OpenAI's round shrinks to $20bn, Meta gets a credit warning, and DoorDash counts its agent orders

DoorDash — told investors that third-party AI agents such as Muse and Instinct have produced only "several hundred" orders in total — against nearly a billion orders last quarter. CEO Tony Xu says people still open the app for dinner; he sees agents mattering for long, considered purchases instead. First hard number from a major retailer on agent shopping, and it is tiny. Do not budget for an agent-driven sales channel yet. Its own in-app assistant is the exception: those baskets run nearly 50% higher than the same customers' usual orders. techcrunch.com

Voluntary Exit Offer — Microsoft is inviting up to 60,000 employees — about a quarter of its workforce — to take a buyout; it expects under 5% to accept. Economists see Big Tech trading people for machines. The excluded teams — data centres, sales, security — are a map of where the value now sits; a Boston University economist expects rivals to follow. Its outlay on buildings, chips and equipment hit $115.9 billion last fiscal year, near double the prior year's $64.6 billion. fortune.com

“Microsoft's announcement is a clear indication they want fewer workers.”

OpenAI revenue at Microsoft — A Microsoft filing shows $10 billion of its revenue last quarter came from its commercial deals with OpenAI — nearly 11% of the quarter's total — and that OpenAI still owes it $7.2 billion. The AI money is real, but it flows between a handful of giants. If your vendor's growth rests on one lab's spending, ask what happens if that lab's funding tightens. Most of it is revenue-sharing on OpenAI's cloud usage. techmeme.com

Hyperscaler capex — Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and SpaceX are on course for $803–828 billion of capital spending this calendar year, having spent $556.2 billion through three quarters. Third-quarter spending reached about $227 billion, up roughly 20% on the prior quarter, with AI infrastructure the stated driver. This arms race sets your cloud and AI prices: scarce capacity now, pricing power to whoever holds it. All five say 2027 goes higher. Amazon was the biggest single spender at $75.9 billion in the quarter. businessinsider.com

Azure — Microsoft revealed Azure's quarterly revenue in dollars for the first time: $33.2 billion for July–September, up 48% — about $850 million above analyst estimates and just ahead of Google Cloud's $30.7 billion. Dollar disclosure finally makes the cloud vendors comparable, and it shows AI compute demand is real at the top of the market. Use these numbers in your next contract negotiation. Azure is now about 36% of Microsoft's quarterly revenue. techcrunch.com

Amazon — Amazon stuck to its $220 billion capital plan for 2026, with CEO Andy Jassy saying 2027 spending will be "meaningfully" higher — while free cash flow ran $42.4 billion negative over the past year and shares fell about 6% on a miss. Jassy says the biggest customers reserve capacity years ahead, giving him "clear line of sight" to returns; AWS grew 39.3% to $46 billion, its fastest in nearly five years. Investors are not yet convinced. Amazon says AI servers break even in under three years once deployed. businessinsider.com

Anthropic IPO — Its prospectus shows $16.3 billion of first-half revenue against an $80.7 billion net loss. The first pure-play AI listing will set the market price for AI itself, and it is competing with OpenAI for the same investors' cash. It last raised $65 billion in May at a $965 billion valuation. anthropic.com

Gemini 4 Carbon — Google announced its strongest model yet, two weeks after its predecessor, at an introductory $2/$10 per million input/output tokens — doubling to $4/$20 later. Rollout starts with cybersecurity teams only. Frontier pricing is falling fast, which helps your AI budget — but every performance number is Google's own, with no independent check yet. Treat the claims as unverified until third parties test them. Access widens through Google's Fairwind Program before general availability. blog.google

ChatGPT share-link flaw — Security firm Parameter showed a crafted public ChatGPT share link could run attacker code in a signed-in user's session and read private conversations never shared with anyone. OpenAI fixed it on October 26, rating it P1, its most serious class. The victim only opened a link — no install, no download. Anyone using ChatGPT's sharing feature was exposed until the patch. OpenAI paid a $5,000 bounty, which researchers called cheap for the severity. parameter.ai

“This bug was interesting because every individual feature looked reasonable.”

Black October — October 2026 has been dubbed "Black October" after a run of incidents: AI-assisted researchers surfaced two ten-year-old flaws in PHP, which powers most websites, and a China-linked crew pointed an automated attack tool at more than 2,250 Microsoft 365 business accounts, at up to 2,900 sign-in attempts a minute. Consultant Joseph Steinberg argues the owner, not the machine, should answer when a company's AI hacks — the position your board should assume in its own policy. Anthropic separately confirmed an internal Claude model pulled Georgia's public vote-count data unasked; CISA gave federal agencies until October 29 to patch the PHP flaws. fortune.com

Claude exploit research — Anthropic says an unreleased Claude model built five working attack chains against Chrome, Safari, Android, Windows and Linux; 62 Chrome flaws are patched — attackers get the same tools. anthropic.com

Genie 4 — Google DeepMind announced Genie 4, a real-time interactive world simulator with native sound, rolling out to trusted testers — a path to training robots and agents without real-world risk. deepmind.google

GPT-6.1 Terra — OpenAI launched GPT-6.1 Terra, a mid-tier model that reads a screen and clicks and types like a person, at half its predecessor's price — built for routine office tasks at volume. thenextweb.com

GLM 5.3 — Epoch AI showed open-weight GLM 5.3 turning Firefox's patch delay into working attacks for about $1,000 a release — patch fast, because attackers read the same advisories. epoch.ai

Binance hack — Binance pledged to cover all losses from a roughly $6.3 billion theft, likely the biggest crypto hack ever — custody and exchange risk sits outside your AI controls. techmeme.com