Techmeme
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Anthropic donates the Agent Skills open standard to the Agentic AI Foundation and says 70+ platforms have integrated it, after donating MCP to the AAIF in 2025 (Anthropic)
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Sources: OpenAI nears an up to $30B round led by investors from the UAE and Coatue at a $1.25T pre-money valuation, as an "opportunistic" bridge ahead of an IPO (Kate Rooney/CNBC)
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Canva launches Craft, its first image generation model, trained on human-designed templates, available to all users, with plans to support third-party chatbots (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
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Microsoft and Alphabet join 14 other companies objecting to a plan by OKXICE, a venture of OKX and ICE, to trade blockchain-based versions of their shares (Camila Grigera Naón/Fortune)
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Amazon issues refunds from a 2025 settlement, crediting "President Trump's Federal Trade Commission," the first time an FTC refund has been tied to a president (Alfred Ng/Politico)
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Microsoft says its GPT-5-powered Diagnostic Orchestrator uses agents that mimic panels of experts to diagnose conditions up to 4x more accurately than doctors (Robert Hart/The Verge)
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Sources: Datadog offered to acquire Israeli cloud cybersecurity startup Upwind Security for nearly $4B; Upwind is finalizing a $300M round at a ~$3.8B valuation (The Information)
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Amazon rebrands its Kindle Unlimited subscription as Kindle+ and expands access to audiobooks, including titles narrated by AI (Maria Diaz/ZDNET)
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Sources: SoftBank's SB Energy is considering going public as soon as December or waiting until 2027, as it closely watches Anthropic's IPO, expected in November (The Information)
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US officials say Trump asked Elon Musk to lift Starshield restrictions; Ukraine officials said it was not fully fixed Thursday but was working at higher speeds (Wall Street Journal)
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Chicago-based Formic, which provides robots-as-a-service automation to manufacturers, raised $50M, including a $40M Series B and $10M in asset-backed financing (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios)
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The Browser Company says it will shut down its Arc browser on December 22, launched in 2023, shifting attention to its AI-focused Dia browser, launched in 2025 (Jay Peters/The Verge)
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Microsoft says it is closing The Garage, which for 17 years gave employees worldwide space and tools for side projects and ran the company's Global Hackathon (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)
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Filings: Nvidia, Anthropic, and OpenAI had their highest-spending lobbying quarter between July and September, spending $2.2M, $2.1M, and $1.5M, respectively (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)
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Atlanta-based Tractian, which uses AI and sensors to predict machine failures and recommend maintenance plans, raised a $130M Series D at a $1.4B valuation (Rocket Drew/The Information)