AI and Tech News, 16 Oct 2026: TSMC, FTC Probe, Anthropic IPO

Here are the twenty-two biggest technology and AI stories of the day, from TSMC's record quarterly profit and new FTC demands to OpenAI and Anthropic to Tesla's long-delayed Roadster reveal.

1. TSMC Posts a Record Quarterly Profit of NT$763B, Up 68.7%

TSMC's third-quarter net income rose 68.7% from a year earlier to NT$763.06B, above analysts' estimates, and it forecast fourth-quarter revenue of $52.3B to $54.3B on strong AI chip demand.

2. The FTC Sends Civil Investigative Demands to OpenAI and Anthropic

The Federal Trade Commission sent both companies demands of more than 50 pages each, seeking records on AI security incidents, safeguards, marketing and privacy practices, Axios first reported.

3. Some Investors Discuss a $1.5 Trillion Valuation for Anthropic's IPO, Reuters Reports

Some investors are now discussing a valuation near $1.5 trillion for Anthropic's planned listing, down from roughly $2 trillion expected earlier, after its revenue growth slowed, according to Reuters sources.

4. Proofpoint Agrees to Buy Varonis for About $6.3B in Cash

Thoma Bravo-owned Proofpoint will pay $49.75 per share for data security firm Varonis, a deal expected to close in the first half of 2027 pending shareholder and regulatory approvals.

5. Tesla Unveils Its Next-Generation Roadster but Gives No Price

At a SpaceX site in Texas, Tesla showed the Roadster driving upside down using suction fans and doing a mid-air barrel roll, while Elon Musk pointed to 2028 for production.

6. Meta Releases Muse Spark Open, an 816B-Parameter Open-Weight Model

Meta published the weights of Muse Spark Open, a mixture-of-experts model with 42B active parameters and a 1M-token context window, under its own Muse Model License with limited commercial terms.

7. Citizen Lab Says Targeted Online Ads Were Used to Deliver Zero-Click Spyware

Citizen Lab linked ad-tech firm Discover-Tech to Candiru spyware infections on Al Jazeera computers, calling it the first public technical confirmation of mercenary spyware delivered through targeted ads.

8. Apple and Nvidia Each Pledged $25M to the White House Ballroom, the Washington Post Reports

Documents obtained by the Washington Post list Apple and Nvidia among the largest donors to the roughly $330M ballroom project, alongside Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta and other tech companies.

9. Amazon Launches the $75 Bee Frontier and $100 Bee Eclipse AI Recorders

Amazon's first new Bee devices since buying the startup record and summarize conversations; the Frontier wristband is on sale in the US now, while the phone-mounted Eclipse is coming soon.

10. Volvo Cars Expands Its Nvidia Partnership for Door-to-Door Automated Driving

Volvo will combine its safety systems with Nvidia's Hyperion platform and driving software, aiming to bring supervised automated driving on highways, city streets and in parking to its cars before 2030.

11. Cohere Signs a Letter of Intent to Buy AI Security Startup AISLE

Cohere plans to acquire AISLE, whose AI finds software vulnerabilities, and form a new Cohere Cyber unit led by AISLE CEO Ondrej Vlcek; terms were not disclosed and the deal is not final.

12. A Cyber Incident at BAE Systems Halts US Bankruptcy Court Notices

The federal judiciary said an incident at the BAE-run Bankruptcy Noticing Center stopped the production and delivery of notices for bankruptcy courts nationwide and took related websites offline.

13. Apple Invites Media to an October 28 Launch in Los Angeles, Bloomberg's Gurman Reports

Apple is inviting some media to an all-day product experience expected to feature touch-screen MacBook Pros, a new iPad mini and M6 Macs, though Apple has not announced the products.

14. Wipro's Quarterly Revenue Rises 9.1% While Profit Slips Slightly

Wipro's revenue grew 9.1% from a year earlier to about Rs 24,753 crore, profit edged down to about Rs 3,200 crore, and it guided for -1.5% to +0.5% sequential growth next quarter.

15. Google's Paid News AI Pilot Expands to More Than 400 Publications

Google added outlets including CNN, the Financial Times and US local publishers to the licensing pilot that supplies content for AI article overviews and audio briefings; financial terms were not disclosed.

16. Nvidia Releases Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, a 120B Open Multimodal Model

Nvidia's new vision-language model for AI agents comes with open weights under a license that allows commercial use, fine-tuning and redistribution, alongside smaller Nemotron models for edge devices.

17. Adobe and Nvidia Expand Their Partnership on AI Creative Tools

Adobe will optimize Photoshop, Premiere, Frame.io and other apps for Nvidia hardware, including the new RTX Spark chip, and build its Brand Concierge agent with Nvidia's Nemotron open models.

18. OpenAI Rolls Out GPT-Live-1.1 With New Voices in Six Languages

The updated voice model for ChatGPT, Codex and dots adds voices in French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean and Mexican Spanish, with more natural accents; API access is promised but undated.

19. Bluesky's Attie App Now Lets Anyone Build Websites and Games With AI

Announced at TechCrunch Disrupt, the expanded Attie lets users create sites, quizzes, polls and games tied to their AT Protocol identity, using their own AI model or open-weight options.

20. Black Forest Labs Opens the Weights of Its 5.6B FLUX 3 Image Klein Model

The image model runs on consumer GPUs with about 8GB of memory, and its license allows free commercial use only for individuals and businesses with under $5M in annual revenue.

21. The UAE Launches Jais 3, a Family of Open Arabic AI Models

MBZUAI's Institute of Foundation Models and Inception42 released six open language models from 0.9B to 375B parameters plus an Arabic speech recognition model, covering several regional dialects.

22. AI Agent Security Startup Opsin Raises $21M

Opsin's round, led by SYN Ventures and Race Capital, funds its platform for monitoring the AI agents employees build in tools such as Microsoft Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT Enterprise and Gemini.