AI News Today, November 9: Top Stories

Latest AI News — Last 48 Hours

axios.com 1m ago 21

Trump defends Huang, calls him 'honorable' amid spy probe

President Trump told reporters outside Mar-a-Lago that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is 'an honorable guy' and 'a fine person' after Huang admitted to an affair with Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, who US intelligence has linked to China's MSS. Trump said 'I haven't heard he's done anything wrong,' backed Huang keeping the CEO role, and signaled he may bring him on his mid-November trip to the Philippines and China. The remarks cut against congressional Republicans who have demanded Huang testify Nov 18 and a classified Rubio-overseen memo warning the administration of Huang's ties to a suspected Chinese spy.

scmp.com 1m ago 23

Tencent AI chief warns models near biology-harm threshold

Speaking at a Hong Kong science event Saturday, Tencent chief AI scientist Yao Shunyu, 29, said cyber abilities of today's AI and the soon-to-arrive bio abilities 'will reach a threshold where it's actually possible to do harm,' warning biology risks may be harder to manage than cyber risks. Yao, who joined Tencent last year after a stint at OpenAI working on Operator and Deep Research, said Anthropic has a 'strong argument' for closed models and called on Chinese open-source labs to prioritize safety. Tencent plans to release Hy4 weights and a safety-testing report in the coming days.

techcrunch.com 1h ago 20

Sequoia partners blindsided as Botha joined SpaceX board

The FT reports Roelof Botha joined SpaceX's board in June 2026 without first clearing it with Sequoia's partnership or compliance team, catching partners off guard and complicating the firm's ability to trade its roughly $20B SpaceX stake. New co-stewards Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, who took over in November 2025, have since halved Sequoia's general-partner count, merged early-stage and growth teams, shut the London office, and ended the Scouts program — moves sources describe as unwinding Botha's legacy at the top AI venture firm.

nytimes.com 3h ago 22

Rubio drafted classified memo warning officials of Huang's spy ties

Secretary of State Marco Rubio oversaw the drafting of a highly classified memo in spring 2026 warning top Trump administration officials that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was in a close relationship with a Chinese spy, per the NYT. The memo, distributed to officials with high-level clearances before Trump's May China trip, drew on electronic surveillance of Alice Huang and concluded Beijing's MSS had recruited her to gather information on US AI chips and push Jensen Huang to lobby Washington for looser export controls.

apnews.com 3h ago 23

US AI safety center staff now informally reporting to White House

Two former officials told AP that staff at the Commerce Department's Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence (CAISSI) were asked to informally report to a White House office, cutting against its description as an independent division. The $10M/year center, one-eighth the budget of its UK counterpart, lacks a permanent leader after its April director was hired and fired within days and his replacement resigned months later, and it stopped publishing public AI safety reports in August.

truthout.org 4h ago 18

Truthout: AI firms target cash-strapped schools as teacher substitute

Truthout reports that cash-strapped US schools are adopting ChatGPT, Amira Learning and other AI tools as substitutes for hiring teachers, citing Stanford's SCALE Initiative finding 'extremely limited' causal evidence that AI improves K-12 learning outcomes. The Center for Democracy & Technology warns bias-prone content filtering and predictive analytics disproportionately flag students of color as 'at-risk'. NYC has banned K-8 classroom AI use, Los Angeles limited it for 370,000 students, and Chicago advocates are pushing for a moratorium.

wsj.com 4h ago 22

US professional services add 70K Oct jobs despite AI job-loss fears

US professional and business services added 70,000 jobs in October, the largest monthly gain since July 2022, with consulting (+17,300), legal (+2,400) and accounting (+2,300) all growing despite being frequently ranked among the industries most exposed to AI displacement. Narrower roles show pressure — document preparation employment is down 17% year over year through September — but the top-line numbers complicate the 'AI is gutting white-collar work' narrative at a sensitive political moment.

