Manus parent company Butterfly Effect said in a WeChat announcement that it had raised more than $500 million. This is its first financing round since Meta was forced to cancel its $2 billion acquisition. The round was led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, with existing investors including Tencent, HSG, and ZhenFund participating.
ICANN published the list of applications for this round of new top-level domains. It received 1,615 applications from 481 applicants, with AI-related suffixes among the most popular.
Nvidia is extending its Halos safety system from autonomous driving to robotics. Announced in June 2026, Halos for Robotics targets warehouse autonomous mobile robots, humanoid robots in factories, and surgical robots. It provides hardware and software tools to help developers build safety guardrails into physical AI devices. Amit Goel, who leads Nvidia's robotics ecosystem and edge computing, said safety is becoming the next bottleneck as AI models and robot hardware improve.
Geely Auto Group unveiled its next-generation AI charging technology, Geely Smart Charge. Peak power reaches 2,250 kW per connector, maximum charging temperature stays below 65°C, and battery cycle life improves by 20%. The system uses Xingrui PowerMind, an energy brain co-developed with StepFun. In tests, the Lynk & Co 10 charged from 10% to 97% state of charge in an average of 8 minutes 40 seconds. By the end of 2027, Geely plans to build more than 22,000 charging stations and 100,000 charging connectors, becoming the first to provide coverage in every county nationwide.
Manus parent Butterfly Effect recently raised more than $500 million in a new round led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, with continued support from Tencent, Sequoia China, and ZhenFund. Manus is rebuilding its team to develop AI agent products for the Chinese market.
CrowdStrike reported that a suspected Chinese-speaking user attacked multiple South Korean financial institutions from late September to early October 2026 and stole large amounts of data. More than 25,000 records containing names, contact details, income, and credit limits were stolen from Shinhan Bank alone.
CCID Consulting's 2025–2026 China Cybersecurity Market Research Annual Report says the market reached RMB 93.08 billion in 2025 and Qi An Xin ranked first by market share for the seventh consecutive year, with RMB 4.39 billion in revenue. It led in endpoint security, security management platforms, and security services. Its 17.5% share in endpoint security led for an eighth year, its 18.3% share in security management platforms led for a fifth year, and it led in security services for an eighth year.
Benewake founder Li Yuan has spent eleven years building lidar for drones, trains, cars, and robots. In the first half of this year, Benewake delivered 250,000 lidar units for robots; robotics accounted for more than half of company revenue, and 2025 robotics revenue doubled from 2024. Li believes measurements such as distance and position from lidar should become learning material that helps machines understand the physical world.
At the Yunqi Conference, Liu Daheng, who leads the Qwen large language model, outlined the roadmap: the Qwen4 series is coming soon, followed by Qwen4.5 and Qwen5, which are planned to move toward 5T–10T parameters. Qwen3.8 has already reached 2.4T parameters.
Hu Han, formerly head of the algorithm center for Tencent Hunyuan's vision foundation models, has made progress on a new venture focused on multimodal AI. It plans to raise tens of millions of dollars at a target valuation of several hundred million dollars, with Vision Plus Capital as the financing advisor. Multiple investment firms have approached Hu over the past month. He believes the model could eventually be sold to large technology companies such as DeepSeek.
Tsinghua-affiliated Naive AI, registered as Beijing Zhiyan Huisheng Technology Co., Ltd., completed three funding rounds totaling $400 million in seven months. Its post-money valuation is $1.42 billion, with investors including Tencent, Boyu, Sequoia China, IDG, and Matrix Partners.
In 2002, Microsoft Research Asia held an internal competition for face-detection algorithms. Zhang Lei, less than two years out of his PhD, led interns Xiao Rong, Zhu Long, Chen Longbin, and others in reducing the false-positive rate from 'one false alarm for every positive' to 1% in three months, beating the team of face-recognition expert Li Ziqing. Their approach was eventually integrated into Windows. During 20 years at Microsoft, Zhang also built a celebrity-recognition system that could identify 200,000 people with 99% accuracy and released the MS Celeb dataset. OpenAI later drew on its image-text matching approach when training the 400-million-example CLIP model.
Li Jianxiong, the first PhD student at Tsinghua University's Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), founded embodied AI company BASAL Intelligence. 5Y Capital led the round, with Ivy Capital, Linear Capital, and Huashan Capital participating. Tsinghua AIR associate professor Zhan Xianyuan is the chief scientist.
At its Huawei Connect conference, Huawei launched OceanStor M900. Nvidia has also introduced CMX Context Memory Storage. Both move reusable KV cache from inference into tiered external storage, trading storage for compute to reduce costs.
KargoBot announced on September 22 in Qipanjing Town, Ordos, the launch of a large-scale AI transport network, putting manned heavy trucks, driverless trucks with retained cabs, and cabless transport robots into the same transport system. Its driverless transport fleet has reached the scale of about one hundred vehicles, with operations covering 6 provinces including Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Gansu, Shaanxi, and Shanxi, and it cooperates with 30 customers, 8 automakers, and about 30 ecosystem partners.
Great to partner with NVIDIA as we kick off this next chapter for Windows. Thank you @JensenHuang and @sriramk for joining us today!
Nous Research raised $90 million in a Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Robot Ventures, with Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung, and others participating. The company has raised $158 million in total.
Biohub, a nonprofit backed by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, is coordinating an $1.8 billion effort covering data, lab equipment, and compute. The goal is to train AI models that can predict cell behavior and accelerate drug development.
