Manus raises more than $500 million in its first funding round since Beijing blocked Meta's $2 billion acquisition of the AI agent startup. Parent company Butterfly Effect says Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the round, with Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund following on. Analysts say Manus still must prove profitability and regulatory alignment.
Google releases Google AI Edge Foresight, a Mac note-taker competing with Granola. The app runs offline using the on-device EmbeddingGemma 2 model with 740 million parameters, the company says, and pairs shorthand notes with AI-generated ones. Google says it is optimized for Apple Silicon.
Anthropic launches OSS Scanner, an opt-in service that sends model-generated vulnerability reports, with no human triage, to eligible open-source projects at no cost. Anthropic says six months of scanning produced over 29,000 candidate vulnerabilities, of which only about 6,000 were reviewed. In testing, 85 of 97 critical findings across 48 projects met its disclosure bar.
Anthropic updates its usage policy to ban using Claude for deceptive campaigns, weapons development, and election disruption, and requires a human in the loop for high-stakes uses. OpenAI says it shut down two influence operations, from Russia and Iran, that used its models for false-front campaigns. The Iranian operation, OpenAI says, created seven fake journalist personas.
OpenAI tells investors its annualized revenue is approaching $50 billion, the Financial Times reports, about $20 billion below the $70 billion figure outlets previously cited. The gap partly reflects method: Anthropic counts cloud partner sales, OpenAI does not. OpenAI raised $122 billion in a March round and pushed its IPO to early 2027.
OpenAI Developers says Ultrafast for GPT-6.1 Sol is rolling out in the API, Codex and ChatGPT Work, claiming up to 8x faster speeds than Sol Standard. API pricing is $12 per million input tokens and $60 per million output tokens. Codex and ChatGPT Work access requires Pro 500, usage-based Enterprise, or credit-based Edu plans, and enterprise admins must enable it.
Microsoft publishes Quicksand, an async Python API that launches, controls, and snapshots QEMU virtual machines to sandbox AI agents. The tool ships pre-built Ubuntu 24.04 and Alpine 3.23 images for x86_64 and ARM64, and runs without root privileges or Docker. The repository carries an MIT license.
NVIDIA's NVlabs releases Long-WAM, long-context world-action models for robot policies, with an arXiv paper posted Oct. 8. The models support robot-video pretraining and deployment on YAM, Franka and Unitree G1 hardware. The repo says LongLive 2.0's NVFP4 2-step model reaches 45.7 FPS on one GB200, measured excluding VAE decoding.
Exa previews ATLAS, a 547-task benchmark that grades search agents on wide, multi-hop research. Exa says its best tested system reaches 0.66 row F1 at $8.92 and 18 minutes per task, while no configuration under $1 per task gets half the rows correct. Exa plans to release the tasks, golden tables, and grader in coming weeks.
ClaudeDevs says it halved Sonnet 5.5 cache read pricing to $0.10 per million tokens on the Claude Platform, with input at $2 and output at $10. The company says the change makes Sonnet 5.5 about 20% cheaper for most agentic work. The cut applies to the API only, with no change to Claude Code usage limits.