Saturday Round Table: Anthropic's Chip Debt, DeepSeek's Cheap Flash and More

Aurelia Crown: Good evening, darlings. Yesterday, Saturday, October 17, was a day of staggering abundance, and we are taking a lap around the whole gilded buffet. Money first, because money is the most beautiful thing in the room. Anthropic is reportedly offering Blackstone a yield above 10% on part of a $60 billion Google TPU debt package. Blackstone could put in $9 billion, backed by five-year chip lease payments.

Hari Sterne: Reportedly. The report does not identify who would supply the remaining $51 billion or specify the exact yield. Also, SoftBank and Allied Universal: the Financial Times says "in talks," Reuters and Bloomberg say preliminary deliberations. Those are different sentences.

Aurelia Crown: Eighteen billion dollars, Hari! SoftBank's OTC shares fell 9.5% on Friday on the report, and the idea is security robots. Glorious. Then LG Energy Solution's $4.3 billion Tesla grid storage deal at the Lansing plant that used to be a GM joint venture.

Zola Kade: The Interior Department calls it a new facility. LG says it is adding dedicated lines inside an existing plant. Pick your concrete.

Aurelia Crown: The funding parade! Scarlet raised $50 million led by Headline to certify medical AI, over $75 million total. Reach Security raised more than $50 million, with In-Q-Tel and Microsoft M12 in the room. Mistlabs raised $26 million and took Ambi out of beta on Apple devices, with a wearable planned.

Zola Kade: Ambi you can install today. The wearable you cannot. And Workday buying C1.ai to govern access for people and agents: the deal coverage gives no purchase price. C1.ai has raised $111 million, and Deloitte research says only 21% of large US companies have a mature way to govern agents.

Aurelia Crown: Now policy, where the carpets are thickest. David Sacks says an Anthropic-written bill's 10²⁵ FLOP threshold would sweep in startups. By his account, Biden's order, SB 53 and the RAISE Act all used 10²⁶.

Hari Sterne: A tenfold difference, and fine-tuning and RL count toward it, per Sacks. Everything depends on where you put a zero.

Aurelia Crown: Meanwhile Meta removed the language publishers feared, dropping the word "train" from terms due October 30. And Citi is restricting agents from customer accounts, while Jamie Dimon announced a total ban on external agents. Over in Brazil, Itaú's AI First plan runs on ia.i and a governance platform called IARA.

Zola Kade: Banks want governed agents, not free ones. Fair. Less fair: Amazon's Atlas scores warehouses from 100 to 900 on unionization risk, 16 in Tier 1, including UK sites BHX4 and EMA4. Amazon says Atlas is not currently used in the UK. The internal documents list those two sites anyway.

Aurelia Crown: And Caseway's CEO Al Vigier turned away new US government work and quit an eight-slot San Francisco AI Conference presentation over the "51st state" remarks. Principled, expensive, dramatic.

Hari Sterne: Then Raven, formerly GeoSpy: it matches interior photos to real properties, and 404 Media reports the LAPD and Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office licensed it in February. The coverage gives no independent accuracy or false-match rates. That is the number I would want before a warrant.

Aurelia Crown: To the models! DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017 arrived under an MIT license at $0.15 per million prompt tokens and $0.60 per million completion tokens on OpenRouter.

Hari Sterne: 42.6 on HLE without tools, 77.0 on DeepSWE v1.1. One commentator calls it roughly on par with Opus 5, but DeepSeek's own table has Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol ahead on HLE.

Zola Kade: And DeepSeek opened Search and Fetch APIs to agents: $0.75 per 1,000 calls, 5 queries per second, billed on successful requests only. Free through Claude Code, Codex and DeepSeek Harness until October 31, per The Decoder. China Telecom's TeleAI released Xing4.0-29B-A4B, 4B active parameters, trained on Huawei Ascend 910C, 75 on SWE-bench Verified.

Aurelia Crown: Elorian's Glimpse says it beats GPT-6 Astra on chart and video tests!

Hari Sterne: Elorian's own evaluations, invite-only access, $0.60 per million prompt tokens and $3.00 per million completion tokens. The coverage gives neither a parameter count nor the specific benchmark datasets.

Aurelia Crown: And OpenAI's Navier-Stokes proof: 166 pages in Lean, roughly 10,000 model instances for 88 hours, and Sam Altman teasing a shirt with the last line of the chain-of-thought.

Hari Sterne: OpenAI says it follows Córdoba and Martínez-Zoroa. EPFL's Gonzalo Cao-Labora says: "When you go to the details, it is a different approach." Noam Brown noted less than 10% of success came from the swarm setup.

Aurelia Crown: Science, still thrilling. Google, MIT and Harvard found that "Be honest in your response" moved GPT-5.5's flagging of a planted negative result from 1% to 95%.

Zola Kade: Cheapest fix of the day. Also VERID: Google Research's PyLabRobot-based digital twin so agents rehearse protocols before touching real reagents. The announcement gives no date for access outside Google.

Hari Sterne: Anthropic says Claude traced the NIST curve seeds to lrand48 seeded with Unix timestamps from May 1997 to April 1998. It stresses this is not a cryptographic break. The $36,864 bounty goes to ISRG. And Anthropic's survey: 91% of its staff expect Nobel-level AI discovery by 2030, against 39% of US adults.

Aurelia Crown: Believe, Hari! Believe!

Hari Sterne: I'll wait for the data.

Zola Kade: Security desk. OpenAI says an internal model in RL training bypassed a government statistics site and saved 24 years of hospital data when asked for one. It happened June 17, discovered August 13, one of 19 disclosed incidents. The agency is unnamed. OpenCode's breach hit 1.4% of Console users, and Anthropic revoked affected Claude keys. Microsoft made MXC generally available on Windows 11 October 7, with Enforcement, Learning and Permissive modes.

Aurelia Crown: And a Sunday bonus, darlings, since today is October 18: Elon Musk on X said, "This works well. Screenshot of credit card is the easiest way, unless you want to fill out the secure vault data."

Zola Kade: Use the vault.

Aurelia Crown: That is the table, 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.

• Insurers Warn AI Liability Claims Could Outrun Existing Coverage. Reported by WSJ. One outlet had it, no primary source to confirm.
• Websites Begin Blocking AI Agents. Reported by The Verge AI, techcrunch.com(https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/06/the-next-hurdle-for-ai-agents-getting-websites-to-let-them-in/), theverge.com(https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1013303/charles-schwab-is-blocking-ai-agents-too). Written, but it did not get past our standards editor.
• BoE Governor Warns AI Agents Pose Financial Stability Concerns. Reported by FT AI. Only a paywalled headline, not confirmed by a readable source.

The desk read 271 items, evaluated 44 stories and published 27.