Biohub, NIH and the Department of Energy are building an open biological dataset for AI, with DOE putting in more than $500 million over five years. Biohub puts the total at $1.8 billion, and the supercomputers come from DOE's national labs.

Invest

Anthropic's AI model ends HAWK's bid to become a NIST post-quantum standard

Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview found a weakness in HAWK, a post-quantum signature scheme NIST was weighing for standardization. Anthropic said the model needed 60 hours where human review had run two years, and NIST says HAWK's team has since withdrawn it.

Leadership

Record fuel bill tests Delta's 20% earnings growth promise

Delta Air Lines made $1.4 billion in adjusted pre-tax profit in the June quarter while paying the highest quarterly fuel bill in its history. Its full-year growth promise now depends on outrunning fuel, and a Wall Street Journal report finds energy costs also climbing in Walmart's automated warehouses.

Product

Standard Bots raises $200 million Series C at $1 billion valuation; CEO says deployments are fastest route to autonomy

Standard Bots raised a $200 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, led by RoboStrategy, the company said. The price backs CEO Evan Beard's bet that robots improve with each deployment, at a time when buyers such as Walmart report automation as slow and costly to get working.

Science

Wrong AI advice shown before a person decides lowers that person's accuracy

Participants judging defendants in two experiments grew less accurate when a supposed AI gave wrong advice before they decided. A 2022 study in which an accurate parser cost annotators no quality suggests the risk grows with the model's error rate.

Security

Stanford's Dan Boneh says AI could shrink a decade of cryptographic vetting to a month

Stanford's Dan Boneh says AI could cut the roughly 10 years a new cryptographic assumption waits before deployment to about a month. On keys already in use, fellow a16z crypto panelist Eddy Lazzarin said recent AI math results showed no new weakness.

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Lenders price Waymo's first $5 billion loan at 5.25 points over the benchmark

Waymo closed a $5 billion term loan on October 8, its first debt financing, with PIMCO, Blackstone and Sixth Street as lead lenders. Until now the robotaxi company funded its growth with equity, so this spread is the first price lenders have set on its own credit.

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US suspends eight employers, including Microsoft and Infosys, from green card labor certification

U.S. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling suspended eight employers, including Infosys and Microsoft, from the PERM green card program. Pending cases stop, and a worker can carry a priority date to a new employer only with an approved I-140 and a 180-day-old adjustment filing.

Leadership

Stock pay leaves only 8 of 55 listed SaaS firms above the Rule of 40

Only 8 of 55 listed SaaS companies clear the Rule of 40 on an EBITDA basis, against 25 on free cash flow, Aventis Advisors found. Stock-based compensation explains almost all of the gap, and Andreessen Horowitz argues boards can no longer leave it out.

Science

AlphaFold's near-experimental accuracy did not solve protein folding, DeepMind and Biohub researchers say

AlphaFold predicted protein structures to a median backbone accuracy of 0.96 angstroms in CASP14, matching experimental structures in most cases. Google DeepMind's Pushmeet Kohli and Biohub's Sal Candido call that only the beginning, arguing the protein folding problem is far from solved.

Security

Justice Department disrupts China's Integrity Tech for a second time in two years

US agencies say China-based Integrity Tech, a firm with Chinese government ties, equips hackers who target critical infrastructure. The Justice Department's domain seizures are its second disruption of the firm in two years; the joint advisory leaves the edge-device entry point for owners to close.

Security

Hackers talked Meta's AI support bot into resetting Instagram passwords

Hackers took over Instagram accounts by getting Meta's AI support assistant to add their own email address and issue a password reset. The attackers say the trick failed on every account with multi-factor authentication, so the exposed accounts were the ones protected by a password alone.