A day about who is buying whom, and at what price.
OpenAI wants $30 billion before anyone can compare
A round of roughly $30 billion that could value OpenAI above $1.4 trillion, up from $852 billion in March. SoftBank, Abu Dhabi's MGX and existing investors are in talks; no term sheet is final. The reported urgency is Anthropic's IPO - both draw on the same investor pool, and OpenAI wants its valuation set before the disclosures invite a comp. OpenAI reports $50bn annualised revenue and projects $70bn by year end; Anthropic was around $65bn annualised in July with Q3 of $16.8bn. The two count differently, and OpenAI has said so publicly.
Disney gets Character.AI for $20 million
Chapter 11 filed 13 October, assets and liabilities of $50-100m against more than $193m raised. Disney is offering $20m for certain assets plus a perpetual non-exclusive technology licence, and has agreed to hire most of the staff. Closing late November or early December. Forty attorneys general are asking the court to attach child-safety and data conditions first - the asset in question is private chats, voice calls and mental health disclosures.
Two more deals circling
Nvidia and Reflection AI - early talks on an acquisition, investment or acquihire. Nvidia led a $2bn round last October and has put in roughly $800m; Reflection was valued near $25bn pre-money in April and shipped Beam, a 501B Apache 2.0 model, on the 16th.
Amazon and Decart - reportedly around $7bn for the Lucy video and Oasis simulation models. Anthropic reportedly negotiated about $6bn for the same company in September and dropped it.
Courts and oversight
Judge Edward Davila granted Apple expedited access to forensic and recruitment evidence against OpenAI, while denying access to OpenAI's hardware research. Both allege departing engineers took material.
About 400 scientists from 34 countries want frontier cyber-capable models air-gapped and independently overseen, plus a public incident registry. Hinton and Bengio signed; LeCun declined.
Open source and enterprise
DeepSeek open-sourced DeepInfer, its in-house inference engine, on GitHub - the serving layer, not just the weights. Supports V4.1 Flash today. Note the pricing confusion: coverage cites an OpenRouter listing of $0.035/$0.12 per million, while DeepSeek's own published rate is $0.30/$1.20 at peak.
Bank of America hired around 1,000 contractors in a quarter to fix flaws found by Anthropic's Mythos model, after one scan reportedly flagged over 23,000 potential vulnerabilities. Finding at machine speed, fixing at human speed.
GitHub moved Agentic Autofix and AI Scan to GA on the 15th - fixes validated by CodeQL before a human sees them, and scanning for PHP, Shell, Terraform, Dockerfiles, JSP and Blazor.
And the number of the day
$48 billion raised by physical AI and robotics year to date, per PitchBook - for a sector whose actual product right now is movement and touch data. NEURA Robotics plans five data-collection gyms by year end.