Nvidia is reportedly discussing guaranteeing billions in debt financing for Nscale's planned Anthropic data center in West Virginia, a residual value guarantee under which Nvidia would step in, temporarily take over the facility and help find a new buyer and tenant if Nscale defaulted on construction payments, according to The Information. The arrangement would extend the chipmaker's support beyond its usual coverage of leases and chip purchases, as neocloud providers face investor pressure.
OpenAI has lowered its funding target to $20 billion, with a first close expected to be even lower, according to the Financial Times, which said the round will be led by a group of investors from the United Arab Emirates. The Wall Street Journal reported the company has secured $11 billion so far and that fundraising met a "tepid" response from some large investors.
Blackstone told investors it now expects Anthropic to receive a high "junk" credit rating following its IPO, in the double B range, reversing its earlier position that the company would reach investment grade before 2027, according to a Financial Times report. Anthropic and Blackstone both declined to comment; a junk rating would make it more difficult and costlier for the company to fund its compute spending.
On a third-quarter earnings call, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said third-party AI agents have generated several hundred orders in total since they began running, which he called a very low use case against the roughly 1 billion orders the platform handled in the quarter. Xu said agents may suit long consideration purchases, while simple tasks like ordering food tend to come directly to DoorDash; the company's MCP connector launched less than a month ago and is open only to a small number of early beta partners.
The FDA issued a letter in April proposing that Tavneos be withdrawn from the US market, citing reports of serious and sometimes fatal liver injury and arguing the drug now lacks substantial evidence that it works, after an investor lawsuit uncovered what the agency believes is evidence that ChemoCentryx employees manipulated data in the pivotal trial. Amgen, which acquired ChemoCentryx a year after approval, has said the totality of the evidence supports continued availability, and some patients and academic experts also consider it an important option.
A Verge writer bought a $50 touchscreen computer pendant from China, the Waveshare ESP32-S3 1.75C, which Meta itself suggests as a starting point for building a "Muse Gadget" that connects to its Muse AI cloud using open-source code and tokens. Meta's own build was limited — slow responses, no spoken replies, a single avatar and no smart home discovery — so the writer used Claude Code to add a conversation history page, an ElevenLabs voice, a remote camera shutter, more avatars and a Tamagotchi-style minigame.
OpenAI cut the target on its latest fundraising round and its expected valuation after a week of tech-stock selling, while rival Anthropic filed an S-1 ahead of an IPO expected next month showing rising revenue and positive first-half cash flow, according to the Financial Times and the filing. S&P Global cut its outlook on Meta to negative from stable, citing negative cash flow and uncertainty around capex plans, and said Meta's ability to monetize its AI investments is more limited than peers'; a Meta spokesperson said the company disagrees with the assessment.
Binance said Saturday it has covered up to 90% of the roughly $6.3 billion in tokens taken from its hot wallets in a theft announced Thursday, drawing on its SAFU fund, part of its futures insurance fund and corporate treasury, and said it will keep buying the remaining assets until all tokens are fully backed. The exchange said its next milestone is resuming withdrawals by Sunday subject to security checks; it is still unclear how the attack happened, and TRM Labs pointed to North Korean hackers as potential culprits, citing features matching earlier linked heists.
Crypto-tied organizations have contributed more than $200 million this cycle, outpacing online betting and data center groups in federal corporate political spending according to Public Citizen, with Fairshake and affiliated super PACs backing 33 House candidates and putting at least $1 million each behind six incumbents. The push follows the Clarity Act stalling in the Senate in September after Democrats argued it did too little to stop top officials profiting from crypto ventures, and comes as voters focus elsewhere — Rep. Steven Horsford, one of the Democrats receiving over $1 million, said the overwhelming issue right now is the affordability crisis.
Twenty-two super PACs that registered in the final 10 weeks before Election Day have each spent at least $1 million on congressional races, reporting roughly $637 million in independent expenditures by Oct. 29, according to a CNBC analysis of FEC filings. Large expenditures must be disclosed within 24 or 48 hours but donors are reported less often, and both parties are using the tactic; Northwestern law professor Michael Kang said the reason is almost entirely to avoid disclosure, even if temporarily, while the Campaign Legal Center's Saurav Ghosh said it is happening more because it works.
The Justice Department asked a judge to order Alaska officials to preserve and segregate ballots ranking retired teacher Dan J. Sullivan, saying it wants to investigate whether such rankings resulted from voter confusion with Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan. The U.S. attorney for Alaska, Michael Heyman, said the investigation has run for several months and that reports linking Mary Peltola's campaign to recruiting the second Sullivan prompted what he called a significant surge of law enforcement assets to the state; Peltola and the DSCC deny involvement.
Mary Peltola told voters she knew nothing about any candidate on the Alaska Senate ballot other than herself and the incumbent, and said she is not interested in tricking voters, after The New York Times reported that people connected to her campaign and senior DSCC aides tried to recruit retired teacher Dan J Sullivan as a spoiler. The Justice Department has opened parallel civil and criminal investigations and, according to CBS News, begun issuing subpoenas; Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy ordered a separate state inquiry, while attorney Scott Kendall told the BBC he was sceptical the described conduct broke the law.
NPR senior political editor Domenico Montanaro told listeners that national horse-race polls have been fairly accurate while slightly underestimating Republican turnout, and that state-level surveys this cycle have included junk polls and a couple of fake ones. He argued that margins of error make polls a fuzzy range rather than a precise number, and that the decline of local journalism explains weaker state polling.
Stylists and commentators told the BBC that congressional candidates are using personal style to signal authenticity, with stylist Joe Zee saying politicians dress both to look capable of office and connected to voters. Washington Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez favours work jackets and flannel, Alaska's Mary Peltola wears rugged outdoor gear echoing her fishing-boat past, and Iowa Republican Ashley Hinson has worn denim, bandanas and American-flag pumps.
A Turkish diplomatic source confirmed on Saturday that Ankara has nominated OSCE head Feridun Hadi Sinirlioğlu, a former foreign minister and UN envoy, to succeed Antonio Guterres as UN secretary-general. The nomination letter, dated Friday and signed by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, followed an inconclusive Security Council straw poll and a deadlock in the selection process.
Turkish prosecutors are seeking five years and four months in prison for BirGün reporter İsmail Arı over social media posts about an investment fund investigation, on charges of publicly disseminating misleading information and insult, according to the Stockholm Center for Freedom. The Ankara 32nd Criminal Court of First Instance accepted the indictment, kept Arı in pretrial detention and set a first hearing for November 19; prosecutors allege his posts suggested a link between former RTÜK chairman Ebubekir Şahin, who filed the complaint, and the investigation.
The number of women held in Turkish prisons has risen roughly 11.9 times over 21 years, from 1,802 in 2005 to 21,445 in 2026, according to World Prison Brief data cited in an interview with CİSST representative Özge Akyüz. Akyüz said the system is organized around men's needs and raised concerns about access to health care, activities and conditional release, including complaints that administrative and observation boards penalized women for non-participation caused by how prisons are run.
Journalist Deniz Zeyrek reported on T24 that aides to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev described his absence from Friday's Organization of Turkic States summit in Ankara as a response to Erdoğan skipping the October 15 CICA meeting in Baku, which Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan attended instead. The aides reportedly also sought Turkish action against seven Turkish citizens accused of targeting Azerbaijan, an account that differs from Azerbaijan's Report Information Agency, which cited prior commitments including a youth football tournament ceremony.
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