News may be slowing down this week in anticipation of the holiday next week, but cyber criminals, cyber cops and antitrust hawks are not.

And despite some high-profile antitrust fallout, such as Adobe abandoning its acquisition of Figma and Apple came under antitrust fire on two fronts, consolidation and even new fundings in enterprise software aren’t slowing down either, as the haves scoop up the have-nots.

But generative artificial intelligence, while continuing to attract big bucks to the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI (yes, even more) and others, seems to be taking some downtime for self-examination, as companies increasingly find ways to keep the fast-growing technology’s most impulsive instincts in check.

You can hear more about all this and other news in John Furrier’s and Dave Vellante’s theCUBE Podcast, due out this afternoon. And don’t miss Vellante’s weekly deep-dive Breaking Analysis this weekend.

AI looks inward

Another week of introspection about how to make sure AI doesn’t go off the rails:

Breaking Analysis: David versus Goliath reimagined: OpenAI’s approach to AI supervision

Speaking of those OpenAI governance issues… it would seem they will continue to be issues: New OpenAI safety team will have power to block high-risk developmentsIan Chaffee puts OpenAI in perspective: What do we have after the OpenAI-nniversary? Not much more than palace intrigue and another finger

And the money spigot never seems to end: OpenAI reportedly discussing new funding round that would raise its value to over $100B

AI startup Anthropic reportedly in talks to raise $750M on a $15B valuation — and it arguably has been the most focused on AI safety from the start

Patronus AI rolls out SimpleSafetyTests to identify harmful AI models

Google takes steps to prevent abuse of its generative AI tools during U.S. elections

FTC calls pharmacy Rite Aid “reckless” after facial recognition use in stores

Harvey raises $80M to build generative AI for legal professionals to avoid privacy and hallucination issues

Researchers find child sexual abuse images in LAION-5B AI training dataset

UK Supreme Court rules AI systems can’t patent their inventions

Apple publishes research to bring AI models to iPhones and make videos into 3D avatars

Consumer AI startup Rabbit raises $10M from Khosla Ventures

Around the enterprise and cloud

This was kind of a classic antitrust case, since Adobe reportedly would have 72% of the market for interface design. Still, that’s a long time to end up saying no — and you have to wonder how this is supposed to spur competition. If VCs and startups now have many more doubts about how they’re going to exit beyond an IPO, always a long shot, there might be fewer fundings and startups: Adobe and Figma end proposed $20B proposed merger amid regulatory issues

But that’s not stopping a spree of smaller acquisitions, and fundings as well. And the soft landing is spurring some optimism in VCland: 2024 venture capital outlook: moderate rebound to 2020 levels amid economic optimism

Snowflake snaps up data clean room startup Samooha in its eighth acquisition of the year

IBM acquires Software AG’s StreamSets and webMethods products for €2.13B

Alteryx to be acquired by private equity firms in $4.4B deal

Cisco acquires eBPF networking startup Isovalent — apparently for $650 million or 32 times annual recurring revenue, according to The Information — whew.

ServiceNow buys Czech task mining platform provider UltimateSuite

Salesforce to acquire Spiff, which automates sales commission plans

Qlik buys data-as-a-product startup Mozaic Data

Lightmatter raises $155M for photonic computing at $1.2B valuation

Data center operator Arkon Energy nabs $110M in fresh funding

After adding new investors, enterprise software company Visma’s value rises to $21B

Kubernetes resource automation startup ScaleOps lands $21.5M in funding

UltiHash raises $2.5M to make data storage more cost-effective and sustainable

In other news

Report: Pentagon has so far committed only a fraction of its JWCC cloud contract’s $9B budget

Commerce Department to launch review of U.S. chip supply chain

Rise of continuation funds and longer hold periods forecast for private equity in 2024

Report: AWS to reorganize sales teams amid slowing cloud revenue growth

Micron posts better-than-expected sales and its stock recovers from earlier losses

Despite earnings and revenue beats, BlackBerry shares drop on outlook miss

Report: Up to 240 million PCs could be scrapped following end of support for Windows 10

Futuristic transit company Hyperloop One to shut down

Antitrust bites deeper

Apple to stop Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US starting Thursday And the ruling stuck so far: Apple suspends sales of Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 models as export ban looms

And more on Apple: Report: Justice Department expanding Apple antitrust probe over Beeper Mini shutdown

EU launches investigation into X over suspected DSA violations

Google to pay $700M to settle Play Store antitrust case with US states and consumers

Cyber criminals, and cyber cops, are keeping busy

Comcast’s Xfinity unit and Insomniac Games experience large-scale data breaches

MongoDB, North Face owner VF Corp and Mr. Cooper fall victim to cyber attacks

Akamai finds new Outlook exploits that leverage sound file attachments

SSH communications threatened by emerging ‘Terrapin Attack’ method

Law enforcement agencies led by FBI disrupt ALPHV ransomware gang Maybe… ALPHV claims to reactivate ransomware data leak website after FBI-led takedown

Global police operation HAECHI IV nets 3,500 arrests in crackdown on online financial crime

German police shut down dark web marketplace Kingdom Market

New cyber products, fundings and acquisitions

Okta acquires identity security startup Spera in reported $100M+ deal

Halcyon raises $40M to bolster ransomware defense capabilities

Fortinet strengthens OT security with enhanced FortiGuard Service and new hardware

IoT security startup Phosphorus raises $27M for research and development

Cybersecurity simulation firm SimSpace raises $45M to help companies prepare for attacks

Image: Bing Image Creator