Tuesday 20 October 2026
Top stories today:
OpenAI seeks ~$30B at $1.4T+ valuation ahead of Anthropic IPO
DeepSeek faces DHS removal order at U.S. civilian agencies
Apple announces Oct. 28 event, touchscreen MacBook expected
MiniMaxās M3.1 Flash debuts, touts āgenerational leapā
Inception unveils Mercury 3 diffusion LLM, takes aim at Luna, Haiku
0. Data & Calendar
All values as of 6 AM ET / 3 AM PT, other than S&P500 and NASDAQ close (4 PM ET / 1 PM PT).
All times are ET.
Listen to our AI-generated podcast summarizing todayās newsletter (beware of hallucinations):
1. OpenAI said to seek ~$30B at $1.4T+ valuation ahead of Anthropic IPO
SoftBank and MGX are among the investors reportedly in talks to join the round.
Last week: OpenAI reportedly met with long-only funds and sovereign wealth funds to accelerate fundraising.
Annualized revenue is expected to rise from $50B to $70B by year-end, OpenAI told investors.
OpenAI needs capital for infrastructure and to bolster its balance sheet if its 2027 IPO is delayed.
Mid-Nov.: Anthropic is expected to go public.
Separately, Sam Altman outlined 3 paths to safe AI development, including international oversight, merging AI labs, or one firm monopolizing compute, which he opposed.
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3. DeepSeek faces DHS removal order at U.S. civilian agencies
The order also bans future purchases of DeepSeek products and services.
Restrictions extend to DeepSeek affiliates and third-party products and services built using its models.
DHS cited potential data transfers to China but did not disclose specific security vulnerabilities.
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5. Apple announces Oct. 28 event, first-ever touchscreen MacBook, M6 MacBook Pro expected
The āPro and tellā event will take place in Los Angeles, with Apple marketing chief Greg Joswiak sharing the invite on social media:
The 14-inch and 16-inch touchscreen MacBook Pros with OLED displays are expected to be the showstoppers.
A new iPad mini with an OLED display, revamped speakers, and a relocated FaceTime camera is also expected.
A new iMac could also debut.
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7. MiniMaxās M3.1 Flash debuts, touts āgenerational leapā in agentic tasks, coding, cybersecurity
MiniMax-M3.1-Flash is on par with GLM-5.3-Flash and Claude Haiku 5.5 but trails DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index:
Costs $0.15/$0.60 per 1M input/output tokens, vs. GLM-5.3-Flashās $0.15/$0.50 and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017ās $0.006/$1.20 (peak rate).
Oct. 23: model weights are set for release.
