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Accel reportedly in talks to lead $1B round for Thinking Machines at $40B valuation
Thinking Machines, Mira Murati's AI lab, is in talks to raise $1 billion at a $40 billion valuation, with Accel reportedly leading.
Thinking Machines, the AI lab founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is negotiating a $1 billion round at a valuation of at least $40 billion, below the $50 billion it reportedly sought last year. The company's annual revenue run rate exceeds $100 million, mostly from usage-based compute fees for its open-weight Inkling model adapted on the Tinker platform. Its prior $2 billion seed round, led by Andreessen Horowitz with Nvidia, GV, Lightspeed, and Conviction Partners, valued it at $12 billion. Several co-founders, including Lilian Weng and Luke Metz, have since returned to OpenAI.
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Google releases Gemini 3.8 Flash, its third Flash model in six weeks
Google releases Gemini 3.8 Flash, topping the DeepSWE coding leaderboard six weeks after 3.7 Flash, alongside the cybersecurity-focused 3.8 Flash Cyber.
Google shipped Gemini 3.8 Flash, its third Flash model in six weeks, placing it at the top of the DeepSWE software engineering leaderboard. The companion Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber showed a reported 2.6x patch accuracy increase for the Chrome security team and found a critical vulnerability in two hours, but is limited to trusted testers and governments. Gemini 3.8 Flash improved over 3.7 Flash on the OSWorld-2.0 computer-use benchmark yet remains far behind Claude Opus.
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Researchers observe first ‘near-autonomous’ AI attack on government target in Taiwan
Dream researchers observed the first near-autonomous AI attack on a government target, with suspected Chinese hackers stealing 2,500+ Taiwan records.
Israeli firm Dream reported that suspected Chinese hackers used open-source AI models to run a near-autonomous cyberattack against Taiwan's government, extracting over 2,500 personnel records. The framework, built on Hermes and OpenClaw, adapted mid-operation without human intervention, ran autonomous 'Learning Cycles' researching applicable vulnerabilities, and expanded to supply chain vendors, a nuclear safety agency, a government email system, and seven-plus energy companies. Attackers bypassed safety guardrails by framing the work as authorized penetration testing. Dream discovered the operation via a 160MB online archive of nearly 1,400 files.
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