US employers added 165,000 jobs in October, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Economists had expected about 65,000. The unemployment rate held at four point one percent. Earlier months were also revised up by a combined 84,000 jobs. The strong report makes an interest rate rise by the Federal Reserve in December more likely.
\nProfessional and business services added about 70,000 jobs and health care about 42,000. Transportation, warehousing and manufacturing also grew. Average hourly earnings rose by four tenths of a percent on the month and about three percent on the year. Labour force participation stayed just under 62 percent. After the release, traders priced in a high chance of a rate rise in December and Treasury yields moved higher. That pricing is a market expectation, not a decision.
OpenAI has released GPT-6 Cyber, a model built to find software flaws and write working exploits. It is the first model OpenAI rates as critical for cybersecurity under its own safety framework. Because of that rating, only vetted organisations in its Daybreak Red programme can use it. They must verify identity and meet strict account security rules.
\nOn the ExploitGym benchmark, which tests turning known bugs into working attacks, the model succeeded in about 48 percent of tasks. Its predecessor managed about 32 percent. OpenAI also rates it high for biological and chemical risk. Safeguards include sandboxed use, monitoring for misuse, and blocking help against industrial control systems and essential services. The benchmark figures come from OpenAI itself and have not been checked independently.
The independent evaluator METR says Anthropic is improving its AI models about twice as fast as it did between early 2024 and late 2025. METR estimates that most of the speed-up comes from AI tools helping Anthropic's own staff with coding and experiments. More training compute is not the main driver, it says. METR found no clear bottleneck that would stop further acceleration within a year.
\nThe assessment covered August to October 2026. Its central estimate is a speed-up of about one point nine times, with a wide range of uncertainty. Anthropic withheld most of the evidence METR found most useful, saying it could help competitors. METR also notes that its benchmark measure may not match real-world impact, and that the earlier rate may have been unusually slow. Staff reported large personal productivity gains, but those figures are self-reported.
US stocks had their worst day since April 2025 on Thursday. The Nasdaq Composite fell five and a half percent and is now in a correction, more than ten percent below its October record. The S&P 500 lost more than four percent and the Dow fell about 1,800 points. Investors sold chip and AI infrastructure stocks on fears that the new Democratic majority will slow the building of data centres.
\nThe semiconductor sector had its worst day since March 2020. Nvidia fell about nine percent and Broadcom about ten percent. Memory and data-centre suppliers fell further, and smaller AI cloud providers lost between ten and seventeen percent. Senator Bernie Sanders has called for a national data-centre moratorium, and strategists at UBS estimate that about 30 percent of the data-centre capacity expected for 2028 is now at risk. That is a forecast, not a measured number. Asian markets followed on Friday, with Japan's Nikkei entering a bear market. Weekly US jobless claims fell to 189,000, which did little to lift the mood.
Qualcomm's revenue from phone chips fell 26 percent to about five billion dollars in the quarter to September. The company blamed the end of its Apple modem business and pressure from memory prices on phone makers. Total quarterly revenue was about ten billion dollars, down eight percent from a year earlier. Its shares fell about nine percent on Thursday, in a day when all chip stocks were sold.
\nOther parts of the business grew. Car chips reached a record of about two billion dollars in a quarter, up almost 90 percent. Qualcomm also announced an AI data-centre partnership with Amazon and says its data-centre business is aiming for five billion dollars a year. For the current quarter it guides to revenue of between 10.4 and 11.2 billion dollars. It expects phones to be less than half of its sales in the new fiscal year. The company renewed long-term licence deals with Apple, Huawei and Transsion.
OpenAI says an unreleased AI model for cyber security built working root exploits for 948 different Linux kernel bugs. It did so in a single automated run in October that cost a little over one million dollars in compute. That is roughly 1,300 dollars per exploit. The company says the agents also found at least ten new attack techniques.
\nThe pipeline first flagged about 2,300 possible bugs and confirmed about 1,700 of them. Security staff review every exploit and proposed patch before it goes to the kernel maintainers. OpenAI says hundreds of reports and fixes have gone out so far, starting with the most serious, and partners in its Patch the Planet programme are sending the rest. Its warning for operators is blunt. On an unpatched Linux system, any low-privilege access should be treated as close to full control for a capable attacker. The work shows how cheap exploit finding has become, for defenders and attackers alike.
Microsoft will not take up an option to more than double its rented AI computing capacity at an Nscale data centre in Texas. That is according to a person familiar with the matter, first reported by the Financial Times. The option covered a second phase of about 700 megawatts from late 2027. It would have been worth tens of billions of dollars to Nscale.
\nThe existing Texas contract of about 230 megawatts of Nvidia systems is not affected. Nscale has put the total value of its Microsoft contracts at about 103 billion dollars, and it is in talks with other large customers about the rest of the site. The decision was reportedly made months ago. It follows Microsoft's exit from Nscale's planned UK site in Essex, where grid connection delays pushed supply into the 2030s. Neither company commented. The news landed as investors were already worried about a slower data-centre buildout.
