AI and Tech News, 20 Oct 2026: DeepSeek Ban, Tenstorrent, OpenAI

Here are the twenty-six biggest technology and AI stories of the day, from a US order removing DeepSeek from federal systems and Tenstorrent's $1.5B round to Inception's Mercury 3 model.

1. DHS Orders Federal Civilian Agencies to Remove DeepSeek Products

The exclusion and removal order, issued under a 2018 supply chain security law, also covers third-party products built on DeepSeek's models, though national security systems fall outside its scope.

2. Tenstorrent Raises $1.5B in a Series E at a $6.2B Valuation

The Jim Keller-led AI chip company says the round, co-led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, will fund large-scale deployment of its Galaxy servers and its chip IP licensing business.

3. OpenAI Seeks to Close a $30B Round Before Anthropic's IPO, Reuters Reports

Sources told Reuters the round could value OpenAI at more than $1.4T and that SoftBank and MGX are in talks, as both labs court the same investors ahead of Anthropic's expected mid-November listing.

4. Nscale Is in Talks on a Second $45B Compute Deal With Anthropic, Bloomberg Reports

The deal would cover another 460MW building at Nscale's West Virginia campus using Nvidia Vera Rubin chips, though the talks are not final and both companies declined to comment.

5. Apple Announces a 'Pro and Tell' Event for October 28 in Los Angeles

The invitation does not name any products, but reports expect new Macs and a new iPad mini at the event, which starts at 10 a.m. Pacific time.

6. The Nasdaq Rises About 1.1% as Chip Stocks Snap an Eight-Session Losing Streak

Nvidia, AMD and Intel led the chip rebound after the Nasdaq's worst week since June, while the S&P 500 gained about 0.4% and the Dow ended slightly lower ahead of Tesla and Meta earnings.

7. Waymo Plans to Grow Its Fleet to 20,000 Vehicles by the End of 2027, Semafor Reports

Sources say Waymo aims to double its roughly 4,000 vehicles to 8,000 by the end of this year, funded by $5B it borrowed this month; Waymo has not confirmed the targets.

8. Meta Details Prometheus, Its Gigawatt-Scale Supercluster Heading to About 1 Million GPUs

Meta says the first phase of the Ohio cluster, spread across interconnected buildings with hundreds of thousands of GPUs, is complete and was used to train its Muse models.

9. A Chinese-Speaking Hacker Used AI Agents to Breach More Than 100 Companies, Reuters Reports

Research from NorForge shows the agents, run on an open-source platform called Cairn, targeted more than 1,200 websites, and Reuters identified victims including Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins.

10. Microsoft Unveils Security Tools That Treat AI Agents as Potential Insider Threats

The private preview features give each agent a continuously updated risk score and can remove its write access, require human approval or shut it down, with wider release planned for Ignite in November.

11. Eric Schmidt Owns About 1% of Anthropic From Its 2021 Series A, Bloomberg Reports

The former Google CEO's early stake sets him up for a large windfall from Anthropic's planned IPO, though it is unclear whether he has sold any shares since.

12. Musk Pledges to Give One SpaceX Share to Every Child in America in 2027

Musk made the pledge on X after Anthropic announced its public benefit fund, but he has not explained who qualifies or how shares would be held for minors.

13. Korean AI Cloud Firm Elice Falls as Much as 32% in Its Kosdaq Debut

Shares dropped to 61,400 won from an IPO price of 90,500 won, even though the 201B won offering was the Kosdaq's biggest this year and heavily oversubscribed.

14. Amazon Launches TorchNeuron, an Open-Source PyTorch Backend for Trainium, in Beta

TorchNeuron lets existing PyTorch code run on Amazon's Trainium chips by changing the device setting rather than rewriting it, as Amazon tries to chip away at Nvidia's software lead.

15. DeepSeek Is Working With Huawei on Future AI Chip Designs, The Information Reports

People familiar with the matter say Huawei engineers are taking DeepSeek's requests into account for chips coming next year and beyond, as China pushes for alternatives to Nvidia.

16. Netflix Fires Film Chief Dan Lin Ahead of Its Q3 Earnings

Variety reports Lin, who ran Netflix Film for nearly three years, was let go over the weekend amid a wider leadership shake-up; Netflix declined to comment on his departure.

17. AI Assistant Startup Town Raises $108M at a $1B Valuation

The Series B was co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures, and Town will use it to extend its AI assistants from individual workers to whole teams.

18. Foxconn Buys Half of Mitsubishi Electric's Car Parts Unit for About $727M

The roughly 115B yen deal makes Mitsubishi Electric Mobility an equal joint venture aimed at building a Japan-made EV platform, with closing expected in 2027 after approvals.

19. Four Major European Carriers Explore a Joint Satellite-to-Phone Bid to Rival Starlink

Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica and Vodafone signed a letter of intent to assess a joint bid for European mobile satellite spectrum, with a satellite partner yet to be chosen.

20. The FTC Clears Publicis's $2.2B LiveRamp Deal With Equal-Access Conditions

The consent order requires Publicis to keep LiveRamp's data connectivity tools open to all clients on neutral terms and to wall off LiveRamp's customer data from its own agencies.

21. Dream Labs, Founded by Former Nvidia Robotics Leads, Raises a $90M Seed Round

The round was led by B Capital and Kindred Ventures, and the startup opened a public API for Dream-1, a robot foundation model trained on human video of everyday tasks.

22. doubleAI Launches Maxwell, a Model That Speeds Up Code While It Runs

The Tel Aviv startup led by Amnon Shashua has raised about $220M, spent roughly half on Nvidia chips, and plans to charge customers a share of the compute costs it saves.

23. Modal Plans to Run AI Agent Workloads on Nvidia's Vera CPUs, Reuters Reports

Modal says early tests showed up to twice the throughput of comparable x86 hardware under heavy load, though it will keep Intel and AMD chips and route jobs to the best fit.

24. Ramp Applies for a National Trust Bank Charter With the OCC

The proposed Ramp National Trust Bank would offer fiduciary investment management and digital asset custody, and Ramp says it would not take deposits or make commercial loans.

25. DHS Appointees Asked CISA to Secretly Obtain and Hack a Voting Machine, ProPublica Reports

Two former officials said CISA was told not to alert the vendor about any flaws found, but the request was never carried out, partly because staff able to do the work had been cut.

26. Inception Releases Mercury 3, a Diffusion Language Model Running at Over 1,000 Tokens per Second

Inception says its largest model yet has a 1M-token context window and is available through its own API, OpenRouter and Baseten, though its benchmark claims are the company's own.