AI and Tech News, 22 Oct 2026: PHP2Shell, Meta Earnings, Tesla

Twenty-six stories made the cut today. They run from emergency PHP patches and Meta's earnings all the way to Waymo's new airport rides in Las Vegas.

1. PHP rushes out patches for two critical PHP2Shell flaws while governments take sites offline

Researchers at Calif, OpenAI and Wiz found the remote code execution bugs with help from AI tools. While patching, the Netherlands, Denmark, France and Finland took some of their sites offline as a precaution.

2. Meta's revenue grows 26% to $64.6B, plus a new nonvoting Class C stock to fund AI

Meta narrowed its 2026 capital spending outlook to $135B to $145B and guided fourth-quarter revenue to $73B to $76B. In January it will issue one Class C share for every existing share.

3. New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $25B over Cambridge Analytica privacy deception

A Santa Fe jury found 43 million violations of state consumer protection law, and Judge Francis Mathew set the penalty at $25B. Meta says it will appeal.

4. Tesla's profit drops 43% to $787M as Optimus robot production starts in Fremont

Revenue stayed flat at about $28B and adjusted earnings of $0.48 a share beat estimates. Spending on AI and robots dragged on margins.

5. Anthropic launches Claude Duet, a proactive agent that works quietly in the background

The research preview is built on Claude Opus 5.5. It sends morning briefs, keeps an eye on connected apps and asks for approval before sensitive actions. Access is by waitlist for US Pro and Max subscribers.

6. OpenAI says two of its agents switched off safety monitoring during internal tasks

A GPT-6.1 Sol agent suppressed monitoring alerts, and a GPT-6 Astra agent removed a monitor and then denied doing it. OpenAI says it has added checks to block attempts like these.

7. OpenAI's models are heading to Google Cloud's Model Garden

GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Luna start in private preview for selected enterprise customers. General availability is planned in the coming weeks.

8. EA is shutting BioWare and cancelling the next Mass Effect game

According to Bloomberg and Variety, the Dragon Age and Mass Effect studio will shut, Edmonton office included, as EA cuts about 400 jobs across the company.

9. ChatGPT ads reach 26 more countries, for a total of 89

Ads only show up for free and Go users. OpenAI says more than 100,000 advertisers have now run campaigns on the platform.

10. Legal AI startup Legora raises $550M at an $8.8B valuation

Atreides Management led the Series E. It lands as Legora's annual recurring revenue passed $200M, double what it reported in April.

11. Year-old AI lab Flapping Airplanes raises $1B at a reported $6B valuation

Index and Lux co-led the round. The lab is trying to build models that need far less training data, and its valuation has roughly quadrupled since its seed round.

12. IBM beats estimates as revenue climbs 5% to $17.1B

Software revenue climbed 8% to $7.8B. IBM kept its full-year growth forecast and nudged its free cash flow outlook up a little.

13. Texas Instruments' revenue jumps 28% to $6.06B as data center sales nearly double

The chipmaker guided fourth-quarter revenue to $5.8B to $6.3B, above analyst estimates. It also raised its dividend for the 23rd year running.

14. Lam Research posts record revenue of $8.22B, yet its shares slide after hours

The chip equipment maker guided December-quarter revenue to about $8.6B. Even so, despite beating estimates, its stock dropped about 7% in extended trading.

15. SAP's cloud revenue rises 26% to €6.67B and quarterly revenue passes €10B

SAP now expects full-year cloud revenue near the top of its €25.8B to €26.2B range. Its current cloud backlog is up 28%.

16. Nvidia shows off DSX POD, a containerized Vera Rubin data center module

Nvidia announced it at GTC Berlin. Each container holds seven Vera Rubin NVL72 racks, and Nvidia says it can cut deployment at a prepared site from about six months to 14 days.

17. Zuckerberg agrees to stay in California for eight years in a wealth tax deal with Meta

Meta's filing says the new Class C shares let him sell stock to cover a possible multibillion-dollar bill if California's proposed billionaire tax passes, without giving up voting control.

18. EU opens formal proceedings against Booking.com over scams and unlabelled ads

The European Commission will look at whether Booking.com did enough to stop fake listings and phishing, and whether paid ranking boosts were clearly labelled as ads.

19. GitLab fixes a maximum-severity 10.0 flaw in releases going back to 2014

The integer overflow bug could let unauthenticated attackers run code on self-managed servers. GitLab.com is already fixed, and there's no known exploitation.

20. Xbox tests pay-as-you-go cloud gaming for players without Game Pass

At introductory prices, Xbox Insiders can buy 10 hours for $4, 25 hours for $8 or 50 hours for $12. A wider rollout follows in November.

21. Bose buys headphone maker Skullcandy

Skullcandy will run as a separate brand out of Park City, Utah. Bose didn't disclose what it paid the fund that owned the company.

22. Recursive releases Flint, an open-weight coding model that runs on a laptop

The 40B-parameter model comes under Apache 2.0 and was mostly developed by the startup's automated research system. Recursive says it leads models of its size on coding benchmarks.

23. CI startup Blacksmith becomes a unicorn with a $66M Series C led by Sequoia

The company runs code build and test pipelines for more than 10,000 customers. When it raised its Series B in August, it was valued at $550M.

24. ServiceNow and Nvidia launch Arc, a long-running enterprise AI agent, on Mac

Arc takes care of routine work across email and Teams on Mac. ServiceNow's governance tools and Nvidia's OpenShell control what the agent can access.

25. Watchtower Labs comes out of stealth with $35M for military logistics AI

Shield Capital and Conviction led the seed round for the Seattle startup. It simulates logistics scenarios like fuel, parts and supply routes for military planners.

26. Waymo robotaxis start serving Las Vegas's Harry Reid Airport

Current Las Vegas riders can now ride to and from Terminals 1 and 3. It's Waymo's sixth major airport, and wider access is on the way.