The Bank of England raised its key interest rate by a quarter point to four percent. It is the first increase since 2023. Eight of the nine members of the Monetary Policy Committee voted for the move, and Catherine Mann wanted a larger rise of half a point. The Bank said rising energy prices from the Middle East conflict are pushing inflation up again.
\nUK consumer price inflation was three and a half percent in September. The Bank now expects it to reach about five percent by the middle of 2027 before it falls back. Oil futures averaged about 108 dollars a barrel in late October, well above the Bank's summer assumptions. The committee said policy is not on a pre-set path, but markets read the statement as a signal that another rise is possible. It has seen little evidence so far that higher energy costs are feeding into wages, and it will watch next year's pay round closely. The next decision is due on 17 December.
Democrats were projected to win control of the US House of Representatives in the midterm elections. Late on election night they led in enough Senate races to flip that chamber too, but Senate control was not yet decided. US stock futures fell. Futures on the Nasdaq 100 index dropped about two percent and those on the S&P 500 about one percent.
\nTraders pointed to fears that new state and federal majorities could slow the build out of data centres. One leading candidate for governor in Texas has called for a pause on new data centres. Treasury yields fell as investors looked for safety, and solar stocks rose. These are projections from election night. Final results in several close races may take days.
US employers had about seven and a half million open jobs at the end of September. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the BLS, said the job openings rate was four and a half percent. That was little changed from August, but above what economists had expected. More workers quit their jobs, close to three and a half million, which usually means people feel confident they can find new work.
\nHires were about 5.4 million and layoffs about 1.6 million, both little changed. The August figure for openings was revised up to 7.2 million. Treasury yields rose after the release, together with stronger factory orders data. For the Federal Reserve the report points to a labour market that is cooling only slowly, which makes a fast cut in rates less likely.
AMD had a record third quarter. Revenue rose 45 percent on the year to about 13 and a half billion dollars, above the top of its own guidance. Its data centre business almost doubled to about eight and a half billion dollars. That unit now makes up nearly two thirds of the company's sales. AMD expects about 17 billion dollars in the fourth quarter, which would be growth of about two thirds on the year.
\nThe company said demand for its EPYC server processors and the launch of its Instinct MI450 accelerators drove the quarter. Adjusted earnings per share were 2.09 dollars, ahead of analyst forecasts. The shares rose in late trading. The guidance is a company forecast, not a result. For the AI market it adds a second large supplier to the picture of data centre spending that is still growing fast.
US factories grew faster in October. The Institute for Supply Management, the ISM, said its manufacturing index rose one point to 55.5. Economists had expected 54.5. Any reading above 50 means activity is growing. Production rose to 59, its highest level since November 2021.
\nInventories moved back into growth and order backlogs fell a little. Employment was roughly flat at 52.3. The prices index eased by almost three points but stayed high at 75.2, so factory input costs are still climbing quickly. Long term Treasury yields slipped on the day as lower oil prices softened the inflation outlook. For the Federal Reserve the report shows a strong goods economy with price pressure that has not yet gone away.
Chip designer Marvell has agreed to buy Lumentum, a maker of lasers and optical parts, in an all-stock deal. The deal values Lumentum at about 115 billion dollars including debt. Lumentum holders get four and a half Marvell shares for each share they own. The two companies say AI data centres need far more bandwidth than copper cables can carry, so links are moving to light.
\nThe price is about 24 percent above Lumentum's share price before talks were reported. Marvell holders would own about two thirds of the combined company. The firms expect more than one billion dollars a year in cost savings. Closing needs approval from both sets of shareholders and from regulators, and is planned for the first half of 2028. Marvell shares had fallen sharply when the talks first leaked last week.
Ivanti has fixed two more flaws in Connect Secure, its VPN gateway. Attackers had already chained them with an earlier login bypass. Together the three bugs gave an attacker full root control, even on gateways that had all earlier patches. The attackers stole credentials, copied data, explored internal networks and wiped logs.
\nThe fixed versions are 25.1.1.3 and 22.8R2.6. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, added both flaws to its list of exploited vulnerabilities on 1 November and gave federal agencies days to patch. Anyone running an older build should update now and check the gateway for signs of compromise, because a patch does not remove an attacker who is already inside.
The two critical PHP flaws fixed on 21 October are now used in real attacks. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, added both to its catalogue of known exploited vulnerabilities on 26 October. Federal agencies had until 30 October to patch. The flaws let an attacker run code on a web server without logging in.
\nResearchers say attempts started about four days before the patches were out. Working remote shells were later seen on test servers set up to catch attackers. The fixed versions are PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35. Any server still on an older build of those lines should be treated as exposed. PHP 8.1 and older get no official fix.
