Musk pledges one SpaceX share per US child, US bans DeepSeek from federal agencies

TechmemeOct 20, 2026

Mon, Oct 19

Tomorrow's events: Money20/20 USA (day 3); Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference (day 2); Earnings: SPCX, NFLX; Nvidia GTC Berlin; Masters of Scale Summit

top news

Elon Musk says “I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America” in 2027, a gift worth ~$10.5B, after Anthropic committed 5% of its shares to APBF (Kai Nicol-Schwarz / CNBC)

@elonmusk: Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many.

@realdonaldtrump: A BIG THANK YOU to our legendary friend, @ElonMusk , for his incredible generosity in giving SpaceX Stock to millions of American children through TRUMP ACCOUNTS! This is exactly what was envisioned when we created TRUMP ACCOUNTS — Bringing together the GREAT PRIVATE SECTOR, Elon and so many more, to invest in our children, by far our greatest and most important asset, and give every American Child a piece of the American Dream. Thank you Elon! President DONALD J. TRUMP

@rmac18: Also worth noting that Musk has a history of making philanthropic pledges and not following through. In 2018, he pledged to “fund fixing the water in any house in Flint that has water contamination above FDA levels.” He did not.

The US DHS orders all federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek's tech from their IT systems and prohibits future procurement of its products and services (Connor Hart / Wall Street Journal)

@zackkorman: The order banning DeepSeek in the US government is absurd. Why ban US-hosted DeepSeek? “The models themselves may contain malware”. The proof? The DeepSeek iOS app has vulnerabilities.

@firstadopter: Anthropic just got an IPO present from the Feds WSJ:

@sentomcotton: This is the right move by @DHSgov. The U.S. government shouldn't rely on Communist Chinese AI models, including DeepSeek.

SPONSOR The best sales leaders aren't job hunting. Here's how to reach them without months of cold outreach. — Our team came from Box, Square, and Brex, so we already know the GTM leaders worth meeting.

Apple announces a “Pro and tell” event on October 28 at 10am PT in LA, where its first touchscreen MacBook, a 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6, and more are expected (Chance Miller / 9to5Mac)

@gregjoz: Can't wait to pro and tell next week.

@markgurman: Obviously this is a finger touching a display and drawing on it.

@rsgnl: “Pro and tell” tagline *seems* to rule out the “MacBook Ultra” name. RIP to “iPhone Ultra” and “MacBook Ultra” rumors 👋

Researcher: a Chinese-speaking hacker used AI agents to target 1,200+ websites and breach 100+ entities, like Deere and SharkNinja, spending ~$5,000 in tokens (Raphael Satter / Reuters)

Sources: Nscale is in talks for a second deal with Anthropic worth ~$45B to deliver 460MW of computing power at its West Virginia campus using Vera Rubin chips (Bloomberg)

Sources: US investigators pursuing ShinyHunters, which stole FBI data, identified executives at two ransomware negotiation firms who had unusually close ties (Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security)

Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, and Vodafone agree to explore a joint bid to offer “direct-to-device” satellite service in Europe, challenging Starlink (Financial Times)

Sources: Waymo aims to expand its fleet to 8K by the end of this year, up from 4K today, and to 20K by the end of 2027, after raising $5B in debt this month (Ellen DiMauro / Semafor)

Sources: OpenAI is racing to secure investor commitments before Anthropic's expected IPO in mid-Nov. and aims to raise ~$30B; the round could value it at $1.4T+ (Reuters)

artificial intelligence

MiniMax launches M3.1 Flash, saying it delivers “a generational leap” in agentic tasks, coding, computer use, and cybersecurity, with weights due October 23 (MiniMax)

Source: Anthropic is preparing a model with better intuition and reasoning that can discern underlying intentions and is better at thinking outside of the box (Stephanie Palazzolo / The Information)

