AI & Technology
OpenAI is closing in on a record $1.25 trillion valuation A new $30 billion round led by Coatue would make the AI lab the most valuable private company ever on the eve of its IPO.
1 source
Still developing
ServiceNow and Nvidia launch Arc, a governed AI agent for enterprise work The pair is betting that hardware-enforced policy, not just model capability, is what lets agents act with limited human involvement.
Anthropic is lining up a mid-November IPO at a $1.5 trillion valuation The Claude maker is set to begin marketing shares the week of November 9 as investors weigh soaring revenue against computing costs and regulatory risk.
Google's 'universal' shopping cart finally lands The agentic cart Google previewed at I/O in May is rolling out across Search and Gemini, with price-drop alerts and Wallet checkout timed just before Black Friday. The Verge Apple updates App Store rules to explicitly ban AI nudify apps The new terms require developers to proactively prevent and remove nonconsensual intimate imagery, or face removal from the store. The Verge Meta Pauses Muse Sharing After Researchers Find Public URLs Meta has suspended a feature that allows users to share AI conversations after researchers discovered the URLs were publicly accessible on the open web, exposing potentially sensitive interactions to anyone who could find them. The Verge Stagwell lands ServiceNow in the biggest multi-agency deal in its history A three-year pact pairs Stagwell's AI marketing operating system with ServiceNow's platform and joint go-to-market pitches. Adweek MediaPost DeepSeek open-sources the inference engine behind its production serving DeepInfer, released under the Apache 2.0 license, ships with speculative decoding, deterministic sampling and support for both NVIDIA and Huawei hardware. GitHub Tesla begins making Optimus robots, and says it will sell Cybercabs by year's end On its Q3 earnings call, Tesla announced early production of its humanoid robot at Fremont, while cautioning that the software is far from ready, and confirmed customers can buy the wheel-less Cybercab by December. The Verge TechCrunch
AI & Technology AI & Technology Left alone on a virtual island, AI agents started playing
MIT researchers left 13 Claude-powered agents to explore for 30 hours without a task, and the idle time made them better at their jobs.
1 source →
AI & Technology Canva ships its first in-house AI image model, Canva Craft
The design tool's new model plans a layout before generating an image, aiming for more precise text and object placement.
1 source →
AI & Technology inDrive will test Pony.ai robotaxis in Kazakhstan in 2027
The ride-hailing company is teaming up with Pony.ai and Nvidia to bring driverless cars to Astana, a harsh-winter testing ground.
1 source →
ServiceNow & ITSM ServiceNow & ITSM ServiceNow employees are leaving on their own, Redditors say
Voluntary departures are stacking up on top of the layoffs, with insiders pointing at the new Workday-era leadership as the trigger.
1 source →
ServiceNow & ITSM ITSM transformations keep failing at the people layer
New data from Gartner and Bain point to adoption, not the platform, as where change programs fall short.
1 source →
ServiceNow & ITSM SAP's Cloud ALM skips SolMan's ITSM, leaving the door open to ServiceNow
With SolMan 7.2 mainstream maintenance ending at the close of 2027, SAP is pointing ITSM customers toward third-party platforms.
1 source →
AI & Technology
OpenAI is closing in on a record $1.25 trillion valuation A new $30 billion round led by Coatue would make the AI lab the most valuable private company ever on the eve of its IPO.
A new $30 billion round led by Coatue would make the AI lab the most valuable private company ever on the eve of its IPO.
OpenAI is reportedly close to securing another mega-round of private funding rather than heading straight to an IPO. The AI lab is working on raising up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation in a round led by Coatue alongside investors from the UAE, sources told CNBC. The UAE funding could also be paired with a deal to secure more computing capacity for OpenAI from the region, though terms are still being negotiated.
A valuation above $1 trillion would break records and set the bar higher for OpenAI's forthcoming IPO, which it filed confidentially for in June after its March raise valued it at $852 billion post-money. The high mark also has implications for Anthropic's IPO, which many believe is closer to materializing and reportedly targets a $1.5 to $2 trillion public debut.
1 source
TechCrunch
AI & Technology
Anthropic is lining up a mid-November IPO at a $1.5 trillion valuation The Claude maker is set to begin marketing shares the week of November 9 as investors weigh soaring revenue against computing costs and regulatory risk.
The Claude maker is set to begin marketing shares the week of November 9 as investors weigh soaring revenue against computing costs and regulatory risk.