cnbc.com 4h ago ALERT 32

Jensen Huang admits affair with suspected Chinese spy in staff memo

In a Sunday memo to Nvidia staff, Jensen Huang admitted having an affair with Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive US intelligence believes was recruited by China's MSS to target him, writing 'I was unfaithful to my wife... I am deeply sorry' and 'I take full responsibility'. Nvidia's board initiated an independent investigation with outside counsel, saying it has no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised. Three House committee chairs demand Huang attend a closed-door briefing November 18, and Senator Chris Coons says 'Congress will investigate and get answers' — turning the scandal into a wildcard for Huang's push to loosen China chip export controls.

bloomberg.com 6h ago 23

DeepSeek Harness hits 1.54M daily users, 92T tokens a day

DeepSeek said its open-source agent app Harness reached 1.54 million daily active users on Nov 4, less than three months after launch, and now processes roughly 92 trillion tokens per day — about 60 million tokens per user. The figure, disclosed to Bloomberg, pushes DeepSeek further up the Chinese consumer-agent leaderboard and comes as domestic rivals court the same prosumer coding and research workloads.

nvidianews.nvidia.com 6h ago ALERT 28

Nvidia board opens Huang spy-plot probe as CEO admits affair

Nvidia's board said on Nov 8 it is launching an independent-director inquiry, assisted by outside counsel, into reporting that CEO Jensen Huang was the target of a foreign-intelligence operation; it says there is no evidence Nvidia secrets were compromised and that Huang is cooperating. The statement landed the same day Axios reported Huang emailed staff admitting an affair, taking 'full responsibility' and saying he fell short of duties to the board, shareholders, and employees. The board publicly reaffirmed confidence in Huang's leadership.

247wallst.com 8h ago 18

US chip and computer imports hit $1T annualized pace on AI buildout

US Census data for September 2026 shows imports of computers and chips at $86.9 billion for the month — a $12.1B MoM jump (second largest on record) and 151% YoY growth, translating to a $1.04 trillion annualized pace. Imports in these categories have quadrupled since the start of 2024; for comparison, annual growth during the dot-com peak topped out at 34%. The figure quantifies the physical hardware flow underwriting the current AI capex cycle.

runtimewire.com 8h ago 17

Theseus Robotics launches from YC to put humanoids in supermarkets

Zurich-based Theseus Robotics came out of stealth on Nov 7 as part of Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch, selling software and AI models that convert off-the-shelf wheeled humanoids into overnight shelf restockers and daytime e-grocery pickers. The three-founder team pitches 'lights off at 9pm, shelves full by 9am' without store retrofits, and says retailer pilots are planned for 2027. No funding figure was disclosed with the launch.

theinformation.com 9h ago 19

AI firms have already sold $300B of stock in 2026 — and more is lined up

The Information's Alex Eichenstein reports AI companies sold or priced more than $300 billion of stock and mandatory convertibles in 2026, excluding Anthropic's upcoming IPO, with roughly another $100 billion still on tap. The piece, published Nov 8 after a sharp post-midterm selloff, questions how much more supply the market can absorb and at what prices — context for the Anthropic valuation talks that slid from $2T toward $1.1-1.3T in recent days.

fourweekmba.com 9h ago 20

Cognition's new Devin build leaks a five-tier 'Silicon' model family

Reverse-engineering the Devin CLI build Cognition shipped on Nov 7 (3000.12.17) turned up five new identifiers for a model family called Silicon, in tiers low, medium, high, xhigh and max; none appeared in the Oct 30 build. X users mapped the codename claude-donut-eap to silicon-high and claude-onigiri-eap to obsidian-3-high, reading the claude- prefix as pointing to Anthropic. Neither Anthropic nor Cognition has confirmed the model's lab or release timing.

