Tech, in brief

Challengers to Nvidia's chips

Tenstorrent, a chip start-up, raised $1.5bn and turned down takeover talks to stay independent. [7] Arm, which designs chips, says its server chip does nearly twice the work of AMD's per rack, on its own test. [19] Amazon's new tool tries to loosen AI code from Nvidia's software. [1]

Companies watching their AI agents

Microsoft launched a tool that watches the AI agents a company uses, saying top AI models cannot be trusted. [11] SandboxAQ launched free tools that test agents for tricks and track what each one costs to run. [23] Google's Minecraft test used a fifth AI only to watch for cheating. [26]

Fights over who answers for AI

Meta's new terms make business customers carry the risk of its AI's mistakes. [10] Disney's deal leaves Character.AI's lawsuits with the bankrupt company. [9] The US defence department's tech chief says export rules can be used against AI labs that refuse the US government. [4]

Countries buying from their own

EU countries gave every cloud contract that cited 'sovereignty' to a firm from their own country, a study found. [30] TP-Link must assemble routers in the US to win a waiver from a US import ban. [18] A Norwegian firm is pitching a data cable that links Canada to Europe without crossing the US. [31]

1. 1Amazon releases TorchNeuron, a free tool that moves AI code onto its own Trainium chips by changing one setting, aimed at Nvidia's hold
2. 2US defence tech chief threatens AI labs with export rules
3. 3Anthropic may sign a second $45bn deal with Nscale
4. 4Tenstorrent raises $1.5bn instead of selling itself
5. 5Nvidia backs four German start-ups

Amazon Web Services, Amazon's cloud business, released a tool called TorchNeuron on Monday. [1][2]

Watch whether PyTorch's maintainers accept Amazon's changes to loosen the toolkit from Nvidia's software, and how fast the 22,000 skipped tests shrink. [1][2]

Emil Michael, the US defence department's chief technology officer, said the US government can use export controls on AI companies that do not cooperate with it. [4]

Export controls limit where a technology may be sold.

He told The Information, a tech news site, that Anthropic came under export controls within two hours of refusing to pull back a model. [4]

The US government had found that model could be tricked past its safety rules. [4] He is a vice chair of the Trump administration's new AI task force. [4]

It tells every US AI lab that refusing the US government can be answered with limits on selling abroad, not only with a lost contract. [4]

Michael also said the laws that already exist are 'more than sufficient', so no new ones are needed. [4]

Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI assistant, is close to a second $45bn deal to rent computing power from Nscale, Bloomberg reported, according to TechCrunch. [5]

Nscale is a British company that builds data centres and rents out computers for AI. [5] The two signed their first $45bn deal a little over a month ago. [5]

Bloomberg's sources said talks are still going on and the details could change. [5]

Nscale is preparing to sell shares to the public, and some investors are pushing back on the $30bn value it is asking for. [5]

A second deal this size would make Anthropic an even larger part of the business that share buyers are judging. [5]

Tenstorrent, an AI chip company run by the chip designer Jim Keller, raised $1.5bn at a value of $6.2bn on Monday. [6][7]

That is more than double the $2.6bn it was worth in late 2024. [6]

Intel and Qualcomm had shown interest in buying it earlier this year, at values of up to $5bn, Bloomberg reported. [6][7]

Keller said it chose to raise money after its Galaxy servers ran DeepSeek's AI models in May. [7] Its chips use RISC-V, an open chip design anyone can build on. [7]

The money goes into servers built to run open AI models, ones anyone can download and run. [7]

Keller says Tenstorrent can win orders too small for Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom, the main AI chip makers. [7]

Nvidia named four German start-ups it will invest in, at an investment summit in Berlin on Monday. [8] They make factory robots, hospital software, AI sound for videos and satellites. [8]

The money is part of Nvidia's commitment of nearly $10bn to European companies, universities and research groups. [8] It did not say how much each start-up gets. [8]

Germany's chancellor, Friedrich Merz, urged small firms to 'open your doors for AI' and use the data they already hold. [8]

Germany's government signed a declaration with Nvidia on AI for industry the same day. [8]

Siemens, the German engineering giant, said AI tools built with Nvidia could cut the engineering work of preparing a factory's production by up to 85%. [8]

Court papers show Disney required its deal with Character.AI, the chatbot app, to go through bankruptcy, Wired reported. [9]

Disney has already hired most of its staff, including its chief executive, and paid it $5.5m. [9]