Anthropic is preparing a November stock-market debut and is reportedly targeting a valuation of about $1.5 trillion rather than the $2 trillion previously thought, with the schedule dependent on market conditions. The listing comes as the company's expansion of computing infrastructure to power its Claude models has driven significant funding needs, with banks preparing around $60 billion for AI chip investments and a BB+ rating on its debt.
Alongside the IPO, Anthropic has agreed to support a European AI consultancy with private equity firm Hg, with offices in London and Berlin planned to launch before year-end. The company has also pledged to dedicate 5% of its equity to a public-benefit fund, and its IPO disclosures flag government restrictions and AI safety concerns as business risks.
1 source
CoinGape
AI & Technology
Left alone on a virtual island, AI agents started playing MIT researchers left 13 Claude-powered agents to explore for 30 hours without a task, and the idle time made them better at their jobs.
MIT researchers left 13 Claude-powered agents to explore for 30 hours without a task, and the idle time made them better at their jobs.
MIT researchers placed 13 AI agents, each running on Claude Opus 4.7, alone on a simulated desert island for 30 hours without a specific task, and they began inventing challenges of their own. The behavior shows the hallmarks of play, the team writes in a paper posted on arXiv. Afterward, the agents that had played generally beat identical agents that had never set foot on the island on tasks such as getting objects onto the island's tallest spire.
One agent, Eko, set out to conquer the tallest spire, failed, then hauled a rock up a neighboring summit and stacked blocks before leaping to the top. When a golden ring flew into the ocean, it built a heart of stones as a memorial to the lost ring. The researchers frame goal-free exploration as a different way to build agents, especially for controlling robots: "Perhaps some capabilities are best taught by tasks," they write. "Others may need something closer to a childhood."
1 source
TechCrunch
AI & Technology
Canva ships its first in-house AI image model, Canva Craft The design tool's new model plans a layout before generating an image, aiming for more precise text and object placement.
The design tool's new model plans a layout before generating an image, aiming for more precise text and object placement.
Canva has launched Canva Craft, an image-generation model that competes directly with those from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. It uses a two-stage architecture that lets it plan a design before generating an image, which Canva says gives greater precision, consistency, and control for complex images that require legible text and precise object placement. Craft can generate images at up to 2K resolution in more than 30 aspect ratios, and Canva trained it on millions of human-made templates from its content library.
The model currently ranks fourth on Design Arena's leaderboard, behind OpenAI's GPT-Image-2.5 Sunburst, GPT-Image-2.5 Flare, and GPT-Image-2. Canva plans to let AI agents plug into Craft through the open Model Context Protocol and to roll out faster Craft-fast and Craft-ultrafast models. It is available now to all users globally.
1 source
The Verge
AI & Technology
inDrive will test Pony.ai robotaxis in Kazakhstan in 2027 The ride-hailing company is teaming up with Pony.ai and Nvidia to bring driverless cars to Astana, a harsh-winter testing ground.
The ride-hailing company is teaming up with Pony.ai and Nvidia to bring driverless cars to Astana, a harsh-winter testing ground.
Ride-hailing company inDrive has signed a memorandum of understanding with China's Pony.ai and Nvidia to begin testing robotaxis in Kazakhstan's capital, Astana, in the first half of 2027. Pony.ai would supply its Gen-7 robotaxis, which inDrive would offer through its app and operate, while Nvidia would provide the AI technology, including its Hyperion platform and Halos safety system. Testing will initially involve a safety operator, with fully driverless rides the eventual goal.
The move reflects growing interest in self-driving beyond the U.S. and China, and comes as Uber announced plans to test Pony.ai's robotaxis in London. Astana's snow and ice make it a useful test for autonomous systems, and the announcement coincided with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's first visit to Kazakhstan. Pony.ai aims to have more than 3,500 robotaxis operating in over 20 cities worldwide by the end of 2026.
1 source
TechCrunch
ServiceNow & ITSM
ServiceNow and Nvidia launch Arc, a governed AI agent for enterprise work The pair is betting that hardware-enforced policy, not just model capability, is what lets agents act with limited human involvement.
The pair is betting that hardware-enforced policy, not just model capability, is what lets agents act with limited human involvement.
ServiceNow and Nvidia announced Arc, a "personal long-running AI agent" for everyday enterprise work, with general availability on October 22, 2026. Rather than a chat assistant, Arc is designed to plan work, use apps and systems, write code, and take actions with limited human involvement. It runs under a joint governance architecture: the agent is governed by ServiceNow's Super Intelligence Control Tower and enforced with Nvidia OpenShell, while Nvidia's OpenShell and BlueField data-processing units can read ServiceNow's AI Passport to validate what an agent is permitted to access or execute.
