AI and Tech News, 6 Oct 2026: Schneider-PTC, Foxconn, Claude Cuts

Ten big stories today. The highlights: Schneider Electric's record deal for PTC, Foxconn's AI-fueled quarter, and Meta and Microsoft scaling back their use of Claude.

1. Schneider Electric Strikes a $22.6B Deal to Buy PTC

The French group will pay $205 per share in cash, a 42% premium, for the US engineering-software maker. It's the largest deal the group has ever done, and it's expected to close by the third quarter of 2027.

2. AI Servers Push Foxconn's Q3 Revenue Up 47%

Third-quarter revenue hit NT$3.03 trillion ($95.4B), beating forecasts. September alone topped NT$1 trillion for the first time, as demand for AI servers kept climbing.

3. Meta and Microsoft Are Reportedly Pulling Back on Employees' Claude Use

The Information reported that Meta has about 30,000 Claude Code users, down from 60,000 earlier this year. Microsoft, meanwhile, cut a projected $1B-plus internal Anthropic spend by over a third.

4. AI Lab Leaders Testify Under Oath at the New York City Council

Executives from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta faced lawmakers. Former Google DeepMind researcher Alex Turner also warned that "we are racing to build and grow our own adversary."

5. ChatGPT Image Generation Will Test Visual Ads

In a test starting this month, US users creating images will see clearly labeled image ads. OpenAI says ads don't influence answers, and Plus, Pro and Enterprise users see none.

6. A Bullish Morgan Stanley Call Lifts SpaceX Shares About 7%

The stock posted its highest close since June after analysts called it cheap and reiterated a $300 target. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index put Elon Musk back above $1 trillion, at about $1.04 trillion.

7. Qualcomm and Huawei Agree to a Broad Patent Cross-License

The multi-year deal covers 5G, AI, computing and networking, and includes Qualcomm buying certain Huawei US patents. Nikkei reported that Qualcomm would become the net payer for the first time, though Qualcomm says that's incorrect and the terms are confidential.

8. Reflection AI Shows Off Beam, a 501B-Parameter Open-Weight Model

The US lab is pitching itself as an answer to Chinese open models. It says Beam rivals GLM 5.2 on reasoning with far less compute, and it'll ship under Apache 2.0 later this month.

9. TikTok Rolls Out an AI Shopping Assistant and One-Click Checkout

Announced at Advertising Week New York, the conversational assistant answers product questions. Buy Direct, meanwhile, lets viewers buy from brands straight from the For You feed.

10. As Memory Prices Rise, Nvidia Adds a $4,999 64GB DGX Spark

The cheaper desktop AI system arrives October 23 through partners such as Dell, HP and ASUS. It comes after the 128GB model's price climbed to $6,950 on surging memory costs.