- Alembic, which offers AI-powered data analytics for marketers, raised a $145M Series B led by Prysm and Accenture at a $645M valuation, up from $49M in 2024 (Patrick Coffee/Wall Street Journal)
- Sources: Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab is in early talks to raise a new round of funding at a roughly $50B valuation, potentially rising to $55B-$60B (Bloomberg)
- Baidu unveils Ernie 5.0, an AI model to process and generate text, images, audio, and video, claiming it beats GPT-5-High and Gemini 2.5 Pro on some benchmarks (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)
- Anthropic open sources a method to score AI model political evenhandedness; Gemini 2.5 Pro got 97%, Grok 4 96%, Claude Opus 4.1 95%, GPT-5 89%, and Llama 4 66% (Ina Fried/Axios)
- Cursor says it has crossed $1B in annualized revenue, has 300+ employees, and its in-house models "generate more code than almost any other LLMs in the world" (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)
- Sources: Apple and Major League Soccer agree to make all MLS games available on Apple TV for no extra charge from 2026, ending the MLS Season Pass subscription (Paul Tenorio/The Athletic)
- Netflix is shifting its video game strategy to focus on popular titles like Pictionary, Boggle, and Tetris, playable on TVs with smartphones as controllers (Nicole Sperling/New York Times)
- Red Queen Bio, spun out of mRNA therapeutics company Helix Nano to focus on preventing AI-enabled bioweapons development, raised a $15M seed led by OpenAI (Deepa Seetharaman/Reuters)
- The UK CAT refuses Apple permission to appeal a ruling that it abused its dominance by charging unfairly high App Store fees; a lawyer calculates damages at £1B (Sam Tobin/Reuters)
- Apple unveils Mini Apps Partner Program, offering a reduced 15% commission on IAPs for mini apps, or "self-contained" experiences built with web tech like HTML5 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
- Ubisoft delays the publication of its H1 financial results and requests the shares be halted from trading until then; its stock is down 49% so far in 2025 (Bloomberg)
- Google says all NotebookLM users will get access to Deep Research in the service within a week; users get to choose between two research styles: fast or deep (Elissa Welle/The Verge)
- Amazon renames Project Kuiper to Amazon Leo, a nod to "low Earth orbit"; so far, Amazon has launched 150+ satellites as part of a 3,200 planned constellation (Kurt Schlosser/GeekWire)
- Meta overhauls Facebook Marketplace, adding new collaborative tools, expanded social features, an improved checkout experience, and Meta AI integrations (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
- Anthropic says China's state-sponsored hackers used its tools to automate 80% to 90% of a September hacking campaign that targeted corporations and governments (Wall Street Journal)