Binance hit by $6.3B hack; Anthropic files for IPO

Starting around 4pm ET Thursday, hackers drained about $6.3B from Binance wallets across multiple blockchains, most of it in roughly 20 minutes according to TRM Labs. Binance paused withdrawals and deposits, and Tether and Circle froze more than 1.5B USDT and 800M USDC. Elliptic, TRM and another tracing firm point to North Korea, and Elliptic says the theft would almost double what the regime has stolen in crypto to date. Chainalysis says the laundering used automated patterns not seen before. By Sunday Binance said it had covered 90% of the losses with more than $6.34B of company funds, and CEO comments reported by The Verge say it plans to cover the rest, held in less liquid tokens.

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Two critical PHP bugs, disclosed October 21, sent organizations scrambling to patch, and some took sites offline until fixes were in. Wiz saw a limited number of exploitation attempts and about a 67% drop in daily exposed vulnerable machines, while its CTO says the cleanup is far from over. Dream researchers then found artifacts of what appeared to be a Chinese AI-assisted campaign that chained PHP2Shell with a kernel privilege-escalation exploit to root 25 PAN-OS firewalls, including systems in a US government-affiliated environment. Palo Alto Networks is releasing fixed PAN-OS versions. Separately, a critical Linux TCP use-after-free (CVE-2026-98432) was still listed as unfixed on Ubuntu and RHEL as of October 31.

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Anthropic filed its draft S-1 with the SEC. As of September 30 it had 11,900+ customers spending $100,000 or more a year, 1,900+ above $1M and about 250 above $10M. Capex was $482M in the first half of 2026, with compute mostly leased under $782B in lease obligations. The filing also covers ranked successor lists for co-founders' voting power and data centers' growing reliance on natural gas. Blackstone says Anthropic may not get an investment-grade rating after the IPO, and the FT reports a high junk rating is expected, though TechCrunch notes this is only a forecast. Anthropic also expanded its GSA partnership to give government customers a 40% discount on Claude, and renamed its Max plans.

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Microsoft reported Azure revenue up 48% to $33.17B, with $10B of revenue from OpenAI arrangements. Alphabet's Google Cloud revenue rose 103% to $30.7B, but free cash flow was negative $9.07B on $51.36B of capex, and Search fell below half of revenue for the first time at 49.7%. AWS grew 39% to $45.98B, and Amazon spent more than $77B on property and equipment. Alphabet fell 12% Thursday, shedding over $500B, Intel dropped 28.58% Friday on weaker guidance, and Reddit fell 29.27% after a weak Q4 forecast. The Nasdaq had its worst month since March 2025.

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The Wall Street Journal reports OpenAI has about $11B in commitments, less than half of its $30B target, at a $1.25 trillion valuation rather than the $1.4 trillion it sought. The FT reports it now seeks about $20B at that valuation as some investors cut commitments amid the selloff. The WSJ also reports CoreWeave, Nebius and Nscale have effectively been shut out of the bond market. Elon Musk said debt markets have almost entirely shut off money to companies without substantial revenue independent of AI data centers. Earlier in the week Broadcom arranged a $63B deal to finance chip purchases for Anthropic, and SpaceX locked in a $40B GPU financing deal with Apollo.

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DoorDash and Instacart announced a definitive agreement at $65.00 per Instacart share, a 26% premium to the October 22 close, valuing the equity at about $17B. At least 75% of the consideration will be cash, with DoorDash stock capped at 25%. Instacart's board approved it unanimously. The Wall Street Journal had reported the advanced talks earlier in the week. Elsewhere, OpenAI-backed Thrive Holdings agreed to buy ADT for $15.3B, and LSEG agreed to buy Octus for $3.54B.

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A tampered version of Anthropic's Claude Code extension, published on the Cursor marketplace, contained a backdoor and stayed up for nearly 12 hours. Anthropic says a malicious actor used access to Cursor's marketplace to publish it, that it did not build or publish the copy, and that its own systems and employee laptops were not compromised. How attackers got access to the verified account is still unknown. Cursor published a security notice. Separately, Cursor released its Agent SDK for code-defined agents, and a write-up found Claude Code re-sends agent transcripts roughly every 30 seconds to produce a status line.

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Google calls Gemini 4 Carbon its strongest model. It scores 59 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5, the top result, and 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding vulnerabilities. Access starts with a subset of cyber defenders and widens to trusted partners through the Fairwind Program, and Google says it is taking part in the US government's voluntary pre-release testing. On the Coding Agent Index it trails Claude Code with Claude Opus 5.5 by 3 points. Earlier in the week Google's Genie 4 world model doubled scene consistency to two minutes, while OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Terra and Mistral released the weights of its 1-trillion-parameter Large 4.

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Distributed Denial of Secrets published an archive called Icepick covering more than 41,000 DHS employees or contractors, including undercover and surveillance staff. A group calling itself the Department of Peace says it took the data by subverting DHS's single sign-on system, and Okta says it is unaware of any breach of its systems. Separately, attorneys for 15 Minnesota residents facing federal conspiracy charges obtained discovery records describing ICE surveillance of left-wing groups under Project Whipple Shield and Operation Puppet Master. More than 300 Boston Dynamics employees also protested an ICE plan to buy robot dogs.

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Brazilian groups gave the electoral court new evidence of possible unequal treatment of Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro on Meta platforms, and asked it to enforce a R$500,000 daily fine. Meta says the issues were technical and that any suggestion it favors one side is false. UK union members at Meta signed a statement denouncing favoritism toward the Bolsonaro family. Meta also admitted it wrongly suspended the No Kings Coalition's Instagram account on October 17. In the Llama case, rightsholders say ex-researcher Stephen Roller admitted in a deposition that he torrented the roughly 200,000-book Books3 dataset.

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