cnbc.com 9h ago 21

Amazon stands up a new home robot team around Fauna's Sprout

Amazon formally organized Fauna Robotics inside a new Personal Robotics Group staffed with much of the original Astro team plus an unnamed MIT roboticist, CNBC reported Nov 8. Job listings describe a new-to-world home robot that would navigate dynamic home environments and operate alongside family members; design, price and release date are undisclosed. Fauna, acquired in March, built the 3.5-foot humanoid Sprout; the original $1,450 Astro shipped to only a few thousand customers before Amazon shut its business version.

mlq.ai 9h ago 25

Anthropic emails enterprise customers their account data was accessed

Anthropic began emailing enterprise Claude customers on Nov 7 that a third-party cybersecurity research firm accessed internal systems in late October without authorization, viewing account ID, organization ID, plan tier, usage and spend metrics; conversation content, passwords and payment data were not exposed. The firm, which Anthropic declined to name, has certified in writing that it deleted the data, and the incident was reported to Korean authorities. Security researcher Jamieson O'Reilly surfaced the notice publicly; the description matches Cathedral, the startup that disclosed breaching Anthropic in under 12 hours in October.

9to5mac.com 10h ago 23

Apple's Ternus pushes Federighi to ship agentic Siri by 2027

Mark Gurman reports Apple CEO John Ternus held a closed-door meeting pressing software chief Craig Federighi to move beyond incremental Siri tweaks toward an agentic assistant that tracks goals and continues work between conversations, with a target of shipping as early as 2027. The internal push also restructured the iOS 28 M1 milestone to give engineers 6 weeks of coding and 2 weeks of integration (vs the prior 4/4 split), a 50% increase in coding time, while Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell is reportedly weighing a departure.

cnbc.com 12h ago ALERT 34

Anthropic buys $3.4B of gas generators to power its data centers

Anthropic committed roughly $3.4 billion in late September to take over 1.7 gigawatts of heavy-duty gas generators that OnePWR Solutions had ordered from Caterpillar about two years ago, the FT reported Nov 8. The deal buys Anthropic OnePWR's place in Caterpillar's production queue plus engineering and installation services, but does not include OnePWR itself or any of its employees. Piper Sandler describes the transaction as a $3.4B sale of OnePWR's power-generation platform to 'a frontier AI lab' — the largest known single purchase of power-gen equipment by any AI lab.

the-decoder.com 13h ago 17

AI auditors drown reviewers in false alarms at 99% catch target

Anthropic Institute researcher Andy Hall and Dan Thompson replicated METR agent-log studies across GPT-5, GPT-6 Astra, Opus 4.8 and Gemini 3.8 Flash as auditors. GPT-5 caught nearly 98% of reward hacking at 5% false-alarm rate, but pushing detection to 99% drove GPT-6 Astra's false positives to 15%. At 100,000 agent sessions a month, a 3% false-positive rate would produce 3,000 false alarms alongside ~2,000 real catches, overwhelming human reviewers.

newsletter.semianalysis.com 15h ago 22

China's Inner Mongolia AI hub: 22 projects, $3M/MW, 30K workers

SemiAnalysis published a Nov 7 on-the-ground report from Inner Mongolia's Chahar High-tech Zone, documenting 22 datacenter projects employing roughly 30,000 construction workers. The Galaxy campus at Ulanqab is designed for up to 800MW of IT capacity—comparable to Stargate Abilene—with the initial 120MW phase finished in one year at about one-fifth the US cost, pushing regional capex below $3M/MW. Envision Group supplies 60%+ of power through 420MW of dedicated wind farms, and the site is piloting a 5MW solid-state transformer that converts 10kV AC directly to 800V DC.

thehackernews.com 1d ago ALERT 32

Claude Code's 'Don't Ask Again' leaked 2,539 secrets to public GitHub

Apiiro says Claude Code's 'Yes, and don't ask again' permission saves the full approved command — passwords, API keys, tokens and all — in plaintext to .claude/settings.local.json, which is not added to .gitignore. A scan of 104,185 public copies on GitHub found real credentials in 1,122 files and 2,539 distinct secrets across 1,994 repositories, including 379 database passwords, 23 AWS keys, 42 GitHub/GitLab/npm tokens, and 43 SSH logins. Apiiro says four related reports to Anthropic were auto-closed by a bot with no reply, and half the exposed files sat on default branches for at least 217 days.

