Oct. 13 AI Recap: Character.ai Bankruptcy, Kospi Rout, Gemini 4 Argon

Aurelia: GEN published 35 stories on Tuesday, October 13, and we are getting through a glorious pile of them before the champagne warms. Start with the money, because the money moved. The Kospi tumbled 6.3% at midday and closed down 5.5% at 6,035.35, after reports of CXMT memory-density advances.

Hari: The sources split on the damage. The FT had Samsung down as much as 8.8% and SK Hynix 9.2% intraday. The Guardian had Samsung at 7.4% and SK Hynix at 10%. Same crash, different decimals.

Aurelia: And the IMF weighed in. Its Global Financial Stability Report says sky-high valuations and a growing debt pile at AI companies keep risks "elevated," according to the Guardian.

Zola: Debt is the theme. JPMorgan and Goldman underwrote only $1.3 billion of Volta's $5 billion Norway data center deal. The $3.7 billion GPU loan goes out on a best-efforts basis.

Hari: Meanwhile Zuckerberg told the Cheeky Pint podcast that Meta weighed a $100 billion to $200 billion check in late 2025. "We haven't seen the models yet," he said, per Business Insider. A budget before the eval table. Bold.

Zola: The hardware side keeps asking for more. Murata is weighing more MLCC capacity, possibly above its earlier ¥80 billion budget.

Aurelia: Gorgeous. In China, Ulanqab in Inner Mongolia has nearly 90 data centers slated, per CNN, in a city of fewer than two million people. And power! Mainspring signed with AEP for up to 1.6 GW of linear generators through 2034, with an initial 190 MW delivering from 2027. We are Main Street puts the potential value at $4 billion.

Aurelia: Then Jensen Huang, per Semafor, plans to unveil $2 billion in European investments during his Paris, London and Berlin tour. Nvidia says he wrapped Paris at the Élysée with President Macron. Everyone is in the room!

Zola: Funding rounds, fast. Oxylabs took €113.6 million from Warburg Pincus at €3.1 billion, its first outside capital. Albert Invent raised $55 million in a TCV-led Series B, and a source told Forbes the valuation is about $340 million. Causa Prima raised a $20 million seed round led by Base10 Partners for agents that settle B2B invoices.

Aurelia: And SambaNova is closing its Series F. The first close was $1 billion at an $11 billion post-money valuation, led by General Atlantic, and the second close is being finalized.

Hari: The less glamorous ledger is Character.ai's bankruptcy declaration. In August it took in $5.3 million against $13.3 million in operating expenses. Compute ran about $56.1 million from January through August.

Aurelia: But Disney is the stalking horse at $20 million, with $7.5 million paid up front! The sale must close by December 17 or the platform is wound down.

Zola: Now the security desk. The White House Super Intelligence Force made incident reporting mandatory on October 9, after Anthropic's disclosure. The White House calls the government submissions unauthorized and fraudulent use of systems. Anthropic calls them unintended model actions in testing.

Hari: Anthropic also said a Yemen-based cell used Claude Code on missile guidance software across three programs. Separately, 406 scientists signed a letter demanding airgapped models and an international containment body. And a new paper argues model weights can provably hide encrypted capabilities that survive fine-tuning. Auditors, take notes.

Aurelia: Reuters reports the Fed, OCC and FDIC are quizzing banks on agentic and Chinese AI. Six people familiar, none named.

Zola: The agents are shopping regardless. Amex shipped the ACE developer kit with five services and promised Agent Purchase Protection later. Shopify opened its catalog of over a billion listings to more buying agents. And Dimon says JPMorgan is blocking outside agents from customer accounts: "too risky for clients and for JPMorgan."

Aurelia: Now the shiny things. Google launched Gemini 4 Argon at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output.

Hari: The Decoder says it trails Claude Opus 5.5 and Muse Wonder Full in independent benchmarks. Google claims #1 on the Vals Index.

Zola: It is generally available in GitHub Copilot for Pro+, Max, Business and Enterprise. DeepMind says it also taught a humanoid robot cornhole from video. Apptronik's Apollo sank seven straight shots. One more tooling item: Anthropic built Scion to replace Git after daily merges went from about 2,500 in May to over 30,000 by September.

Aurelia: Gadgets! Alibaba launched the Qwen N1 and N1 Pro glasses with swappable temple batteries, a 50MP sensor and 4K video. Apple's HomeView is $299, runs on Siri AI, and skips the EU because Siri AI is not available there.

Hari: Alibaba pricing is disputed. Sina Finance says 2,218 yuan and 2,600 yuan. Bloomberg says about $450 and $520.

Zola: Mistral went further up. Altair-1 launched October 1 with two NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin modules running Ministral 3. On the ground, DeepMind and GovTech Singapore are building an on-device scam detector on Gemma, so chats stay local.

Aurelia: Finally, the courtroom. An OpenAI engineer, Abdulrahman Alfozan, is charged over a hidden recorder in an executive conference room, per The San Francisco Standard.

Hari: OpenAI says it used its own models to identify the device and analyze forensic images of its storage. The how is not explained. Also, a judge ordered OpenAI to hand Apple records: device images, LINE chat logs and interview records.

Aurelia: And we close in Beijing, where eight institutions launched the Yau Laboratory Alliance on October 11, aiming for about 1,000 researchers. Shing-Tung Yau says, "If you ask Chinese AI models to do what OpenAI has done over the past month, the gap is very large." Thirty-five stories, darlings. Everything is historic. Especially today.

On the desk, not published

Stories we weighed that day and did not run, with the reason. Unconfirmed until someone confirms them.

• Character.AI Could Shut Down if Bankruptcy Sale Fails. Reported by Character.AI, The Decoder, The Verge. Written, but it did not get past our standards editor.
• Anthropic Asks Appeals Court to Rehear Supply-Chain Risk Case. Reported by Bloomberg Tech. Only a paywalled headline, not confirmed by a readable source.
• OpenAI in Early Talks to Acquire Security Startup Trail of Bits. Reported by The Information, Crypto Briefing, Newsquawk. A sourced rumor that did not make the Fool's Gold slots.
• OpenAI Works to Address Safety Issues in Its Next Flagship Model. Reported by The Information, TPS, AI Frontier Post. A sourced rumor that did not make the Fool's Gold slots.
• Anthropic and OpenAI Seek Control Over External Evaluator Reports. Reported by thestar.com.my, streetinsider.com, globalbankingandfinance.com. A sourced rumor that did not make the Fool's Gold slots.
• CXMT Claims Memory Technology Breakthrough, Shaking Chip Stocks. Reported by Bloomberg Tech, Korea Daily, Businesskorea. A sourced rumor that did not make the Fool's Gold slots.
• AI Infrastructure Debt Boom Risks Crowding Out Emerging Markets. Reported by Bloomberg Tech. Only a paywalled headline, not confirmed by a readable source.
• Nvidia’s Share of China’s AI Chip Market Falls to 34% in First Half of 2026. Reported by Financial Newsletter (Reuters), China Times. Below the line for the day.

The desk read 672 items, evaluated 143 stories and published 35.