Google has released Gemini 4 Carbon, a model built for software security. It can look for vulnerabilities, test whether they can be exploited and write a fix. Google calls it its strongest model so far. For now only selected cyber defenders can use it. Governments, critical infrastructure operators and large platforms come first, through a programme called Fairwind.
\nThe limit has a reason. A model that finds and exploits flaws for a defender can do the same for an attacker. Google reports 88 percent on a benchmark for finding vulnerabilities and 71 percent on one for patching them. These scores are Google's own. The introductory price is two dollars per million input tokens and ten dollars per million output tokens, doubling later. No date for general access has been given.
Records on more than 41000 current and former staff and contractors of the US Department of Homeland Security have been published online. The data includes names, work emails, phone numbers, job titles and group memberships. Some entries point to sensitive roles in surveillance, forensics and undercover work. A hacktivist group took responsibility and gave the files to a transparency nonprofit.
\nThe group says it got in through a cloud single sign-on service used by the department. The identity vendor named in reports says it has no evidence its own systems were compromised. The department said it is aware of a potential breach and is working to address it. For any organisation, the case is a reminder that a single sign-on account opens every door behind it, so its access rights and logs deserve the closest watch.
Mistral, the French AI company, has released the full weights of Mistral Large 4. The model has about one trillion parameters. Anyone can now download it and run it on their own hardware. Mistral says it is the strongest open model for coding and for security work such as finding and fixing vulnerabilities.
\nThe weights are on Hugging Face under a modified MIT licence. Use, fine-tuning and commercial use are allowed. Companies that want to sell the model as a hosted cloud service need a separate licence. The release follows a preview earlier in October, and Mistral says three more weeks of training lifted its terminal benchmark score from 28 to 41 percent. The benchmark claims are the vendor's own. For teams that need to keep data in house, it widens the choice of large models they can host themselves.
Attackers stole about six point four billion dollars from Binance, the largest crypto exchange, on 29 October. It is the largest theft on record. The money left ten blockchains in about twenty minutes. On 31 October the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, said a North Korean group known as TraderTraitor was behind it.
\nBinance said the attack started on an engineer's laptop, which gave access to a service container that could submit withdrawals. Blockchain analysts say about half of the assets have been frozen. The FBI has asked exchanges and other services to block hundreds of addresses tied to the stolen funds. For any team running infrastructure, the lesson is old but sharp: one developer machine with production reach is enough.
Apple has confirmed that its AI features will launch in mainland China in December with iOS 27.3. A developer beta starts on 4 November. Users in China will reach Alibaba's Qwen model through Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence. It ends a wait of about two years since the US launch.
\nThe first wave covers the basic features, among them live translation, writing tools, photo clean up, Genmoji and notification summaries. The new Siri assistant shown this summer is not part of it. China requires approval for any public generative AI service, and the partnership with Alibaba is how Apple meets that rule. It works on the iPhone 15 Pro and newer, with the system language set to English or simplified Chinese.
US consumer prices rose faster in September. The price index for personal consumption expenditures, the PCE index, climbed half a percent in the month and three point six percent on the year. Core prices, without food and energy, rose three point one percent on the year. That is up from three percent in August. It is the Federal Reserve's preferred inflation gauge, and it stays well above the Fed's two percent target.
\nPersonal income grew only 0.2 percent in September while spending rose 0.5 percent, so the saving rate slipped to 3.8 percent. The data came a day after the Fed left its rates unchanged. It makes a quick return to target less likely and supports the case for keeping policy tight for longer.
Intel shares fell nearly 29 percent on 30 October, their worst day since 1974. The company had beaten its own targets for the third quarter, with revenue up 21 percent to about 16 and a half billion dollars. But it guided the fourth quarter lower, citing a PC slowdown it expects to last at least through the first half of next year. The Nasdaq fell almost 3 percent the same day, its biggest drop since June.
\nData-centre and AI revenue rose 78 percent and the foundry business 58 percent, while PC chips shrank 5 percent. Intel expects fourth-quarter revenue of 15 to 16 billion dollars and a gross margin near 38 percent on an adjusted basis, down from 44 percent. Together with Amazon's negative cash flow, the outlook revived worries about how long the AI spending boom can run. The Nasdaq ended October more than 5 percent lower.
Attackers are exploiting a critical flaw in GitLab, the code hosting and CI platform. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, added it to its list of actively exploited vulnerabilities on 29 October. The flaw has the highest severity score of ten. An attacker without an account can run code on the server with a crafted regular expression in a pipeline configuration.
\nIt affects GitLab Community and Enterprise Edition from version 19.2 up to the fixed releases 19.2.8, 19.3.4 and 19.4.2, which GitLab published on 12 October. US federal agencies must patch by 1 November and check for signs of compromise. Anyone running a self-managed GitLab server on those versions should update now and review pipeline configurations and logs for anything unexpected. GitLab.com is run by GitLab itself.