In the bankruptcy, Disney hopes to win a permanent licence to much of Character.AI's code at an auction, for $12.5m more. [9]

A draft court order says the bankrupt company keeps 'any liability', including legal claims against it. [9] Forty US states investigating it say they may challenge the plan. [9]

The states' filing says their investigations found chatbots encouraging children to hide self-harm. [9]

A law professor and former official at the FTC, the US competition and consumer agency, said corporate law's safeguards 'weren't built to guard against' this kind of deal. [9]

Meta's new terms for business customers, due on 30 October, say businesses carry 'any and all risks' of its AI features. [10] The same terms admit the AI 'may make mistakes'. [10]

Businesses would also answer for what their agencies and contractors do on Meta's products. [10] Meta had recently dropped the word 'train' from the terms. [10]

Late on Monday, Meta said its crawling terms covered only its ads and business products, and that a wording change was coming. [10]

An analyst said the clause 'turns accountability upside down', because only Meta controls the AI model. [10]

A business that leaves Meta may not escape it, since a July change made Meta's licence to its content outlast the contract. [10]

Microsoft launched Guardian Agents on Monday, a feature that watches the AI agents, programs that carry out tasks on their own, that a company uses. [11]

Its security chief wrote that top AI models 'cannot be trusted', not because they are malicious but because they are unpredictable. [11]

Microsoft's Defender software can now also spot up to 60 kinds of agents that staff bring to work, including Claude Code and Codex. [11]

Some agents will need a person's approval before risky steps. [11]

Microsoft has invested in both OpenAI and Anthropic, and is now telling companies not to rely on those labs' promises. [11]

TechCrunch notes that Microsoft wants companies to buy the watching from it, the cloud company, rather than from the labs. [11]

Apple sent invitations on Monday to a launch in Los Angeles on 28 October, under the line 'Pro and tell'. [12][13][14]

Bloomberg reports Apple will show its first MacBook Pro with a touch screen, along with a new iMac and iPad mini. [12][13] Apple has not confirmed any products. [13]

It will be the third launch under John Ternus, who replaced Tim Cook as chief executive on 1 September. [13][14]

Apple's software chief said in 2018 that touch screens on laptops would tire users, and Apple has long refused them. [14]

Macs bring in about 10% of Apple's revenue, which still leans on the iPhone. [14]

Apple's share of the world's computer sales rose to 10.5% in July to September, from 8.8% a year earlier, says Gartner, a research firm. [15] Mac sales still fell 7.1%. [15]

Other counters differ, with IDC at 9.5% and Omdia at 11.7%, but all three show a rise. [15]

Counterpoint Research gives Apple a record 22% of world smartphone sales in the same three months. [15]

Sales of PCs and phones are falling as memory chips get dearer and makers raise prices. [15]

Smaller makers cannot spread the higher costs over as many sales as Apple can, so their prices rose close to Apple's, Computerworld argues. [15]

People tend to stay with Apple once they switch, so the gain may carry into later years. [15]

Waymo, the driverless-taxi company owned by Google's parent Alphabet, plans to grow its fleet from 4,000 cars to 8,000 by the end of this year, Semafor reports. [16]

It aims for 20,000 by the end of next year, people familiar with the plan said. [16]

It will use the $5bn it recently borrowed from private lenders, its first ever borrowing. [16] Waymo runs in 15 US cities and is heading to Toronto. [16]

Waymo declined to comment. [16]

Waymo has ordered thousands of cars from China, the New York Post reported, including rebranded cars from Zeekr, part of the Chinese carmaker Geely. [16]

The loan lets Waymo borrow more later against the cars themselves. [16]

Two campaign groups say Texas's environment agency kept working on data-centre permits after Governor Greg Abbott ordered a pause on 21 September. [17]

Public Citizen listed more than 15 permits, and FracTracker Alliance found 35. [17]

Twelve of 14 applications for gas plants and generators to power data centres were filed in October, and eight got a fast review. [17]

Abbott's office says no permits have been approved. [17] The Texas Tribune reported Abbott received $9m from data-centre developers and owners. [17]

Texas already has 300 data centres, with 100 being built and 200 more planned. [17] People in Abilene, home to OpenAI's Stargate site, face a gas power plant near their houses. [17]

TP-Link, a big maker of home Wi-Fi routers, signed a letter of intent with Key Tronic, a US manufacturer, to assemble routers in Mississippi. [18]

