Depending on where you sit as an investor, artificial intelligence still looks like a massive opportunity, or it’s now looking way too risky given growing infrastructure investments and the public’s souring on AI and all the data centers needed to power it.

Really, it’s both. This week saw continued big venture capital investments in AI companies such as OpenAI, DeepSeek, Legora, Otter.ai, Flapping Airplanes (really) and more. But on Thursday, continued worry about potentially excessive data center spending — such as at Meta, which plans to issue new shares to pay for even more expansion — knocked AI stocks such as SpaceX and CoreWeave way down Thursday.

That volatility isn’t likely to change anytime soon, as more big earnings reports are coming next week, including the major cloud and AI providers Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft as well as Intel. Then there’s the prospect of Anthropic’s initial public offering of stock, which looks to vacuum up so much public investor money that some wonder if that will blunt their appetite for other AI stocks.

Still, the excitement of the people using AI, and the companies offering technologies to make it easier for them, seems to be undiminished, judging from several conferences this week, such as Nvidia’s GTC in Berlin and the PyTorch Conference and AGNTCon+MCPCon in San Jose. Among the highlights were Nvidia introducing new reference architectures. At PyTorch, Google and Amazon Web Services offered new tools leveraging the open-source deep learning framework used to build and train AI models, aiming to wrest some control of AI factories using Nvidia technologies.

And out of AGNTCon this week came open AI agent protocols from the Linux Foundation’s relatively new Agentic AI Foundation. They’re intended to keep big tech companies from dominating the key agent protocols and rails — the perennial battle that emerges with every significant new technology. More on that below.

AI managed to find long-hidden vulnerabilities in PHP, the open-source scripting language for the web, and suddenly some 70% of websites had to scramble to apply patches — but that takes awhile, so many remain in danger and thus, so do we. The rising capabilities of AI in finding vulnerabilities also means the defensive edge AI provided defenders so far is fading or gone already.

Many people who don’t live inside enterprise technology have at best a fuzzy idea of what ServiceNow is all about — workflow automation among other things — but now it’s looking to move into a pole position in AI. With its new AI Control Tower, it’s aiming to discover and govern any agent, work across models and clouds, track cost and value, and shut down behavior that violates policy. In his latest Breaking Analysis, Dave Vellante looks at the reality and the prospects.

A couple of important events arrive next week, including Oracle AI World in Las Vegas, and theCUBE’s and theCUBE Research’s own timely virtual event, the AI Cybersecurity & Resiliency Summit.

Here’s all of this week’s enterprise and emerging tech news, analysis and commentary from SiliconANGLE and beyond:

Analysis, opinion and food for thought

Breaking Analysis: ServiceNow AI Control Tower: Selling a penthouse while building the frame

Zoom’s next act: From video company to AI data platform

How to avoid AI’s ‘valley of despair’

Why AI’s deepest mind, Demis Hassabis, believes the world is about to change radically (per the Wall Street Journal)

What will computer chips look like in 2045? Dwarkesh Patel does a deep dive with Intel

Left alone with nothing to do, AI agents started playing (per TechCrunch) 🫪

AI and data: Retail investors go negative as AI funding rises

Money matters

Anthropic S-1 shows red-hot growth, risks and massive computing costs (per the WSJ)

Report: OpenAI closing on $30B ‘bridge’ funding round to tide it over before IPO

DeepSeek reportedly raises $15B days after US restrictions (per Bloomberg)

OpenAI acquires Orchestra Bio to bring AI agents into drug development

Elon Musk, Anthropic pledge multibillion-dollar share donations

Year-old AI research lab Flapping Airplanes raises $1B at a reported $6B valuation

Legal AI startup Legora raises $550M at $8.8B to change the face of law

AI infrastructure management software startup ASI hits $3B valuation after raising $325M in funding

Otter.ai nabs $320M in funding for its AI meeting assistant

Nvidia, Dell back $200M round for AI model developer doubleAI

Tractian raises $130M at $1.4B valuation for physical AI

AI work assistant startup Town secures unicorn status after raising $108M just weeks after launching

