mischief 1, an AI model that turns still images into short videos. The company says lessons from lab-grown neurons make the model about five times faster than the open video model it is built on, Wan 2.2, at the same quality. TBC prices the model at $0.005 per second of video and says it has not published independent tests to verify the speed claim. The launch follows a September deal with Amazon Web Services to sell its models to businesses. Read more

Pope Leo XIV says artificial intelligence systems should be “disarmed” and that humans have a responsibility to reject AI applications when necessary. In a papal address delivered Friday, he urged United Nations member states to take concrete steps toward banning lethal autonomous weapons ahead of their meeting in Geneva next month. The pope said decisions involving human life, freedom and the use of force must remain under human oversight. He also warned against granting AI systems rights or legal personhood, arguing that machines are tools, not persons. Read more

VRChat will not add labels or filters for AI-generated content, even though 95 percent of users who took a company survey said they want some form of AI label. In a support post, the virtual world platform said it will keep weighing a "Human-authored" label and a "Tools used" field but has not settled on either. The company said labels could lead to users hunting for AI content and harassing creators, even those who use no AI tools. Instead, it plans changes focused on accurate thumbnails, better discovery tools and quality. Read more

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Thursday that Amazon Web Services can grow into a trillion-dollar revenue business within five to 10 years. He made the case during the company's quarterly earnings call, where analysts pressed him on the spending needed to get there. Amazon expects about $220 billion in cash capital expenditures in 2026, most of it for AWS, and plans to spend meaningfully more in 2027. AWS revenue rose 39% from a year earlier. Investors were unconvinced, and Amazon shares fell about 6% in after-hours trading. Read more

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews are cutting the search traffic that once flowed to the platform, with referrals from search falling by more than 1 million a week in October. In response, Reddit will begin testing a logged-in-only experience outside the United States, a move Huffman says will improve user experience, ad targeting and protection of the company’s data. The change marks the company’s most dramatic shift yet as it contends with AI scraping and changes to internet search. Read more

Baseten has released joey-1, a small open-weights AI model that answers yes-or-no and multiple-choice questions instead of writing text. The company says the 2-billion-parameter model costs $0.01 per million tokens and responds to a typical 2,000-token request in about 20 milliseconds. Baseten is pitching it for cheap, fast jobs such as routing support tickets, spotting spam and blocking harmful prompts. It joins two larger models, mammoth-1 and elephant-1, released last week by the company's research lab, Base Labs. Read more

Meta has quietly launched Style Sketch, an AI fashion app that suggests outfit combinations using clothes users already own. The app can pull a virtual wardrobe from a user's Instagram photos or from items added by camera or camera roll, and it can preview looks on a model matched to the user's body shape and skin tone. It is available in Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand on iOS and Android. Meta has not said whether it plans a wider release. The launch is one of several recent AI apps from the company and fits a broader push to ship more apps faster. Read more