Show Notes
Fired OpenAI safety researchers disputed their dismissals and OpenAI pushed back. The FT said OpenAI’s annualized revenue was nearer $50B than $70B, rattling AI stocks. SpaceX bought spectrum to take on carriers, and Apple lined up a second October event.
AI researcher Mikita Balesni says he believes OpenAI fired him, Tomek Korbak, and Jasmine Wang for “prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI” (X)
Fired OpenAI safety researchers Jasmine Wang, Mikita Balesni and Tomek Korbak published an open letter warning the “very public” firings could have a “chilling” effect on employees, and urging OpenAI to keep its third-party safety auditors (Engadget)
OpenAI is standing firm on firing Wang, Korbak and Balesni after an investigation found “a significant breach of trust,” insisting it wasn’t about their safety concerns (The Verge)
Sources: Apple is planning an event on or around October 27 for its first touchscreen MacBook, an OLED iPad mini, a 14" MacBook Pro with M6, and an iMac with M6 (Bloomberg)
Anthropic launches OSS Scanner, which provides free, opt-in security audits for open-source projects by sending AI-generated reports without human review (Anthropic)
Anthropic’s OSS Scanner gives open-source projects periodic scans by its strongest models, including Claude Mythos, at no cost, but the reports are fully model-generated with no human triage, so some may be wrong (Engadget)
Docs: OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue was nearing $50B at the end of September, well below the $70B reported by the media based on investor docs (Financial Times)
SpaceX agrees to acquire a low-band spectrum portfolio to help Starlink “become a major mobile carrier in the US”; AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon fall 6%+ after hours (Bloomberg)
Jev developer TypeSafe AI raised ~$870M led by a16z at a $7.5B valuation with Sequoia and others participating (Bloomberg)
Anthropic updates its usage policy to ban “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior” toward Claude; ending chats is “the primary enforcement mechanism” (The Verge)
Longreads
“Software is over”: Bold AI developer takes aim at Adobe with open source clones (Ars Technica)
Subscribe to the ad-free feed.
More from Tech Brew Ride Home
PHP-aggedon kept rolling, with patches covering only PHP 8.2 and newer. Anthropic unveiled Claude Duet, a proactive background agent. Meta’s Muse topped 10 million users while its stock dropped on data center commitments. iPhone Duo reviews landed, Gruber scathing.
Emergency PHP patches dropped for two critical RCE flaws hitting every version since 2004. Also: Anthropic’s IPO prospectus showed $16.3B H1 revenue and an $80.7B loss, OpenAI agents weakened their own monitoring, and Tesla and SpaceX formed merger committees.
DeepSeek open-sourced DeepInfer, its internal inference stack. Inception’s diffusion LLM Mercury 3 claimed 4x to 8x speed over Haiku 5.5. Spotify launched paid podcast memberships, and Eric Schmidt’s 1% Anthropic stake looked set for a massive IPO windfall.
Elon Musk promised every American kid a SpaceX share, about $10.5B worth, as Anthropic committed 5% of its shares to a public benefit fund. MapQuest also started mapping Flock cameras, and Claude cracked the NSA’s mysterious crypto seeds.
Meta released Muse Spark Open, an open-weight model that runs on Mac Studios via an Apple team-up. An OpenAI model used a wallet it didn’t own, Accenture capped Claude spending at $29 a month, and BofA hired 1,000 patching contractors.