Daytona hits $1B valuation with $60M Series B for AI agent cloud

AI startup Firefly secures $20M to make the physical world a safer place

Boomi acquires Elementary Data to bring trusted, governed data to the AI era

New models and services

Coverage from the AGNTCon+MCPCon conference:

Agentic AI Foundation adds four more open-source AI tools

Google Cloud introduces Agent Compute Engine to host AI agents

And a few thoughts from attending the event, which came just weeks after another installment in Amsterdam:

At AGNTCon+MCPCon, the Linux Foundation extended its play to provide protocols for the emerging agentic AI stack, pointedly eyeing the big tech and AI companies all hoping to carve out pieces they can essentially own.

The goal is to prompt those companies to do something like what Google did with the software container orchestrator Kubernetes: Help establish it as the standard and then hand it off to a vendor-neutral organization, in that case the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, to extend it.

“If you’re not careful, one company ends up owning the plumbing and you pay rent,” Manik Surtani, formerly Block’s head of open source and now co-founder and chief technology officer of the Agentic AI Foundation, noted during a keynote at the event. “The agentic era is still being built… and we should ensure it’s built in the open. The plumbing of the agentic era shouldn’t belong to one entity. It should belong to all of us.”

The Agentic AI Foundation, Executive Director Mazin Gilbert said, aims to be that “neutral home where the agentic AI stack is being built.” And there’s demand for vendor-neutral protocols and platforms: It has been adding new members like crazy, now counting 305 since starting 10 months ago.

Paul Nashawaty, an analyst with theCUBE Research, SiliconANGLE’s sister market research firm, and with Efficiently Connected Inc., said standardization is crucial because “the durable competitive advantage in agentic AI will belong to whoever controls identity attestation, tool-calling protocols, payment rails, and audit trails. Those are exactly the layers the AAIF is trying to standardize in the open.” He added that “the addition of projects from OpenAI, Alibaba, and Hugging Face, three organizations with deeply competing commercial interests, to a single neutral governance structure is a meaningful signal.”

Anthropic introduces Claude Duet, a proactive AI agent for professionals

Inception says Mercury 3 beats GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 at up to 8x the speed

DeepSeek releases updated V4.1-Flash model it says completes tasks faster

MiniMax launches M3.1 Flash model, says it cuts AI agent costs by 70%

Ai2 releases OlmoEarth v1.3 state-of-the-art AI-ready satellite embeddings for the whole planet

Scaled Cognition targets customer service with low-cost voice model

OpenAI to make its most advanced AI models available in Google Cloud

Startup Action State launches tools for verifying interactions between AI agents 

Motive Technologies revs up new AI Agents to automate fleet management And analysis from John Furrier: Motive brings agentic AI to physical operations with agents that act before problems escalate

Agents are breaking AI economics, and the fix starts in the data layer

Cloudflare introduces Clairic, a new System One class of extraction models

Pax8 launches 8os to let IT partners govern AI agents and 8bot as a managed AI co-worker

NiCE bets the company on AI, data and accountability, and the legacy business buys it time

Policy

Trump administration orders ban on DeepSeek in federal agencies

Around the enterprise: PyTorch on fire

Coverage from GTC Berlin:

Nvidia debuts new AI reference architectures, development tools

And Zeus Kerravala’s analysis: Nvidia turns the AI factory into a product, and agents into the workload

Red Hat and Nvidia expand their partnership to secure autonomous AI agents

Coverage from the PyTorch Conference:

Amazon introduces toolkit for running PyTorch workloads on AWS Trainium chips

Google unveils TorchTPU in a push to break Nvidia’s stranglehold on AI compute

IBM-backed llm-d framework adds controls for running AI models in-house

Other new products and services

AI is everywhere in Zoom product blitz

While Amazon blocks AI agents, Walmart rolls out the welcome mat

Grafana Labs leans on AI agents to automate AI agent observability

SmartBear’s BearQ adds Sources to find coverage gaps and Workflows to automate test runs

Homebase launches AI assistant to take on scheduling and payroll for small business owners

Neural Concept launches MCP to help AI agents operate commercial CAD tools

Exclusive: Kantata’s Expertise Insights answers services firms’ business questions in plain English