A look at Anthropic's opaque, five-member Long-Term Benefit Trust, where members own no Anthropic equity but hold enormous sway by appointing most of its board (Theo Francis / Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Eric Schmidt, who owns ~1% of Anthropic after investing tens of millions in its Series A, is poised to have one of the largest windfalls from its IPO (Bloomberg)

Google DeepMind says four Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft without any human help in 27 hours and 14 minutes, costing $1,620 at Argon's planned 2027 price (Matthias Bastian / The Decoder)

Cloudflare debuts Clairic, a System One-class extraction model it says processes unstructured data faster, more cheaply, and more accurately than normal LLMs (Cloudflare)

Filing: US prosecutors say OpenAI suspect Abdulrahman Alfozan maintained frequent WhatsApp contact in 2025 and 2026 with an unnamed Saudi Royal Family member (Dan Mangan / CNBC)

Character.AI's Chapter 11 court filings indicate a two-part deal with Disney to transfer talent and tech, shielding Disney from Character.AI's legal liabilities (Maddy Varner / Wired)

AI's ability to forecast extreme weather faces a major test in the coming months amid 2026's historic El Niño, as some scientists question the tech's accuracy (Financial Times)

How Democrats, who polls predict will flip at least one chamber of Congress in the midterm elections, are preparing to aggressively scrutinize the AI industry (Lauren Feiner / The Verge)

China's GDP grew 4.5% YoY in Q3, up from Q2's three-year-low growth rate of 4.3% but below Q1's 5%, as AI-driven exports helped offset weak domestic spending (Osmond Chia / BBC)

Survey of 94 economists: 54% expect AI's gains to spread across the G20 over the next decade, not just the US and China; 32 see African countries falling behind (Financial Times)

Survey: the chatbot gender adoption gap among US adults has closed since 2024, though men are more likely to use them daily; ChatGPT has identical usage rates (Pew Research Center)

Europe's three biggest industrial companies are cashing in on the AI boom, as Schneider and Siemens expand further into software, while ABB focuses on equipment (Aaron Kirchfeld / Financial Times)

Developers and vibe coders are using AI tools like Claude Code to get rid of sponsored ads on their smart TVs, disable tracking features, and more (Sarah Perez / TechCrunch)

AI Processors

Tel Aviv-based doubleAI releases a code execution model for improving GPU and CPU performance; doubleAI raised $220M, using ~50% to buy 1,000 Nvidia B300 chips (Belle Lin / Wall Street Journal)

Q&A with Nvidia's Vera team on agentic AI driving CPU demands and forcing CPU design back to prioritizing single-threaded performance over core counts, and more (Wccftech)

AI infrastructure startup Modal says it plans to start using Nvidia's Vera CPUs for the first time for hosting agents, alongside its current Intel and AMD chips (Stephen Nellis / Reuters)

Amazon launches TorchNeuron, an open-source framework that lets developers run PyTorch code on Amazon's Trainium chips with no rewriting needed, in public beta (Todd Bishop / GeekWire)

Sources: DeepSeek and Huawei are collaborating on future AI chip designs; DeepSeek plans to start using Ascend 950DT for pre-training as soon as 2026's end (The Information)

data centers

Analysis: companies are set for a massive acceleration of 50GW+ in data center capacity additions in 2027; 24GW+ across 40 campuses are in the advanced stages (Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros / SemiAnalysis)

Intel unveils its GPU D-series for data centers, featuring up to 480GB of LPDDR5X memory, an unusually large capacity to support demanding inference workloads (Efosa Udinmwen / TechRadar)

Meta details Prometheus, its gigawatt-scale supercluster in Ohio, which will have ~1M GPUs at full scale and was used to train its Muse foundational models (Engineering at Meta)

How the data center industry courts kids amid a backlash: 11+ firms and groups hosting field trips since 2025, flag kits and cards for first graders, and more (Caroline Haskins / Wired)

payment services

Sam Altman's World debuts a World ID verification suite for banks, bundling tools for verifying human and agent identities, its first industry-specific offering (Zack Abrams / The Block)