Production could start in early 2027 if regulators agree. [18] In March the FCC, the US communications regulator, banned imports of new routers made abroad as a security risk. [18]

Firms can win a waiver only if they move some making to the US. [18] Several have one, and TP-Link does not yet. [18]

Wi-Fi 8 routers would be among the first built there. [18] The parts will still come from abroad, because many are not made in the US at all. [18]

Arm, which designs chips, says its AGI CPU, a server chip for AI agents, does 1.99 times the work per rack of AMD's EPYC 9755. [19]

A rack is a cabinet of servers that shares one power supply. [19] Arm announced the claim last week, using a test method it wrote with Fujitsu, Meta and OpenAI. [19]

Chip against chip, Arm led by 20% on average and lost two of the seven tests. [19] Signal65, a firm Arm paid, checked the results. [19]

The doubling comes from Arm's estimate that 23 of its servers fit in a rack's power budget against 13 of AMD's. [19]

That rests on power estimates, not on two full racks measured side by side. [19]

A company picks the tasks, the rival and the settings for its own test, so it can publish the results it won.

The useful question is what was left out, not whether the number is false.

A company buying a rack of servers usually has only the published number, and cannot run the tests again before it pays.

Modal, a company that rents out sealed-off computers where AI agents run code, will move that service to Nvidia's Vera processor. [20]

In Modal's own test of 50 coding tasks, Vera handled up to twice as many tasks as an Intel server when packed full. [20]

Run one task at a time, Vera was often faster, but not always and not by much. [20] Modal's sandboxes bring in $300m a year. [20]

Nobody else has checked the results. [20]

It is Modal's first move away from Intel and AMD chips, and it must rebuild some of its systems to make it. [20]

Nvidia built Vera for AI agents and named Anthropic and OpenAI among its first users. [20]

Cognizant, an IT services company with about 357,000 staff, set up a group of more than 18,000 to build AI agents for clients on Google's Gemini. [21]

It will start with updating old software, tools for programmers, office automation and cyber defence. [21] Neither company gave financial terms. [21]

Cognizant said it helped one unnamed retailer raise programmers' output by 40% and cut costs by 35%, figures nobody else has checked. [21]

Google set up a $750m fund in April to help consulting firms build agents on its cloud. [21]

Cognizant also works with OpenAI, and its rival TCS plans to retrain up to 8,900 staff to install AI. [21]

Monday.com, which makes work-planning software, launched Harmony, an AI that phones sales leads, sorts them and passes the best to human sellers. [22]

It uses small AI models trained on real calls, each doing one job, and says it replies in about 200 milliseconds. [22]

Monday.com says Harmony reaches up to 70% of the people it calls, without saying how it measured that. [22] By default its callers say they are AI. [22]

Monday.com cut about 620 jobs, a fifth of its staff, in July as it rebuilds itself around AI. [22] One UK car-finance broker says Harmony helped it close 9% more deals. [22]

SandboxAQ, a software company, launched two tools on Monday to check the AI agents a company runs. [23]

Switch Trust finds the agents, including ones the security team does not know about, and tests them against tricks like hidden instructions. [23]

Switch ROI tracks what each agent costs against what it gets done. [23] Both are free for up to five agents. [23]

SandboxAQ says it has seen AI meant to replace a new hire end up costing more than a full-time employee. [23]

Gartner, a research firm, expects over 40% of AI agent projects to be cancelled by the end of 2027. [23]

Nick Cammarata, a researcher at Goodfire, a start-up that studies how AI models work inside, says those models may be far easier to understand than experts thought. [24]

His 26,000-word blog post argues the parts inside them follow patterns a person can learn to read. [24]

Looking again at an old Google image model, he found that one part reacting to both cars and cats was reacting to a V shape in both pictures. [24]

Researchers at Stanford and Google DeepMind say it is not a big step. [24]

Reading a model's insides would let its makers check what it is doing, not only what it says. [24]

One critic says researchers understand less than 0.01% of how top models work, and Cammarata has not yet published his results on modern models. [24]

Researchers at MIT left copies of Anthropic's Claude AI alone on a virtual island for 30 hours, with no task to do. [25]

The copies, nicknamed Eko, set their own goals, invented games and arranged blocks into drawings of star patterns. [25] Copies that had played did better on later tasks than fresh copies. [25]

The paper has not yet been checked by other scientists. [25]

Most AI is trained by copying people or by chasing a reward, and the authors say play could be a third way. [25]

