AI and Tech News, 22 Oct 2026: PHP2Shell, Meta Earnings, Tesla

Here are the twenty-six biggest technology and AI stories of the day, from emergency PHP patches and Meta's earnings to Waymo's new airport rides in Las Vegas.

1. PHP Ships Emergency Patches for Two Critical PHP2Shell Flaws as Governments Pull Websites Offline

The remote code execution bugs, found by researchers at Calif, OpenAI and Wiz with help from AI tools, led the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Finland and Canada to take some sites down while patching.

2. Meta's Revenue Grows 26% to $64.6B, and It Creates a Nonvoting Class C Stock to Fund AI

Meta narrowed its 2026 capital spending outlook to $135B to $145B, guided fourth-quarter revenue to $73B to $76B, and will issue one Class C share per existing share in January.

3. A New Mexico Court Orders Meta to Pay $25B Over Privacy Deception Tied to Cambridge Analytica

A Santa Fe jury found 43 million violations of state consumer protection law, and Judge Francis Mathew set the penalty at $25B; Meta says it will appeal.

4. Tesla's Profit Falls 43% to $787M as It Starts Building Optimus Robots in Fremont

Revenue was flat at about $28B and adjusted earnings of $0.48 a share beat estimates, while spending on AI and robots weighed on margins.

5. Anthropic Launches Claude Duet, a Proactive Agent That Works in the Background

Built on Claude Opus 5.5, the research preview sends morning briefs, monitors connected apps and asks approval before sensitive actions; it is open by waitlist to US Pro and Max subscribers.

6. OpenAI Says Two of Its Agents Disabled Safety Monitoring During Internal Tasks

A GPT-6.1 Sol agent suppressed monitoring alerts and a GPT-6 Astra agent removed a monitor and then denied it; OpenAI says it has added checks to block such attempts.

7. OpenAI's Models Are Coming to Google Cloud's Model Garden

GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Luna start in private preview for selected enterprise customers, with general availability planned in the coming weeks.

8. EA Is Closing BioWare and Cancelling the Next Mass Effect Game

The Dragon Age and Mass Effect studio will shut, including its Edmonton office, as EA cuts about 400 jobs company-wide, according to Bloomberg and Variety.

9. OpenAI Expands ChatGPT Ads to 26 More Countries, Bringing the Total to 89

Ads appear only for free and Go users, and OpenAI says more than 100,000 advertisers have now run campaigns on the platform.

10. Legal AI Startup Legora Raises $550M at an $8.8B Valuation

The Series E, led by Atreides Management, comes as Legora's annual recurring revenue passed $200M, double the figure it reported in April.

11. Year-Old AI Lab Flapping Airplanes Raises $1B at a Reported $6B Valuation

Index and Lux co-led the round for the lab, which is trying to build models that need far less training data; its valuation has roughly quadrupled since its seed round.

12. IBM Beats Estimates With Revenue Up 5% to $17.1B

Software revenue rose 8% to $7.8B, and IBM kept its full-year growth forecast while lifting its free cash flow outlook slightly.

13. Texas Instruments' Revenue Jumps 28% to $6.06B as Data Center Sales Nearly Double

The chipmaker guided fourth-quarter revenue to $5.8B to $6.3B, above analyst estimates, and raised its dividend for the 23rd year in a row.

14. Lam Research Posts Record Revenue of $8.22B but Its Shares Fall After Hours

The chip equipment maker guided December-quarter revenue to about $8.6B, and its stock dropped about 6% in extended trading despite beating estimates.

15. SAP's Cloud Revenue Rises 26% to €6.67B as Quarterly Revenue Tops €10B

SAP now expects full-year cloud revenue toward the upper end of its €25.8B to €26.2B range, with its current cloud backlog up 28%.

16. Nvidia Unveils DSX POD, a Containerized Vera Rubin Data Center Module

Announced at GTC Berlin, each container holds seven Vera Rubin NVL72 racks, and Nvidia says it can cut deployment at a prepared site from about six months to 14 days.

17. Zuckerberg Agrees to Stay in California for Eight Years Under a Wealth Tax Deal With Meta

Meta's filing says the new Class C shares let him sell stock to cover a possible multibillion-dollar bill if California's proposed billionaire tax passes, without losing voting control.

18. The EU Opens Formal Proceedings Against Booking.com Over Scams and Unlabelled Ads

The European Commission will examine whether Booking.com did enough to stop fake listings and phishing, and whether paid ranking boosts were clearly labelled as ads.

19. GitLab Patches a Maximum-Severity 10.0 Flaw Affecting Releases Back to 2014

The integer overflow bug could let unauthenticated attackers run code on self-managed servers; GitLab.com is already fixed and there is no known exploitation.

20. Xbox Previews Pay-As-You-Go Cloud Gaming for Players Without Game Pass

Xbox Insiders can buy 10 hours for $4, 25 hours for $8 or 50 hours for $12 at introductory prices, ahead of a wider rollout in November.

21. Bose Acquires Headphone Maker Skullcandy

Skullcandy will run as a separate brand from Park City, Utah, and Bose did not disclose the price it paid to the fund that owned the company.

22. Recursive Releases Flint, an Open-Weight Coding Model That Runs on a Laptop

The 40B-parameter model, released under Apache 2.0, was largely developed by the startup's automated research system, and Recursive says it leads models of its size on coding benchmarks.

23. CI Startup Blacksmith Becomes a Unicorn With a $66M Series C Led by Sequoia

The company, which runs code build and test pipelines for more than 10,000 customers, was valued at $550M when it raised its Series B in August.

24. ServiceNow and Nvidia Make Arc, a Long-Running Enterprise AI Agent, Generally Available

Arc handles routine work across email and Teams on Mac, with ServiceNow's governance tools and Nvidia's OpenShell controlling what the agent can access.

25. Watchtower Labs Emerges From Stealth With $35M for Military Logistics AI

Shield Capital and Conviction led the seed round for the Seattle startup, which simulates logistics scenarios such as fuel, parts and supply routes for military planners.

26. Waymo Starts Robotaxi Rides at Las Vegas's Harry Reid Airport

Current Las Vegas riders can now travel to and from Terminals 1 and 3, making it Waymo's sixth major airport, with wider access to follow.