Ramp says it applied to the US OCC for a trust bank charter that, if approved, would allow it to offer fiduciary investment management and digital asset custody (Paige Smith / Bloomberg)

Stripe Link data shows agentic transactions increased by 38x and volume of payments by 20x in September, with retail leading in both, and a ~$100 average spend (Alex Konrad / Upstarts Media)

infosec

Microsoft debuts new security tools in Microsoft 365 E7 and its Project Perception system that treat AI agents as potential insider threats via risk assessments (Todd Bishop / GeekWire)

Sources: DHS officials asked CISA to hack a voting machine to report vulnerabilities to the White House without telling the vendor; the request wasn't acted on (ProPublica)

CyberSN: US cybersecurity job postings fell 26.4% YoY to a four-year low of 235,786 roles from January to September; AI security engineer demand soared 268.3% (Kevin Townsend / SecurityWeek)

cryptocurrency

Allium: stablecoin payments rose 45% YoY to $482B YTD through September 30, with transactions up 71% to 1.04B, while circulating supply grew just 0.4% to ~$305B (Krisztian Sandor / CoinDesk)

A profile of Alona Katz, the chief of Brooklyn DA's Virtual Currency Unit, who recently led an operation that seized and disrupted 240+ crypto fraud websites (Bloomberg)

M&A

The US FTC clears Publicis' $2.2B LiveRamp acquisition, subject to a consent decree requiring equal access to LiveRamp's data connectivity tools for all clients (Leah Nylen / Bloomberg)

Foxconn agrees to acquire a 50% stake in Mitsubishi's automotive components unit for ~$727M; Mitsubishi will provide autonomous tech for Foxconn's EV platforms (Reed Stevenson / Bloomberg)

funding deals

AI chip startup Tenstorrent raised a $1.5B Series E led by Trace Capital and Innovation X at a $6.2B valuation, up from $2.6B after raising $700M in 2024 (Bloomberg)

Dream Labs, which offers an API for its Dream-1 robot foundation model trained on human videos, raised a $90M seed led by B Capital and Kindred Ventures (John Koetsier / Forbes)

Abby Care, which runs an AI-powered platform that trains and certifies family members as paid caregivers, raised an $82M Series C led by Transformation Capital (Allie Garfinkle / Fortune)

Stand Insurance, which uses digital twins of homes to price wildfire risk and insures $10B+ of property, raised a $70M Series C at a $1B valuation led by Saga (Nick Lichtenberg / Fortune)

Town, which develops enterprise AI assistants, raised a $108M Series B at a $1B valuation, after announcing a $55M Series A in June (Dominic-Madori Davis / TechCrunch)

Tolan, an AI assistant focused on users that are not tech-savvy, raised $30M from USV, Khosla Ventures, and Homebrew, and says 70% of its users are women (Alex Konrad / Upstarts Media)

Prism Data, which provides credit-scoring data and analytics that help lenders assess borrowers, raised a $20M Series A led by Story Ventures (Ryan Lawler / Axios)

more news

Analysis: 11K+ accounts on X, Bluesky, Discord, Telegram, and others made nearly 25K posts to unmask a Cornell sexual assault accuser, after she named seven men (New York Times)

SCOTUS rejects an appeal by BMG, Sony Music, UMG, and Warner Music, upholding a decision that copyright termination rights apply globally, not just in the US (Blake Brittain / Reuters)

SPONSOR Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Sources: Ted Sarandos complained for months of a lack of new hit shows at Netflix and US watch time being down; it just fired its film chief and content chief (Wall Street Journal)

Analysis: 795 accounts funded by ADI Predictstreet's own fee-collecting wallet drove 99% of the FIFA-partnered prediction market's activity since late August (Wall Street Journal)

Vinted sees an influx of listings suspected of containing stolen goods following widespread French riots, which hit Sephora, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, and others (Yazhou Sun / Bloomberg)

This email was sent to [subscriber]
Images not loading in Outlook? Add us to your address book!
Techmeme 530 Divisadero St. #175 San Francisco, CA 94117 USA