Manus is back on its own — and investors just backed that bet with a very large check.

Butterfly Effect, the parent company of AI agent startup Manus, said Thursday it has completed a funding round of more than $500 million, according to Reuters. The round was co-led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, with existing investors Tencent, HSG (formerly Sequoia China), and ZhenFund participating. The company did not disclose a valuation; Bloomberg had previously reported Manus was targeting roughly a $4 billion valuation.

French AI lab Mistral has launched Mistral Large 4, a 1.05-trillion-parameter natively multimodal model the company has nicknamed "le Chonk," now available in public preview via API. Open weights are promised by the end of October, after a red-teaming phase.

Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on Wednesday, the third launch in the Claude 5.5 family after Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 earlier this fall. Where the bigger siblings brought capability, Haiku 5.5 brings aggression: Anthropic calls it the cheapest, fastest, and most capable small model it has ever shipped, and the pricing backs up the claim.

British quantum computing company Universal Quantum has raised more than $100 million in a Series A round the company describes as the largest ever secured by a UK-headquartered quantum firm. The round was co-led by Silicon Valley's DCVC and the quantum-focused Firgun Ventures, with participation from EDBI, Main Sequence, Hostplus, Integral GlobalTech, and Roblox founder Dave Baszucki, among other investors.

On October 8, 2026, the U.S. Department of Labor suspended eight major technology companies from the Permanent Labor Certification (PERM) program, halting their ability to sponsor new employment-based green cards while federal investigations continue. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced the action at a Washington press conference, joined by Vice President JD Vance.