Edition No. 29

Friday, October 23, 2026

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Lead

OpenAI nears a $30 billion raise at a $1.25 trillion valuation — the richest private round ever priced

OpenAI is working on raising up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation in a round led by Coatue and investors in the UAE, sources told CNBC, TechCrunch reported Thursday. Terms are still being negotiated and could change. The UAE money could also come with a deal to secure more computing capacity for OpenAI from the Emirates — capital and infrastructure negotiated as one. Should it close above $1 trillion, OpenAI would become the most valuable private company in history, up from the $852 billion post-money mark of its March raise. The company filed confidential IPO paperwork in June and declined to comment on the new round.

Source: TechCrunch — https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/22/openai-working-on-new-30b-raise-at-1-25t-valuation-ahead-of-ipo/

The Brief

1. Anthropic could file its public S-1 as early as today, three people tell Yahoo Finance

Anthropic is set to publicly file its S-1 IPO prospectus as early as Friday, October 23, Yahoo Finance reported Wednesday, citing three people familiar with the plans. The company confidentially filed with the SEC in June; public materials must appear 15 days before the investor roadshow, targeted for the week of November 9. A draft of the prospectus reviewed by the Wall Street Journal showed $16.3 billion in first-half 2026 revenue against a net loss above $80 billion — though about $72 billion of that was a non-cash accounting charge tied to financing instruments. Third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion with adjusted profitability, per the company. Wall Street expects the offering could raise up to $100 billion at a valuation near $2 trillion — potentially the largest IPO ever. Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment.

Source: PYMNTS (Yahoo Finance reporting) — https://www.pymnts.com/news/investment-tracker/ipo/2026/anthropic-could-file-ipo-paperwork-as-soon-as-friday/

2. DeepSeek raises about $15 billion — two days after the U.S. ordered its tech off federal systems

Just two days after Washington ordered federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek’s AI technology over security concerns, the Hangzhou lab has raised about $15 billion — roughly 100 billion yuan — in one of the largest funding rounds in Chinese history, Bloomberg reported via TechCrunch. Backers include battery giant CATL and Tencent, the company behind WeChat, with more than 15 investors in total. The company lifted its target at least twice amid heavy demand, from 50 billion to 80 billion yuan before settling at the final figure. DeepSeek plans to spend the money on AI infrastructure and open models for domestic and international markets, and is reportedly preparing for a potential IPO in China as early as next year.

Source: TechCrunch (Bloomberg reporting) — https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/22/deepseek-reportedly-raises-15b-days-after-us-restrictions/

3. Anthropic donates the Agent Skills standard to the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation

Anthropic announced Thursday it is donating Agent Skills — the open standard that packages specialized knowledge and workflows for AI agents — to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation. The transfer includes the standard’s name and logo, its GitHub organization, and the agentskills.io domain. More than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code, have integrated Agent Skills since Anthropic published it as an open standard in December 2025; Anthropic says developers have published 1 million skills with nearly 280 million installs (company-reported figures). It follows the same path as the Model Context Protocol, which Anthropic donated to the same foundation. Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and others will maintain the standard as individuals.

Source: Anthropic — https://www.anthropic.com/news/donating-agent-skills-to-the-agentic-ai-foundation

4. Meta creates a non-voting Class C stock to bankroll its AI buildout

Meta’s board has approved a new publicly listed, non-voting Class C common stock to fund its artificial intelligence spending, the company disclosed alongside third-quarter 2026 earnings on Wednesday, The Brief reports. The shares will be issued as a one-time dividend with an effective date of January 19, 2027, functioning like a 2-for-1 split while leaving voting power — including Mark Zuckerberg’s control — unchanged. The new class gives Meta a currency to raise cash, pay employees, or fund acquisitions without touching its AI budget. Q3 revenue hit a record $64.6 billion, up 26% year over year, while Meta raised the low end of its full-year 2026 capital expenditure forecast to $135 billion, from $130 billion.

Source: The Brief — https://www.thebrief.news/en/standard/article/35058/meta-plans-non-voting-class-c-stock-to-fund-ai-spending

5. Amazon: attacks on the AI-found PHP2Shell flaws began four days before the patches shipped

Attackers began targeting the critical PHP2Shell vulnerabilities on October 17 — four days before security patches were released — Amazon Threat Intelligence disclosed Wednesday, BleepingComputer reports. The flaws, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, allow remote code execution without authentication and had sat in PHP’s code for years until an August audit financed by OpenAI used an AI model to show they were exploitable. AWS CISO CJ Moses said the flaws are “now being broadly exploited in the wild” and warned defenders not to assume the disclosure date was the earliest date of exploitation. VirusTotal counts more than 5.1 million exposed PHP hosts. Organizations are urged to patch immediately and investigate suspicious activity back to at least October 17.

Source: BleepingComputer — https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/amazon-says-php2shell-exploitation-began-4-days-before-patches/

6. China approves DeepSeek and MiniMax for global use of their AI models, state-media account says

Major Chinese AI developers DeepSeek and MiniMax have won state approval for global use of their AI models, according to a Thursday post on Yuyuan Tantian, a social media account affiliated with state broadcaster CCTV — first reported by Reuters, the sole outlet with the story so far. The approval lands a week after China proposed export controls on 23 AI technologies, including models, agents, and computing clusters; Beijing’s commerce ministry said then that most AI technologies would remain exportable, with simplified licensing for open-source technology exports. Neither company immediately responded to requests for comment.

Source: Reuters — https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/chinas-deepseek-minimax-win-approval-ai-global-use-state-media-affiliated-entity-2026-10-23/

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From the AI & Justice book series — AI and Justice · AI and Justice: Education and Opportunity · AI and Justice: Economics and Opportunity · AI and Justice: Labor and Opportunity · AI and Justice: Entertainment and Opportunity · AI and Justice: Law · AI and Politics · AI and Religion · AI and Sex

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