Best of the week
Week 43, 2026
19 October – 25 October 2026 (week in progress): the top 10 stories from 3 issues.
Anthropic in talks for second $45 billion Nscale data centre deal
Anthropic is reported in talks with Nscale for a second 460 MW West Virginia data centre worth about $45 billion
Tenstorrent hits $6.2B valuation
Tenstorrent raises $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation to stay independent and scale open AI chips
Microsoft drops the Essex AI data-centre project
Microsoft pulls out of Nscale's Essex AI data centre over power-supply concerns
Schaeffler opens 'humanoids making humanoids' factory in Taicang
Schaeffler opens a Taicang factory where six humanoids assemble actuators for other humanoids
Quantinuum breaks error-correction world record by 10x
Quantinuum sets an error-correction world record: 99.9995% logical fidelity on Helios
DeepSeek releases V4.1-Flash-1017 open weights under an MIT licence
Hackers use autonomous AI agents to breach company websites
Autonomous AI agents run by a criminal targeted more than 1,200 company websites with almost no human help
Four Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft in 27 hours
Four Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft end to end in 27 hours with no human help
Key practices for incident readiness in superintelligence training
CISA, NSA and NIST publish 10 incident-readiness practices for superintelligence training
Psychologist-checked AI feedback in online CBT nearly matched human therapists for social anxiety in a 263-person trial
Chosen automatically from each day’s ranked top stories (research-first, by evidence) or, before 22 October 2026, the day’s cover highlights. Issues: 19 October 2026 · 20 October 2026 · 21 October 2026.