AI and Tech News, 20 Oct 2026: DeepSeek Ban, Tenstorrent, OpenAI

Twenty-six big tech and AI stories today. The headliners: a US order pulling DeepSeek out of federal systems, Tenstorrent's $1.5B round and Inception's Mercury 3 model. Here's the rundown.

1. DHS Tells Federal Civilian Agencies to Pull DeepSeek Products

The exclusion and removal order was issued under a 2018 supply chain security law. It also covers third-party products built on DeepSeek's models. National security systems, though, fall outside its scope.

2. Tenstorrent Lands a $1.5B Series E at a $6.2B Valuation

The Jim Keller-led AI chip company says Trace Capital and Innovation X co-led the round. The money goes toward large-scale deployment of its Galaxy servers and its chip IP licensing business.

3. Reuters: OpenAI Wants to Close a $30B Round Before Anthropic's IPO

Sources told Reuters the round could value OpenAI at more than $1.4T, and that SoftBank and MGX are in talks. Both labs are courting the same investors ahead of Anthropic's expected mid-November listing.

4. Bloomberg: Nscale and Anthropic Are Discussing a Second $45B Compute Deal

This one would cover another 460MW building at Nscale's West Virginia campus, running on Nvidia Vera Rubin chips. The talks aren't final, and both companies declined to comment.

5. Apple Sets a 'Pro and Tell' Event for October 28 in Los Angeles

The invite doesn't name any products. Reports expect new Macs and a new iPad mini, though. Things kick off at 10 a.m. Pacific time.

6. Chip Stocks End an Eight-Session Losing Streak as the Nasdaq Gains About 1.1%

Nvidia, AMD and Intel led the chip rebound after the Nasdaq's worst week since June. The S&P 500 gained about 0.4%, and the Dow ended slightly lower ahead of Tesla and Meta earnings.

7. Semafor: Waymo Wants 20,000 Vehicles on the Road by the End of 2027

Sources say Waymo wants to double its roughly 4,000 vehicles to 8,000 by the end of this year, paid for with $5B it borrowed this month. Waymo hasn't confirmed the targets.

8. Meta Opens Up About Prometheus, a Gigawatt-Scale Supercluster Heading to About 1 Million GPUs

Meta says the first phase of the Ohio cluster is done. It's spread across interconnected buildings with hundreds of thousands of GPUs, and it was used to train the Muse models.

9. Reuters: A Chinese-Speaking Hacker Used AI Agents to Break Into More Than 100 Companies

Research from NorForge shows the agents ran on an open-source platform called Cairn and targeted more than 1,200 websites. Reuters identified victims including Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins.

10. New Microsoft Security Tools Treat AI Agents as Possible Insider Threats

The features are in private preview. Each agent gets a continuously updated risk score, and the tools can remove its write access, require human approval or shut it down. A wider release is planned for Ignite in November.

11. Bloomberg: Eric Schmidt Holds About 1% of Anthropic From Its 2021 Series A

The former Google CEO's early stake sets him up for a large windfall from Anthropic's planned IPO. It's unclear whether he's sold any shares since.

12. Musk Promises One SpaceX Share to Every Child in America in 2027

Musk made the pledge on X after Anthropic announced its public benefit fund. He hasn't explained who qualifies or how shares would be held for minors.

13. Korean AI Cloud Firm Elice Falls 32% on Its Kosdaq Debut

Shares closed at 61,500 won, down about 32% from an IPO price of 90,500 won. That's despite the 201B won offering being the Kosdaq's biggest this year and heavily oversubscribed.

14. Amazon Puts TorchNeuron, an Open-Source PyTorch Backend for Trainium, Into Beta

With TorchNeuron, existing PyTorch code can run on Amazon's Trainium chips by changing the device setting, no rewrite needed. It's part of Amazon's push to chip away at Nvidia's software lead.

15. The Information: DeepSeek and Huawei Are Working Together on Future AI Chip Designs

People familiar with the matter say Huawei engineers are taking DeepSeek's requests into account for chips coming next year and beyond. It all fits China's push for alternatives to Nvidia.

16. Variety: Netflix Parts Ways With Film Chief Dan Lin Ahead of Q3 Earnings

Per Variety, Lin ran Netflix Film for nearly three years and was let go over the weekend in a wider leadership shake-up. Netflix declined to comment on his departure.

17. Town, an AI Assistant Startup, Raises $108M at a $1B Valuation

Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures co-led the Series B. Town will use it to take its AI assistants beyond individual workers to whole teams.

18. Foxconn Takes Half of Mitsubishi Electric's Car Parts Unit for About $727M

The roughly 115B yen deal turns Mitsubishi Electric Mobility into an equal joint venture. The aim is a Japan-made EV platform, and closing is expected in 2027 after approvals.

19. Four Big European Carriers Weigh a Joint Satellite-to-Phone Bid to Take On Starlink

Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica and Vodafone signed a letter of intent to assess a joint bid for European mobile satellite spectrum. They haven't picked a satellite partner yet.

20. The FTC Clears Publicis's $2.2B LiveRamp Deal, Subject to Equal-Access Conditions

Under a proposed consent order, now open for public comment, Publicis has to keep LiveRamp's data connectivity tools open to all clients on neutral terms. It also has to wall off LiveRamp's customer data from its own agencies.

21. Former Nvidia Robotics Leads Raise a $90M Seed Round for Dream Labs

B Capital and Kindred Ventures led the round. The startup also opened a public API for Dream-1, a robot foundation model trained on human video of everyday tasks.

22. doubleAI's New Model, Maxwell, Speeds Up Code While It Runs

The Tel Aviv startup, led by Amnon Shashua, has raised about $220M and spent roughly half of it on Nvidia chips. Its pricing idea: charge customers a share of the compute costs it saves them.

23. Reuters: Modal Will Run AI Agent Workloads on Nvidia's Vera CPUs

Modal says early tests showed up to twice the throughput of comparable x86 hardware under heavy load. It isn't dropping Intel and AMD chips, though. It'll keep them and route each job to the best fit.

24. Ramp Files With the OCC for a National Trust Bank Charter

The proposed Ramp National Trust Bank would offer fiduciary investment management and digital asset custody. Ramp says it wouldn't take deposits or make commercial loans.

25. ProPublica: DHS Appointees Asked CISA to Secretly Obtain and Hack a Voting Machine

Two former officials said CISA was told not to alert the vendor about any flaws it found. The request was never carried out, partly because the staff able to do the work had been cut.

26. Inception's Mercury 3 Is a Diffusion Language Model Running at Over 1,000 Tokens per Second

Inception says its largest model yet has a 1M-token context window. It's available through its own API, OpenRouter and Baseten. Just keep in mind the benchmark claims are the company's own.