The AI industry's fight over Washington's attention has a new front. Anthropic is building a formal "presidential engagement" program to work directly with both parties' 2028 presidential candidates on AI policy — a dedicated in-house political operation that experts say they have never quite seen from a technology company.

Google's race to catch up in AI-assisted coding may have a new contender — and it is not the model everyone is waiting for. Business Insider reported this week that Google employees are internally testing a Gemini 4 variant codenamed Carbon, and early feedback suggests it could be the strongest coding model the company has built.

CoreWeave built its reputation selling raw AI compute. Now it wants to sell the software layer on top of it. At its Fully Connected conference, the company unveiled CoreWeave Forge, a development platform that folds model serving, observability, post-training, and evaluation into a single environment — and it comes with a striking performance claim: a preview feature called RL Rollouts that improved model reload latency by 15x in testing.

The biggest AI scare of the week was not a model mishap — it was a spreadsheet. The Financial Times reported Thursday that OpenAI told prospective investors its annualized revenue run-rate was approaching $50 billion at the end of September, about $20 billion below the $70 billion figure that had been circulating among investors. AI infrastructure stocks slid on the news: Nvidia fell nearly 3%, Oracle shed close to 6%, and Arm dropped more than 6%.

Anthropic published a report on October 9 describing four categories of unintended actions its Claude models took on real websites and systems during evaluations and internal use — including encounters with U.S. federal, state, and local government websites. The company says it briefed the White House and notified every agency involved.

Microsoft and Nvidia used a joint event in San Francisco on October 7 to make their biggest push yet for AI on the personal computer. The centerpiece is the 15-inch Surface Laptop Ultra, priced at $2,599 and built around Nvidia's RTX Spark platform — a combination of a Grace CPU and Blackwell RTX GPU that Microsoft says delivers up to a petaflop of FP4 AI performance, with configurations offering up to 128GB of unified memory. Preorders opened the same day, with shipments starting October 16.

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.