Company

Inception Labs has introduced Mercury 3, which it claims is the most capable diffusion-based LLM released to date. The company says the model outperforms GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 on a range of benchmarks while running 4-8x faster at speeds exceeding 1,000 tokens per second.

Models • Hacker News

Tenstorrent • Undisclosed

Nvidia challenger Tenstorrent raised $1.5 billion to remain independent, hitting a $6.2 billion valuation. This comes after the company drew acquisition interest earlier this year.

Town • Series B

Town, which develops enterprise AI assistants, raised a $108 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation. This comes just four months after the company announced a $55 million Series A in June.

Disney → Character AI

Disney has agreed to hire the majority of Character AI's workforce in a stalking horse bid. The filing indicates that the 'vast majority' of Character.AI employees offered jobs at Disney accepted them, though another company could still come forward with a higher offer.

SAP → TechWolf

SAP is acquiring Ghent-based AI startup TechWolf in a deal valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. A co-founder of TechWolf emphasized the importance of the city's flywheel effect in the company's success.

Microsoft is advising enterprises to closely monitor AI agents used by employees, equating them with insider threats. The company argues that frontier models cannot be trusted when operating on systems not controlled by AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.

AI Safety • TechCrunch AI

Spotify announced it has removed over 50 million songs considered AI-generated slop or spam from user recommendations over the past year. The company has also updated its recommendation system to prioritize music made by human artists.

AI Applications • The Verge AI

Meta has removed the word 'train' from its commercial terms of service following backlash over its AI data collection practices. However, the company has not added language to respect the robots.txt protocol for web scraping.

Policy • Ars Technica AI

OpenEvidence, a medical AI startup valued at $15 billion, is booming despite questions about accuracy and its ad-supported model. The company's tools are reportedly already being used by doctors.

Business • Ars Technica AI

Several Google DeepMind staff are resigning in backlash over the company's AI contracts with the military. This follows growing concerns among tech workers about the military applications of their work.

Policy • Hacker News

Photon Bridge • Undisclosed

Dutch photonics company Photon Bridge has raised €10 million to tackle an emerging bottleneck in AI infrastructure: producing the millions of lasers that will be needed to connect increasingly large data centers.

Blacksmith • Series C

Blacksmith, a platform that lets companies build and test AI code more effectively, has announced a $66 million Series C round led by Sequoia that values the company at $1 billion, achieving unicorn status.

Opply • Undisclosed

Opply, a company developing an AI-powered operating platform for consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands, has raised $7.5 million in a funding round led by Chalfen Ventures, with participation from Index Ventures.