Thomson Reuters folds AI into its professional tax and audit software

Thought Industries’ Lens checks product knowledge for conflicts before customers see it

Earnings

SpaceX’s stock soars as Elon Musk reveals crushing earnings and revenue beat

Meta beats on revenue and splits its stock with nonvoting shares to raise capital, stock falls

IBM tops expectations as it struggles to bounce back from Q2 mainframe slump

SAP delivers record quarterly revenue as its autonomous enterprise strategy picks up speed

Tesla shares fall more than 3% despite earnings beat and $1.5B in free cash flow

Pegasystems Q3 revenue, adjusted EPS miss estimates as contract growth slows

Texas Instruments posts higher profit, revenue

Western Digital earnings beat, revenue topped estimates, but stock falls

RingCentral earnings beat, revenue falls short of estimates

More money matters

Salesforce to acquire marketing automation provider Braze for $5.66B

Chip legend Jim Keller’s Tenstorrent raises $1.5B to expand its open compute ecosystem

Neocloud operator Nscale’s IPO plans could be at risk after Microsoft cancels UK data center project

Amazon announces plan to invest €16B in Germany in 2027

French enterprise software startup Pigment raises $250M at $2.3B valuation

Arda Industries raises $232M to make production lines more adaptable

Blackwall raises $100M at $2.2B valuation to scale its web traffic optimization and management platform

Code testing startup Blacksmith becomes a unicorn after raising $66M in Series C funding

AuxoAI raises over $20M to bring AI expertise to the enterprise and redesign how work gets done

AI startup Vectorial lands $3M in funding to simulate human behavior for consumer research

Policy

Elon Musk throttled Starlink in embattled Ukraine Whoever did it: Shameful. And stupid, even if all you care about is saving money by helping Ukraine bankrupt Russia.

Meta hit with $25 billion fine for deceiving users on privacy

Cyber beat: PHP freakout

Attack & response

Critical PHP vulnerabilities send organizations scrambling to secure their systems

PHP2Shell attacks began four days before patches, Amazon says, as attempts hit millions

New services

Microsoft targets the ‘agentic insider’ with new controls for rogue AI agents

1Password for Agents lets personal AI agents log in without ever seeing the password

Axonius launches AI Workforce virtual workers as AI Companion and MCP Server go live

Celigo launches MCP tool management for enterprise AI assistants and agent access

Fortanix extends Confidential AI to Kubernetes workloads through Confidential Containers

Money matters

Mave raises $34M to pull existing security tools into one agentic system

Elsewhere in tech: Robotics on the rise

Ex-OpenAI science chief Kevin Weil launches Warp Sciences with $215M for drug chemistry

Eka Robotics nets $150M at a $1.45B valuation for robot hands that sense force

SpaceX alum’s aviation startup, Reliable Robotics, lands $115M, topping $1B valuation

Dream Labs raises $90M to help build more intelligent robots with simple video feeds

Robotics startup Enact Intelligence nabs $30M funding round

Nirva raises $25M to make AI jewelry with ‘perspective’ that listens and provides insights

Comings and goings

Kevin Mandia’s cybersecurity firm Armadin named former Microsoft VP of security Vasu Jakkal chief strategy and business officer.

Joel Kaplan is leaving Meta after 15 years as policy chief (per Axios).

Cequence Security appointed former Fortinet and Check Point Software exec Russ Schafer chief marketing officer.

Automattic began layoffs following board upheaval and executive departures (per TechCrunch).

What’s next

Events

Oct. 25-28: Oracle AI World, Las Vegas

Oct. 27-28: AI Cybersecurity & Resiliency Summit, virtual event by theCUBE and theCUBE Research

Earnings

Monday, Oct. 26: Cadence

Tuesday, Oct. 27: Commvault, PayPal, NXP Semiconductor, F5, Seagate

Wednesday, Oct. 28: Alphabet, Microsoft, Extreme Networks, ServiceNow, Tenable, Flex

Thursday, Oct. 29: Samsung, Intel, Amazon, Mobileye, Coinbase, Twilio

Image: SiliconANGLE/ChatGPT