Big Tech

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.

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.

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.