AI and Tech News, 16 Oct 2026: TSMC, FTC Probe, Anthropic IPO

Twenty-two stories today. TSMC posted a record quarterly profit, the FTC sent new demands to OpenAI and Anthropic, and Tesla finally showed off its long-delayed Roadster. Here's the rundown.

1. TSMC's quarterly profit hits a record NT$763B, up 68.7%

TSMC's third-quarter net income jumped 68.7% from a year earlier to NT$763.06B, beating analysts' estimates. On the back of strong AI chip demand, it forecast fourth-quarter revenue of $52.3B to $54.3B.

2. FTC sends civil investigative demands to OpenAI and Anthropic

Axios first reported that the Federal Trade Commission sent both companies demands running to more than 50 pages each. The FTC wants records on AI security incidents, safeguards, marketing and privacy practices.

3. Some investors float a $1.5 trillion valuation for Anthropic's IPO, Reuters reports

According to Reuters sources, some investors are now talking about a valuation near $1.5 trillion for Anthropic's planned listing. That's down from the roughly $2 trillion expected earlier, after its revenue growth slowed.

4. Proofpoint agrees to buy Varonis for about $6.3B in cash

Thoma Bravo-owned Proofpoint will pay $49.75 per share for data security firm Varonis. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending shareholder and regulatory approvals.

5. Tesla shows its next-generation Roadster, but no price yet

At a SpaceX site in Texas, Tesla showed the Roadster driving upside down with suction fans and pulling off a mid-air barrel roll. Elon Musk pointed to 2028 for production.

6. Meta releases Muse Spark Open, an 816B-parameter open-weight model

Meta published the weights of Muse Spark Open, a mixture-of-experts model with 42B active parameters and a 1M-token context window. It comes under Meta's own Muse Model License, which has limited commercial terms.

7. Citizen Lab says targeted online ads delivered zero-click spyware

Citizen Lab tied ad-tech firm Discover-Tech to Candiru spyware infections on Al Jazeera computers. It called this the first public technical confirmation of mercenary spyware delivered through targeted ads.

8. Apple and Nvidia each gave $25M to the White House ballroom, says the Washington Post

Documents obtained by the Washington Post put Apple and Nvidia among the biggest donors to the White House ballroom project, alongside the Adelson family and Charles Ergen. The Post counted about $333M in private donations so far.

9. Amazon launches two AI recorders: the $75 Bee Frontier and $100 Bee Eclipse

These are Amazon's first new Bee devices since it bought the startup, and they record and summarize conversations. The Frontier wristband is on sale in the US now, and the phone-mounted Eclipse is coming soon.

10. Volvo Cars widens its Nvidia partnership for door-to-door automated driving

Volvo will pair its safety systems with Nvidia's Hyperion platform and driving software. The goal is supervised automated driving on highways, on city streets and in parking, in its cars before 2030.

11. Cohere signs a letter of intent to buy AI security startup AISLE

Cohere plans to acquire AISLE, whose AI finds software vulnerabilities, and set up a new Cohere Cyber unit led by AISLE CEO Ondrej Vlcek. Terms weren't disclosed, and the deal isn't final.

12. Cyber incident at BAE Systems stops US bankruptcy court notices

The federal judiciary said an incident at the BAE-run Bankruptcy Noticing Center stopped notices being produced and delivered for bankruptcy courts nationwide, and knocked related websites offline.

13. Apple invites media to an October 28 launch in Los Angeles, Bloomberg's Gurman reports

Apple is inviting some media to an all-day product experience. It's expected to feature touch-screen MacBook Pros, a new iPad mini and M6 Macs, though Apple hasn't announced any of these products.

14. Wipro's quarterly revenue rises 9.1% as profit dips slightly

Wipro's revenue grew 9.1% from a year earlier to about Rs 24,753 crore, while profit dipped to about Rs 3,200 crore. For next quarter it guided for -1.5% to +0.5% sequential growth.

15. Google's paid news AI pilot grows to more than 400 publications

Google brought outlets like CNN, the Financial Times and US local publishers into the licensing pilot that feeds content into AI article overviews and audio briefings. Financial terms weren't disclosed.

16. Nvidia releases Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, a 120B open multimodal model

Nvidia's new vision-language model for AI agents ships with open weights under a license that allows commercial use, fine-tuning and redistribution. Smaller Nemotron models for edge devices came alongside it.

17. Adobe and Nvidia team up further on AI creative tools

Adobe will optimize Photoshop, Premiere, Frame.io and other apps for Nvidia hardware, including the new RTX Spark chip. It will also build its Brand Concierge agent with Nvidia's Nemotron open models.

18. OpenAI rolls out GPT-Live-1.1 with new voices in six languages

The updated voice model for ChatGPT, Codex and dots adds voices in French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean and Mexican Spanish, with more natural accents. API access is promised, but there's no date yet.

19. Bluesky's Attie app now lets anyone build websites and games with AI

Announced at TechCrunch Disrupt, the expanded Attie lets people make sites, quizzes, polls and games tied to their AT Protocol identity, using their own AI model or open-weight options.

20. Black Forest Labs opens the weights of its 5.6B FLUX 3 Image Klein model

The image model runs on consumer GPUs with about 8GB of memory. Its license only allows free commercial use for individuals and businesses with under $5M in annual revenue.

21. UAE launches Jais 3, a family of open Arabic AI models

MBZUAI's Institute of Foundation Models and Inception42 released six open language models, from 0.9B to 375B parameters, plus an Arabic speech recognition model. They cover several regional dialects.

22. AI agent security startup Opsin raises $21M

SYN Ventures and Race Capital led the round. The money goes into Opsin's platform for monitoring the AI agents employees build in tools like Microsoft Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT Enterprise and Gemini.