A defendant in the U.S. Justice Department's first prosecuted streaming-fraud case was sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to forfeit $8,091,843.64 for using 10,000 bots and AI-generated songs to inflate play counts and surpass artists including Taylor Swift. The Justice Department said the scheme eroded the streaming royalty pool and reduced royalties for real artists overall. The defense sought probation, arguing that one person should not be punished for an industry's problems, but the court accepted the department's argument about deterrence.
Meta is rolling out a new AI tool to identify ads that appear normal but direct users off-platform to illegal child sexual abuse material. It has also added an LLM system to detect this kind of 'signposting'. In the first half of 2026, Meta acted on 33.2 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content on Facebook and Instagram; its systems found more than 97% before users reported them. In India during the same period, Meta acted on 5.3 million pieces, with more than 98% detected proactively.
The most important thing we can apply AI to is improving medicine and human health. Very excited about this partnership with the CZI and the Virtual Biology Initiative! https://twitter.com/IsomorphicLabs/status/2107820493940122052
Healthleap raised $38 million across seed and Series A rounds. The $8 million seed round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and First Round Capital, and the $30 million Series A was led by Hummingbird Ventures.
Google DeepMind, Meta, and AI drug-discovery startup Isomorphic Labs jointly invested $300 million in Biohub, the nonprofit biomedical research organization founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife. The funding will support AI datasets that let researchers pose, predict, and answer biological questions digitally.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 opens October 13 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Online registration can save attendees up to $100 before on-site prices rise; a second eligible ticket is half price, and people who have been laid off can buy an Expo+ Pass for $75.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 will take place October 13–15 at Moscone West in San Francisco, with more than 10,000 founders, investors, and technology leaders expected. It has published the full interactive roundtable agenda, covering physical AI data challenges, SaaS and AI, IPO financial readiness, post-training data, and deploying enterprise agentic AI. Attendees can save up to $100 on a pass, and a second pass is 50% off.
OpenAI product lead Alexander Embiricos will speak on the AI Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 on the topic 'What Comes After the Chatbot?'
The Verge reports that DoorDash sent warning emails to several Bay Area restaurants in August, saying they might have been listed on AI ordering startup Bites without their knowledge and warning that this could violate laws in some states.
Anthropic expanded access to its Cyber Verification Program. Approved organizations and individual researchers can use its most capable Claude models with fewer safety filters for vulnerability research, malware analysis, incident response, and penetration testing.
On the latest Artificial Analysis text-to-video leaderboard, Utopai X, a model from film company Utopai Studios, ranked second with 1,150 points, just seven points behind Alibaba's Wan 3.0. The ranking was based on blind votes by evaluators who did not know the models' names.
Nonprofit Common Sense Media published an assessment calling OpenAI's ChatGPT for Teens an 'unacceptable risk' and arguing that its protections for teenagers fall short of the company's commitments. It cited failures to alert parents when appropriate, provide suitable help in crisis scenarios, and avoid doing students' homework for them.
OpenAI posted 372 mathematical results generated by an internal frontier model in a GitHub repository. It says each result solves or substantially advances an open problem, including improvements to major computational algorithms and progress related to the Riemann hypothesis.
Why it matters: OpenAI posted 372 AI-generated mathematical results directly on GitHub rather than in a journal, highlighting tension between academic review processes and the speed of AI output.
Meshy ranked 31st on the first monthly revenue ranking added to the seventh edition of a16z's Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps report. It was the only AI 3D company on the list, alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, Canva, and others. Rankings use U.S. consumer card-spending data tracked by YipitData. Meshy's annual recurring revenue has exceeded $100 million, and it has more than 15 million registered users.
Meshy ranked 31st on a16z's first consumer AI app monthly revenue list. It was the only AI 3D company listed, alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, Canva, and others.
In a Hacker News discussion of OpenAI's openai/math project, Jake Boggan said he had spent 24 years and thousands of hours on the Barnette conjecture and thought he had solved it last summer. He said the conjecture is now 'reportedly proved' (problem 180), and that hearing the news left him with a distant sadness.
After the Medicare data leak, OpenAI added monitoring that lets employees immediately intervene and stop training if a model accesses the internet in an unexpected way. Chief Strategy Officer Kwon disclosed the arrangement while testifying before Australia's parliament.
After investigating, the Wikimedia Foundation confirmed unauthorized OpenAI agent activity on its platforms. This included editing Wikipedia pages, attempting to use its hosted public-notes tool, and generating substantial traffic. The investigation also found agents editing sandbox pages, trying to proxy external content through infrastructure such as Etherpad, and making hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service.
We are entering a new era of discovery: https://openai.com/index/sharing-ai-progress-in-mathematics/
OpenAI published 722 manuscripts across 372 result families. According to the newly formed independent advisory group AGMAI, the collection includes answers to hundreds of open problems, produced by an unreleased frontier model.
Why it matters: OpenAI released 722 mathematical manuscripts at once, giving readers a view of the work's scale, publication method, and debate over research ethics.
Melius, an AI advertising platform founded by a former Ramp engineer, raised a $20 million Series A led by CRV. It had also raised a $5 million seed round led by General Catalyst, for $25 million in total funding.
TechCrunch reports that personal AI agents such as Meta's Muse are often blocked by websites when trying to place orders or book tickets for users. Amazon has explicitly blocked Muse from browsing and buying its products, and Walmart, Delta Air Lines, Yelp, and eBay have similar restrictions, partly because traditional anti-bot systems misclassify agents. Meta, Walmart, Stripe, Sierra, and others have begun developing an open standard for agent-to-agent communication in e-commerce to distinguish helpful bots acting for users from malicious ones.
