Tech News - Page 42

The US Labor Department has suspended Microsoft, Adobe and six IT outsourcing firms from the PERM labour-certification process, the first step towards a green card. What the announcement confirms, what the fraud claims are, and what Microsoft says. Plus a pointer to TSN's separate post on Axios's report about AI companies' "day after" planning.

Three AI business items from 8–9 October 2026: Nvidia-backed Firmus withdraws its ASX listing and turns to private money; Bloomberg reports Isomorphic Labs is in early funding talks at a valuation of at least $40 billion; and StepFun's Step 5 Preview model is now listed on OpenRouter and Vercel's AI Gateway. What is confirmed, and what is only reported.

Type One Energy says it has completed a $200 million Series B, co-led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Clutterbuck Capital, to fund its stellarator fusion programme in Tennessee. What the money is for, which timeline claims are the company's own, and why groundbreaking has slipped to the first half of 2027.

Two AI infrastructure launches from 8 October 2026: Goodfire's "inside-out" monitors, which read a model's internal signals to catch harmful agent sessions, reach Baseten customers (all performance figures are Goodfire's own), and Upscale AI unveils Token Fabric, a networking platform for AI data centres with general availability planned for early 2027.

Anthropic has launched the Anthropic Cyber Mission: a Critical Infrastructure Defense Program with 11 founding partners and OSS Scanner, a free opt-in service that sends open-source projects unreviewed, model-written bug reports. What is confirmed, what is Anthropic's expectation, and what is not yet proven.

FBI Director Kash Patel says agents have arrested another suspected ShinyHunters co-conspirator over the FBIjobs.gov incident. The suspect's name and charges are not public; reports of a Canadian arrested in Pennsylvania rest on unnamed sources. What is confirmed, what is reported, and what is only the group's own claim.

Five AI creative-tool updates from 7–9 October 2026: xAI's Grok Imagine Video 1.5 Lite from $0.02 a second, Vidu Q4 Preview from $0.014 a second, Magnific One and ElevenLabs Brand Kit for on-brand images, and Runway as a launch partner for Anthropic's Claude Motion beta. What's confirmed, what's reported, and what's only planned.

JR East and Viewcard say about 6.09 million accounts, mostly email addresses, may be exposed after the IDC Frontier ransomware attack. What the companies and Japanese media report, what is not affected, and what it does not prove.

Four AI developer-tool updates from 8–9 October 2026: Harness buys selected Augment Code assets (not the whole company, price undisclosed), Hugging Face's TRL v1.15.0 claims up to 6.9× longer training sequences, Google's Genkit Dart reaches 1.0, and NVIDIA shows its Boro kernel-review tool. What each says, and what it doesn't.

Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar, that nuclear startup Atlas Atomics has raised about $400 million in a Series A at around a $1.9 billion valuation, led by General Catalyst with Andreessen Horowitz. The company has not confirmed it. Who Atlas is, what its own letter says, and what is not known.