Anthropic security chief braces for bug flood

Also: DeepSeek raises $15B, OpenAI nears $1.25T round

Oct 23, 2026

Good morning!

“I am rooting for the machines! I have always been on the machines’ side.”
-- Claude Shannon

It is Friday 23rd October 2026. No show today; we are back live Wednesday, October 28th at 9 AM PT with Debo Olaosebikan.

Anthropic’s security chief tells defenders to fund the basics now

A frontier lab insider is warning that AI-found flaws will outpace patching before AI starts making software safer.

Anthropic’s Jason Clinton said conditions after four rough days will get much worse before improving, and urged security leaders to ask boards now for help with fundamentals, not AI, to hold on roughly 18 months.
Nick Dobos says 3% of all critical security bugs ever recorded surfaced in the last month, a pace he projects at about 100,000 more this year, or roughly 26% of the all-time total.
Clinton’s relief is a forecast: he expects cheap small models to saturate cyber skills around mid-2027 and stop shipped bugs, while predicting many hardware vulnerabilities over the next nine months.

Sources: Jason D. Clinton · Nick Dobos

DeepSeek raises another $15 billion

China’s most-watched model lab now has a war chest that lets it compete on compute, not just efficiency, with a domestic platform giant behind it.

Andrew Curran reported that DeepSeek, nicknamed the Whale, has raised another $15 billion, linking to the announcement in his post.
Replying to a follower in the same thread, Curran said Tencent was a major investor in the round, tying one of China’s largest internet companies directly to the lab.
The post gives no valuation, full investor list or spending plan, so how much of the money goes to chips, talent or open model releases is still unknown.

Source: Andrew Curran

OpenAI nears a UAE-led round at $1.25 trillion

Gulf investors are becoming OpenAI’s bridge to public markets as it races to fund compute before listing.

OpenAI is close to finalizing a funding round of up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation, led by UAE investors, according to people familiar with the matter speaking to CNBC.
The same sources describe the round as a bridge to an initial public offering planned for 2027, positioning the raise as interim financing rather than a final private round.
The deal is not yet closed and the size is a ceiling, so the final amount and investor mix could change before any announcement from OpenAI.

Source: CNBC