The setup adds hardware-enforced runtime policies, including rapid kill-switch controls aimed at limiting ungoverned AI activity inside corporate systems. Jon Sigler, executive vice president and general manager of the AI Platform at ServiceNow, called Arc "the first personal AI agent built for everyday work and governable by IT through the Super Intelligence Control Tower and Nvidia OpenShell." Investors are watching whether Arc ties visibly to ServiceNow's AI ACV, which passed the $1 billion mark in Q2 2026.
2 sources
PYMNTS
Yahoo Finance
ServiceNow & ITSM
ServiceNow employees are leaving on their own, Redditors say Voluntary departures are stacking up on top of the layoffs, with insiders pointing at the new Workday-era leadership as the trigger.
Voluntary departures are stacking up on top of the layoffs, with insiders pointing at the new Workday-era leadership as the trigger.
A post on the r/servicenow subreddit from October 19, 2026 (174 upvotes, 48 comments) claims employees are voluntarily leaving ServiceNow in addition to those affected by layoffs, with the original poster describing earlier layoff discussions as "the tip of the iceberg." The post calls the new executive hires "a lesson in nepotism, failing upwards, and how not to do things," says several of the new leaders came from Workday, and accuses them of bringing "obscene micromanagement, make-work policies, and sudden urgent changes without governance." It explicitly warns job seekers away from engineering positions.
Commenters say the company's real moat was the employees "that would do anything for their customers," and that many of them are now gone, leaving remaining workers "just doing the minimum while waiting to see if their number is up." A commenter with five to ten years at the company said they left on their own "because I was no longer proud to be part of the company," and the thread also flagged a new security offering that tells customers spending millions annually that they do not need "legacy" ServiceNow products, including ITSM.
1 source
Yahoo Finance
ServiceNow & ITSM
ITSM transformations keep failing at the people layer New data from Gartner and Bain point to adoption, not the platform, as where change programs fall short.
New data from Gartner and Bain point to adoption, not the platform, as where change programs fall short.
ITSM.tools argues that most ITSM transformation plans give the platform an owner, a budget, and a schedule, while adoption gets a communications plan, and that gap is where most programs fall short. The piece cites Bain data showing only 12% of business transformations achieve their original ambitions, alongside Gartner research finding that only 45% of employees realized the change goals set by their organization, and just 32% of mid-to-senior leaders saying their last change was adopted on time and without undue strain.
The analysis breaks the failure into three layers: a sponsorship gap in which leaders never work out what the new operating model will ask of them personally, practitioner fatigue behind a Gartner April 2025 finding that 79% of employees have low trust in their organization's ability to deliver change, and a mutual waiting game in which leaders and practitioners each wait for the other to commit first. The proposed fix is simulation-based learning, in which leaders, managers, and practitioners run the new model together before go-live instead of relying on training and passive communications.
1 source
ITSM.tools
ServiceNow & ITSM
SAP's Cloud ALM skips SolMan's ITSM, leaving the door open to ServiceNow With SolMan 7.2 mainstream maintenance ending at the close of 2027, SAP is pointing ITSM customers toward third-party platforms.
With SolMan 7.2 mainstream maintenance ending at the close of 2027, SAP is pointing ITSM customers toward third-party platforms.
A new analysis from the ERP Ninja blog dissects why SAP Cloud ALM, the SaaS successor to Solution Manager, does not carry over SolMan-style ITSM. SAP says explicitly that Cloud ALM is not a complete functional copy of SolMan, and that customers using SolMan ITSM must plan a migration to a third-party ITSM product; mainstream maintenance for SolMan 7.2 ends December 31, 2027, with extended maintenance possibly covering some functions until 2030. The piece reads the omission as a deliberate best-of-breed strategy: Cloud ALM focuses on SAP-specific implementation, monitoring, and change, while enterprise-wide ITSM spanning Microsoft 365, Salesforce, AWS, networks, and security is left to platforms like ServiceNow.
The post walks through a month-end interface failure in which Cloud ALM detects the anomaly, ServiceNow registers and escalates the incident, and the two systems split change management, stressing that teams must decide in advance which system owns change approval, implementation records, and release decisions rather than running both redundantly. It concludes that while not every SAP consultant needs to become a ServiceNow expert, understanding ITSM concepts and the division of roles between SAP-specific tools and enterprise ITSM platforms is becoming essential.
1 source
note.com