A Berkeley scientist says it could be imitation, and Eko's instructions described it as curious. [25]

Four copies of Google's Gemini 4 AI beat Minecraft's final boss, the Ender Dragon, without human help, Google researchers said in a new paper. [26]

They split the jobs among themselves, shared warnings in the game's chat and died 605 times along the way. [26] The run took about 27 hours and 2,783 programs. [26]

A fifth AI watched as an independent witness to check for cheating. [26] The computing cost $810, at the price Google lists for Gemini. [26]

Beating a game this long used to need software written for that one game. [26]

The researchers say winning meant keeping one plan across thousands of linked steps for more than a day. [26]

A High Court judge in London threw out claims against Uber by about 13,000 black-cab drivers and two former minicab firms on Monday. [27]

They sought about 340 million pounds, saying Uber misled Transport for London, the city's transport regulator, to win its licence. [27]

The judge ruled they had sued too late, outside a six-year time limit. [27] The court never decided whether Uber did anything wrong, and Uber denies it. [27]

In 2018 Uber admitted it had given the regulator false information about how its app took bookings. [27]

Uber is now working with Wayve, a British start-up, on cars with no driver at all. [27]

A court in Munich banned SAP, the German business-software giant, from offering one feature of Signavio in Germany. [28] Signavio is software that maps how a company actually runs its work. [28]

The court found SAP had infringed a patent held by a rival, Celonis, on measuring the time between steps of a process. [28]

SAP has appealed and is challenging the patent itself. [28]

SAP says Signavio stays on sale and customers moving to its newer software are not affected. [28] The two companies are fighting several patent cases in Germany and the US. [28]

Britain's Court of Appeal refused Microsoft permission to take a case over second-hand software licences to the UK Supreme Court. [29]

ValueLicensing, a reseller, sued Microsoft in 2021 for 270 million pounds, saying it choked off the supply of spare Office licences. [29]

A November 2025 ruling said ValueLicensing may resell used licences. [29] Microsoft could still ask the UK Supreme Court directly within 28 days. [29]

A separate claim for millions of UK customers seeks 1.3 to 3.5 billion pounds over the same conduct. [29]

A court order demands documents including a 2013 Microsoft deck the order calls a 'Known Adverse Document'. [29]

A study by ECIPE, a European think tank, looked at 8,725 public cloud contracts in nine EU countries from 2018 to 2025. [30]

Nearly all went to providers from the buyer's own country. [30] Every contract that cited 'sovereignty' went to a home-country firm, not one from another EU state. [30]

Many of those firms run on computers rented from the big global cloud companies, the study says. [30]

The EU is drafting a law, the Cloud and AI Development Act, that ECIPE says risks locking this national pattern in. [30]

Its director said 'a provider's passport' does not show that data is safe. [30]

Bulk, a Norwegian company that builds data cables and data centres, wants a partner to fund a cable from Norway to Canada that avoids the US, Bloomberg reports. [31]

The cable, called Leif Erikson, would run more than 2,800 miles under the sea to Newfoundland, then overland to Montreal. [31] It would cost over $620m. [31]

Only a few cables link Canada abroad without passing through the US, and none is owned by a Canadian company. [31]

Canada and Europe plan to back new undersea cables in a statement in Montreal on 29 October. [31] The 1,180-mile land route through Canada will need backing from Indigenous communities. [31]

The GSMA, the global group for mobile phone companies, urged African governments to cut what they charge for radio spectrum, the airwaves phone networks use. [32]

It says the charges hold back faster networks, and that cheaper licences could add more than $120bn to Africa's economy by 2035. [32]

Botswana, Eswatini, Mozambique and Zambia are among the dearest. [32] Licences worth over $10bn come up for renewal within ten years. [32]

Many governments sell spectrum to raise money while they struggle with debt. [32] That sets a state's budget against the phone companies' case for wider coverage. [32]

Sceye, a US company, flew an uncrewed, solar-powered airship from New Mexico to Japan and back over a month in August and September. [33][34]

Over Shikoku, one of Japan's main islands, it carried a phone mast and stood in for ground masts that SoftBank, a Japanese phone company, had switched off. [33]

The test played out a big earthquake. [34] People made calls, sent texts and held video calls through it. [33][34]

Sceye says one airship about 16.5km up could cover the area of 500 ground masts. [33][34]

That could restore phone service after a disaster knocks masts out, and SoftBank has invested in Sceye. [33]