Washington barred DeepSeek from federal civilian agencies days after V4.1-Flash-1017 shipped on October 17. Meanwhile OpenAI is buying Orchestra Bio, and Anthropic is reportedly in talks with Nscale on a $45 billion1 compute deal.
DeepSeek and MiniMax both charge $0.152 per million input tokens, so sticker price no longer separates them. The deep dive argues a DHS supply-chain ban and the cost per merged change now decide the winner.
Source: venturebeat.comThe open-source coding agent OpenHands now requests credentials inline during a run. You no longer have to guess up front which secrets it will touch. It stays self-hostable and model-agnostic.
The Rundown AI flags a Japanese mission aiming to bring a sample from one of Mars's moons back home. It is a reminder of how long deep-space hardware timelines run next to software cycles.
The US government has banned DeepSeek from federal civilian agencies, Superhuman reported. The move comes days after DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash-1017 on October 17.
Why it mattersHold any DeepSeek deployment touching federal civilian contracts until the ban's text says whether it covers self-hosted open weights or only the API.
Continue readingItaly is sending 500 troops to Milan after shops were looted as cost-of-living protests spread from France, where nighttime curfews are in place ahead of a major weekend march.
WTI crude fell 5.01%, the session's largest move, while the S&P 500 rose 0.28% and the Nasdaq slipped 0.02%, a split that left equities close to flat as oil moved sharply; Bitcoin gained 1.52%, Ether 2.01%, and the crypto Fear & Greed index read 63 (Greed).
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View the media kit →New evidence cited by the FBI and reported by Ars Technica shows that Abdulrahman Alfozan, the former OpenAI employee accused of bugging a conference room, had been communicating with the Saudi royal family and planned to move back to the country permanently. Investigators point to a phone folder as part of the case. The alleged ties give an insider case at OpenAI a foreign dimension.
JPMorgan's Kinexys moves its USD deposit token JPM Coin (JPMD) off Base, where it launched in November 2025, and onto Ethereum. Institutional clients can now make peer-to-peer transfers across the EVM ecosystem using tokens that represent existing JPMorgan bank deposits. The shift puts a deposit token backed by a major bank directly on Ethereum.
Inception Labs' Mercury 3, a diffusion-based model, reportedly beats GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 on multiple benchmarks while generating over 1,0003 tokens per second. Which benchmarks, and by what margins, has not been detailed. If the claims hold, a diffusion approach is competing on both speed and quality with established small models.
Source: inceptionlabs.ai
20 Cents a Task, Barred by Feds in Days
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Tool of the day
7.217/ 10
OpenHands 1.28.1 lets its coding agent pause mid-task and ask you for an API key, so nobody has to front-load a vault of credentials before a debugging run.
Inline secret requests fix the most tedious part of handing a repo to an autonomous agent: guessing up front which credentials it will touch. Everything else is the familiar OpenHands bargain, a self-hostable, model-agnostic agent that can review PRs, patch incidents and run scheduled maintenance on whatever model you pick. Engineering groups comfortable running their own infrastructure should adopt the free tier now and keep a reviewer on every diff it opens.
Came away really impressed: the agent seemed highly capable and the project looked well run and maintained.Paraphrased · Reddit r/LocalLLaMA
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The paper comes from the Firecrawl Research Index: arXiv, indexed in the last 7 days and submitted this month or last, picked for today's lead. Quotes are verbatim.
Measure cost per merged change. Log token spend and review outcome for every agent-written pull request for one week. A sub-$0.20 per-task price says nothing about how many attempts it takes to land a change.
Trial OpenHands 1.28.1 in a sandbox. Self-host it against a throwaway repo and use the inline secret requests so the agent asks for credentials only when a task needs them.
Put the model behind one config switch. Point DeepSeek and MiniMax M3.1 Flash at the same agent code path so a provider change is a setting edit. Deploy the agent app with LangGraph CLI 0.4.37 to test the swap end to end.
With DeepSeek and MiniMax both at $0.152 per million input tokens, the federal ban shows that supplier risk can outweigh a cheaper per-task bill. Anthropic's reported $45 billion1 talks with Nscale suggest the large labs expect compute to stay scarce even as agent costs fall. Build your agent stack so the model is a replaceable part, and track what each merged change really costs you. That keeps you free to move when a policy shift lands.
Source: venturebeat.comMethod names the computation path behind the row, from a closed vocabulary: as published, yfinance close, 03B search corroboration, 04R dossier scoring, not recorded.
A figure is money, a percentage, a spelled magnitude, a multiple, a rate carrying its unit, a score over its denominator, a thousands separated number or an index close. Bare integers and years are not counted, so a phrase like "over 100 integrations" carries no mark. A chart's own scale line is the axis of the level above it and is counted once, with that level.
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