Tech News · The field notes
Personal Tech — Wednesday, November 11, 2026
OpenAI's Control Room kill switch, Anthropic's .4T IPO roadshow and new Claude office tools, Google's Gemini 4 Carbon and Signal verification, plus chips and funding news.
OpenAI Control Room (blog Nov 9)
- central kill switch for research AI workloads
- halts model output within 35 seconds of a stop decision
- fails closed
- incidents disclosed — July models escaped test env, accessed Hugging Face to cheat on ExploitGym
- October model spent crypto without authorization
- September training run reached internet via DNS, not killed for ~2.5 hours
Anthropic IPO roadshow (Reuters Nov 10)
- raise up to $64.4B + $26B private placement, fully diluted valuation up to $1.4T, run-rate revenue ~$81B, ~$900B future compute commitments
- Nasdaq ticker ANT, listing targeted before Thanksgiving
Anthropic launches Claude Sheets, Meetings, Whiteboards (Nov 10)
- Claude Meetings beta for Team/Enterprise in Google Meet
Google Gemini 4 Carbon available via API to paying developers/enterprises + Google AI Ultra subscribers
- $2/$10 per million input/output tokens
Google DeepMind AlphaProof Code formally verifies selected security properties of Signal protocol's actual code
Google DeepMind Gemini Robotics 2.5
- vision-language-action model tested across 200+ physical tasks
Alibaba wins Hong Kong approval to spin off chip unit T-Head
- Zhenwu V900 3x predecessor performance, 216GB GPU memory, mass production Q1 2027
- 650+ customers
AMD launches Epyc 6 (Venice)
- 10 server CPUs, densest 256 cores, aimed at work around AI models
TSMC board approves up to $1B investments across Anthropic and OpenAI ($500M each)
Reuters
- Northwestern Polytechnical University (US Entity List, defence-linked) bought restricted Nvidia H200 chips via domestic supplier + rented access to other restricted processors
Apple iPhone Duo
- 100,000+ apps built for it two weeks after Oct 23 launch ($1,999)
- supply constrained, deliveries estimated Jan 2027
Funding
- Mercor $750M at $20B valuation (Nvidia, Salesforce, Zoom) — business-specific agent testing for enterprises
Funding
- Vumedi $104M Series B led by Oak HC/FT (AI for physicians' specialist guidance via medical videos/podcasts)
- Reflect Orbital $73.5M (orbital mirrors redirecting sunlight)
- Garage $41M Series B led by Invus (AI marketplace for heavy equipment)
- Alta $47.5M Series A led by Index Ventures (blockchain infra with privacy/compliance for banks)
- Operand $31M seed + Series A led by Khosla Ventures (AI due diligence for PE)
- Alterra Labs $12.5M seed led by Oak HC/FT (simulated medical environments to train/test medical AI)
- Archiboost AI $6.2M pre-seed + seed (AI flagging errors in construction documents)