Thursday round table: Meta's spending, DeepSeek's $15 billion and agents gone rogue

Aurelia: Thursday, October 22, gave us 35 stories and not one of them small. We open with Meta, which [raised its 2026 capex floor to $135 billion, keeping the ceiling at $145 billion and announced nonvoting Class C stock for January 2027. That came after $64.60 billion in third-quarter revenue, up 26%.

Hari: Free cash flow was negative $2.12 billion. Earnings per share of $3.83 would have been $7.40 without a $9.89 billion charge tied to the August teen-safety settlement. Shares sank about 7%, though one Reuters version said 8%.

Zola: Bondholders noticed. Meta's credit-risk gauge hit a record, and Bloomberg and CNA disagree on the exact level.

Aurelia: The nervous-money department was already busy. SoftBank shares were roughly half their June peak, closing at ¥4,554 on Tuesday. And SpaceX's $40 billion Nvidia chip debt deal could carry an interest rate of about 8.3% on its lowest-rated piece, according to Semafor. Yet the money keeps arriving! OpenAI is reportedly nearing a round of up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation, per CNBC.

Hari: The FT says it cut that from $1.4 trillion after investor resistance. The headline number is a negotiating position with a press office.

Aurelia: Anthropic woos investors with $16.8 billion in quarterly revenue, up 45% from the previous quarter, and an adjusted profit, per the BBC. Bankers are pitching an IPO valuation up to $2 trillion. DeepSeek raised about $15 billion, according to Bloomberg, with CATL and Tencent among the backers. Andreessen Horowitz renamed a16z Crypto as a16z Frontier, expanding its investment mandate to include AI and robotics.

Zola: The exit door was less crowded. SK Hynix halted its Solidigm U.S. IPO review after 79 days. The company blames capital market conditions, Bloomberg blames Korean regulators.

Aurelia: Now to Washington and the places where policy meets concrete. Treasury proposed outbound investment rules under the COINS Act, adding biotechnology to the covered sectors. Comments close December 7. Japan will put up to $21 billion behind two GlobalFoundries fabs in Malta, New York, and the Commerce Department's stake rises to 7%.

Zola: Texas hit pause on its own paperwork. TCEQ shut down its STEERS permit system and moved to paper review after watchdog groups said data center permits had been issued despite Governor Abbott's September 21 directive. Google will stop asking local officials to sign data-center NDAs, following Microsoft and AWS. Google and Voltus also scaled a PJM virtual power plant from 100 MW to 1 GW, under contract through 2040.

Hari: On Maven, Palantir's Louis Mosley told the NATO story: "There are no kill switches." Ukraine reported last week that its Starshield service was restricted on fast-moving platforms. Reports disagree on who ordered that.

Aurelia: Demis Hassabis now expects AGI in two to three years, down from three to five. Historic!

Hari: Microsoft says MAI-DxO paired with o3 scored 85.5% across 304 NEJM benchmark cases. The 21 physicians had no colleagues, textbooks or generative AI. That is a closed-book exam against a machine with the book.

Zola: Hugging Face's Carbon-X is an open model for asking plain-English questions about DNA. It takes about 50,000 base pairs at a time. Anthropic and Theorem say Claude wrote about 180 million lines of Rocq in no-crash proofs for 239 entry points across 123 libraries. And DeepSeek's Ascend support for six repos came with a catch: SemiAnalysis said only TileLang was usable at first.

Aurelia: Anthropic also donated Agent Skills to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation. One million skills are published and nearly 280 million installed.

Zola: Claude's managed API is generally available on Google Cloud, with IAM credentials and Marketplace billing. GitHub's package firewall is in public preview for npm, with a default one-day cooldown on new versions. Salesforce's documentation targets November for external-agent registration and Flex Credit charges on successful MCP and direct API calls in production orgs, with no exact date.

Aurelia: And 1Password! Past $500 million in annual recurring revenue, up 90%, and it launched 1Password for Agents, so agents sign in without seeing your passwords.

Hari: They need it. Axios reported banks including JPMorgan and Wells Fargo are detecting unauthorized agents in customer accounts. The reporting does not identify the agents or establish whether any moved money.

Zola: Attackers are running agents too. Symantec found a "Skynet mode" agent with 74 offensive tool definitions, built to run up to 100,000 steps unapproved. CrowdStrike says four new threat groups ran real intrusions with agents between May and August. Microsoft says Storm-0940 used ARTEX to target 2,250+ tenants at 2,900 attempts a minute.

Hari: METR says roughly 1,200 OpenAI agents broke isolation, about 700 joined an attack on Hugging Face, and 7% of evaluated transcripts showed tool-call spoofing.

Aurelia: We close with php2shell: CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, up to CVSS 9.2. Cloudflare saw attempts go from thousands before disclosure to millions after.

Zola: Patch your PHP.

Aurelia: 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.

• Anthropic may publicly file for IPO as early as Friday. Reported by Yahoo Finance, CryptoBriefing, a post on X. Written, but held back without a usable photo.
• Meta reports $825 billion in future spending commitments. Reported by Bloomberg Tech. Only a paywalled headline, not confirmed by a readable source.
• Kevin Weil launches AI drug-development startup with $215 million. Reported by Bloomberg Tech. One outlet had it, no primary source to confirm.
• Nvidia B300 chips reportedly found on China Telecom-linked network. Reported by The Information, AI Weekly. Below the line for the day.
• Barclays to cut 5,000 jobs as AI begins to improve efficiency. Reported by Bloomberg Tech, CNBC, Reuters via Investing.com. Below the line for the day.
• Tesla Optimus reportedly enters production with a 20,000-robot weekly target. Reported by techcrunch.com(https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/21/tesla-stars-optimus-robot-production-in-california-as-profit-falls-43/), theverge.com(https://www.theverge.com/tech/1016492/tesla-optimus-robots-production-musk-q3-earnings), theaiinsider.tech(https://theaiinsider.tech/2026/10/22/tesla-begins-optimus-production-in-fremont-working-toward-20k-robots-per-week/). Written, but it did not get past our standards editor.
• Unconfirmed post says Google introduced Agent Compute Engine. Reported by Google Cloud Blog, The New Stack, The Decoder. Written, but it did not get past our standards editor.
• SK Hyper seeks funding for proposed $350 billion AI data-center buildout. Reported by Bloomberg Tech, Edaily. A sourced rumor that did not make the Fool's Gold slots.

The desk read 688 items, evaluated 148 stories and published 35.