247wallst.com 1d ago ALERT 30

Microchip: AI buyers took over factories, lead times stretch to 32 weeks

Microchip Technology shares fell 10% after CEO Steve Sanghi told investors that AI buyers 'came in and took over the whole factory. They pushed everybody out,' at outside assembly and test houses that supply much of the industry. Standard chip lead times have extended from 4-8 weeks to 6-32 weeks, and Microchip says resolving the capacity crunch via in-house production or alternative suppliers will take roughly six months. The company's own data-center segment serving AI customers grew 55.7% YoY toward a $1B 2026 run-rate — the same AI demand creating the shortage squeezing everyone else.

dronexl.co 2d ago ALERT 28

Axon sinks $1.2B into Skydio and takes exclusive US police drone channel

Axon is putting $1.2B into autonomous-drone maker Skydio at a $5.2B pre-money valuation, lifting its stake from roughly 15% to 37% through a mix of ~60% cash and ~40% Axon stock, with only $255M of new primary capital and the rest secondary. The deal makes Axon the exclusive distributor of Skydio drones to US and Canadian public-safety agencies, cementing a public-safety drone duopoly. Axon stock fell ~18% on the news, pressured in part by $130M of counter-drone orders slipping beyond 2026.

cryptobriefing.com 2d ago ALERT 32

DeepMind AI agents expose two legacy 1024-bit RSA weaknesses

Google DeepMind said on Nov 6 that AI agents guided by cryptanalysts Nadia Heninger and Emmanuel Thomé found two cryptographic advances against legacy 1024-bit RSA in just weeks, led by DeepMind's Dj Dvijotham and Abhradeep Thakurta. The first makes signature forgery against short-digest 1024-bit RSA roughly 1,600x more efficient; the second cuts the marginal cost of batch-factoring additional 1024-bit keys by about 30x. Modern RSA-2048 is not affected, but DeepMind frames the work as a demonstration that AI agents can compress years of cryptanalysis into weeks.

research.checkpoint.com 2d ago ALERT 28

ARTEX AI agents steal Apple signing certs for under $1,500

Check Point Research disclosed that a single ARTEX operator ran autonomous AI agents for about two weeks (Oct 14-29) to steal 300+ Apple iOS code-signing certificates (three fully valid) and 190,000+ Honor of Kings credentials from 13 gray-market backends. The operator consumed roughly 36 billion tokens of DeepSeek v4.1 Flash and Kimi K3.1 Pro for an estimated $700-$1,500, mostly asking for progress updates rather than directing the attack.

psi.inc 2d ago ALERT 30

Anthropic-powered PSI system proves 18-year-old quantum conjecture

Physical Superintelligence says an internal research system built on a non-public Anthropic model produced a complete proof of the Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture by its third day of operation, with Lean verifying every step. The conjecture, open since 2008, bounds when quantum computers can achieve exponential speedups over classical ones. The system refined the result twice after the initial proof; David Turturean led the work with Jim Halverson and Phiala Shanahan advising.

bleepingcomputer.com 2d ago ALERT 32

OpenSSH flaw bypasses password-disabled Linux logins on musl systems

A decade-old OpenSSH bug nicknamed '*sshole' lets attackers log into password-disabled accounts on musl-libc Linux systems (Alpine, OpenWrt, Buildroot, Yocto) by submitting a password 256+ characters long; glibc and PAM-protected systems are not affected. The flaw has existed since 2016 and is fixed in OpenSSH 10.6p2. Researcher Lawrence Abrams writes it was surfaced through ~17,600 AI-agent authentication probes.