Amazon reported third-quarter sales of about 202 billion dollars, up 12 percent. Operating income rose to about 28 billion dollars, the highest margin in the company's history. Its cloud arm AWS grew 39 percent, the fastest pace in nearly five years. But capital spending reached about 77 billion dollars in the quarter. Free cash flow over the last twelve months fell to about minus 42 billion dollars.
\nEarnings per share were 1.89 dollars, below a year earlier, when gains on the Anthropic stake lifted profit by 9.5 billion dollars. For the fourth quarter Amazon expects sales of 240 to 247 billion dollars. The shares opened about 5 percent lower on 30 October and recovered most of the loss. The result fed a broad sell-off in technology stocks that day, as investors weighed fast AI-driven cloud growth against the cash it consumes.
Microsoft reported revenue of about 92 billion dollars for the quarter to September, up 19 percent. Azure revenue grew 48 percent to about 33 billion dollars. This is the first quarter in which Microsoft reports an Azure revenue figure on its own. Spending on property and equipment was about 39 billion dollars. Unlike some rivals, the company still produced strong positive cash flow.
\nThe wider Microsoft Cloud reached about 64 billion dollars, up 30 percent. Operating income rose 21 percent to about 46 billion dollars. Results landed the same evening as Alphabet's and drew the opposite market reaction, which shows investors now judge AI spending by whether it pays for itself.
The European Central Bank, the ECB, left its three key interest rates unchanged on 29 October. The deposit rate stays at two and a half percent. The bank says energy prices have kept rising. That adds upside risk to inflation and downside risk to growth. Underlying inflation has been broadly stable so far and wages have not reacted much.
\nThe main refinancing rate stays at 2.65 percent and the marginal lending rate at 2.90 percent. The Governing Council repeats that it decides meeting by meeting and does not commit to a path in advance. Its bond portfolios from the asset purchase programmes keep shrinking as securities mature. The Transmission Protection Instrument remains available if spreads move in a disorderly way.
Alphabet reported third-quarter revenue of about 128 billion dollars, up 25 percent. Google Cloud more than doubled to about 31 billion dollars. Capital spending reached about 51 billion dollars in the quarter. That pushed free cash flow below zero for the second quarter in a row. Diluted earnings came in at 2 dollars 12 cents per share.
\nOperating margin was 31.8 percent and net income 26.2 billion dollars. Over the trailing twelve months free cash flow is still positive at 19.7 billion. The quarter shows the trade-off the large clouds are making: very fast growth in AI-driven cloud demand, paid for with infrastructure spending that now exceeds what the business generates in cash.
The PHP project has released PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35 to fix two critical\nvulnerabilities, rated 9.2 under CVSS 4.0 in the advance notice. CVE-2026-109618 lets an\nout-of-memory condition leave request data half initialised, which cleanup code may\nthen trust. CVE-2026-109619 lets internal state from one request outlive its memory and\nbe reused by a later request on the same worker. Both can lead to remote code\nexecution without authentication, and every setup that serves web requests is\naffected, with mod_php named as the highest risk.
\nThe project says updating is the only complete fix; configuration changes such as\ndisabling session upload progress only narrow the exposure. PHP 8.1 and older get no\nofficial release, although source backports exist. PHP 8.2 reaches end of life on 31\nDecember 2026.
The Kubernetes community has formed a Workload Conformance Working Group. Certified\nKubernetes already tests clusters, and the AI Conformance programme tests whether a\ncluster can run AI workloads, but nothing comparable exists for the applications\nthemselves. Operators still check each workload by hand before a node drain or an\nupgrade.
\nThe charter names three deliverables: a specification of workload behaviour per\nKubernetes minor version, a method to test each requirement against a running\nworkload, and upstream tooling that runs those tests. The scope spans security,\nresilience to disruption, resource use, networking, storage, API usage and\nobservability. Every requirement must have an objective, automated test. SIG\nArchitecture will own the specification and SIG Apps brings the application view. The\ngroup aims for a stable first specification within two to three release cycles.
The Federal Open Market Committee kept the federal funds target range at 3.75 to 4\npercent at its meeting ending on 28 October 2026. The vote was 10 to 2: Lisa Cook and\nBeth Hammack dissented, both preferring a further quarter-point increase. The pause\nfollows a unanimous hike in September that lifted the range to its current level.
\nThe statement describes economic activity as expanding at a strong pace, with solid\nproductivity growth and business investment. Job gains have kept up with the growth\nof the labour force and unemployment has barely moved. Inflation is still described\nas elevated, and the Committee says it will use incoming data to judge how restrictive\npolicy needs to be to bring inflation back to its 2 percent goal.