Washington just took its biggest swing yet at Big Tech's favorite immigration pipeline. On Thursday, October 8, the Trump administration barred Microsoft, Adobe, and several of the world's largest IT services firms from the program that lets employers sponsor foreign workers for green cards, accusing them of systemic H-1B visa fraud.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is closing in on one of the largest private financings in the history of the AI industry. Bloomberg reported this week that the company is set to raise at least 80 billion yuan — roughly $11.9 billion — with the final tally possibly reaching 100 billion yuan, as it builds a war chest ahead of a domestic initial public offering. Reuters confirmed the outline of the deal with a person familiar with the matter, though the agency noted it could not independently verify the figures and that DeepSeek, Tencent, and CATL did not respond to requests for comment.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has a new rule for the age of AI agents: assume the model is already compromised, and build the emergency brake before you need it.

Nvidia is circling the open-source coding world — and it already owns a seat at the table.

The money funding America's AI buildout is increasingly coming from Europe.

Hyperscalers — the big cloud and AI companies behind the AI boom — have raised $48 billion in European-currency bonds so far this year, according to Apollo's Daily Spark note published this week. That is more than triple what they raised in all of 2025. The tally breaks down to €27 billion in euro-denominated bonds, £13 billion in sterling, and CHF 7.5 billion in Swiss francs.

Washington's AI policy now has a designated point person. President Donald Trump has named Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton as the administration's AI czar and chairman of a newly created "Super Intelligence Force," tasking the group with coordinating the federal government's work on advanced artificial intelligence.

The era of the chatbot that forgets you the moment you close the tab may be ending. At its DevDay developer conference last month, OpenAI unveiled "dots" — always-on AI agents in ChatGPT designed to keep working toward a user's goals without being told every step. "Dots are remarkably capable, always-on agents built to handle really anything you can think of," CEO Sam Altman said during the keynote.

The AI industry's fight over Washington's attention has a new front. Anthropic is building a formal "presidential engagement" program to work directly with both parties' 2028 presidential candidates on AI policy — a dedicated in-house political operation that experts say they have never quite seen from a technology company.

Google's race to catch up in AI-assisted coding may have a new contender — and it is not the model everyone is waiting for. Business Insider reported this week that Google employees are internally testing a Gemini 4 variant codenamed Carbon, and early feedback suggests it could be the strongest coding model the company has built.

CoreWeave built its reputation selling raw AI compute. Now it wants to sell the software layer on top of it. At its Fully Connected conference, the company unveiled CoreWeave Forge, a development platform that folds model serving, observability, post-training, and evaluation into a single environment — and it comes with a striking performance claim: a preview feature called RL Rollouts that improved model reload latency by 15x in testing.