justice.gov 3d ago ALERT 28

DOJ launches 'Super Intelligence Task Force' to prosecute AI misuse

US Attorney General Todd Blanche on Nov 5 announced the DOJ Super Intelligence Task Force (DOJ-SITF), co-chaired by Associate AG Stanley Woodward and Associate Deputy AG Stephen Weiss, to prosecute foreign state actors, transnational criminals, and corporate actors who misuse AI. The new unit absorbs the AI Litigation Task Force Pam Bondi set up in January 2026 and serves as DOJ's main liaison with the White House's Super Intelligence Force under DNI Jay Clayton. The Trump administration uses 'Super Intelligence' as its executive-branch term for AI.

niemanlab.org 3d ago ALERT 28

Meta pauses new commercial terms after publisher pushback

Meta removed its preview link and paused implementation of the November 20 commercial terms indefinitely, saying it will keep engaging with stakeholders. The reversal follows a Norway preliminary injunction, a Brazil court order blocking Meta from using journalistic content without authorization, a UK CMA formal probe, and public pushback from UK and German publishers plus Sen. Adam Schiff.

thinkingmachines.ai 3d ago ALERT 33

Thinking Machines debuts Inkling 2 Small, Apache 2.0 weights next week

Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab launched Inkling 2 Small on November 5, a 594B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 17B active parameters and a 292M-parameter vision encoder. The model currently runs closed on Tinker with full Apache 2.0 weights promised next week after external safety testing, and was pretrained on 8.4T tokens before extended reasoning phases out to 1M-token trajectories. It scores 31 on the AA Intelligence Index, 86.3% on SWEBench Pro Hard, and 72.1% on DeepSWE.

cnbc.com 3d ago ALERT 30

House GOP wants Jensen Huang briefing on Megaspeed China ties

House Foreign Affairs Chair Brian Mast, Select Committee on China Chair John Moolenaar and Intelligence Chair Rick Crawford sent a November 4 letter asking Jensen Huang for a closed-door briefing on November 18 — one day after Nvidia's Q3 earnings. US intelligence had reportedly flagged Megaspeed executive Alice Huang as 'a Chinese intelligence asset' who cultivated a close relationship with the Nvidia CEO; Megaspeed is a Singapore-based regional cloud customer previously scrutinized for helping Beijing access restricted AI chips. Nvidia says Huang shares only 'ordinary business information' with customer executives.

cnbc.com 3d ago ALERT 31

Nasdaq sheds record $2.3T as AI-chip rout deepens

The Nasdaq 100 fell 6.4% on Thursday — a record $2.3 trillion of market cap wiped out — while the Philadelphia semiconductor index crashed 12% as investors priced the Democratic midterm sweep's threat to AI data-center buildouts. Nvidia and Qualcomm each dropped more than 9%, with Nvidia alone losing roughly $450 billion in market value; AMD, Micron and Applied Materials posted double-digit losses. The sell-off followed voters passing data-center restrictions in 40 of 41 local ballot measures across 10 states.

This Week's Biggest Movers in AI

vs average of last 4 issues — click to explore

Entity	Now	Avg	Change
Agents	88	9.3	▲ +846%
Chips	72	2.3	▲ +3030%
AI Infrastructure	68	2	▲ +3300%
Regulation	68	10	▲ +580%
Anthropic	67	11.3	▲ +493%
Funding	56	0.3	▲ +18567%
NVIDIA	43	0.8	▲ +5275%
Google	42	2	▲ +2000%
OpenAI	52	14.8	▲ +251%
Robotics	32	1.3	▲ +2362%
Coding Tools	28	0.8	▲ +3400%
Generative AI	26	0.3	▲ +8567%
Inference	26	0.3	▲ +8567%
Safety	24	1	▲ +2300%
Microsoft	22	2	▲ +1000%