Industry leading AI news, data and model intelligence scoring. 📩 Daily AI newsletter: thelatent.co/newsletter A sister publication of @TheBlockCo
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THE LATENT: Jay Clayton’s odds of becoming Trump’s next AI czar surged as high as 94% on Friday, up from a low of 20% a day earlier.
CBS reported Thursday night that sources familiar with the matter revealed Clayton is the likely pick and could also remain director of national intelligence.
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THE LATENT: Meta has reportedly cut ties with staff from AI safety firm Virtue AI, just months after bringing them on board in June, according to Semafor.
This follows AI safety team shakeups at OpenAI on Thursday.
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THE BLOCK: Sens. Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are introducing legislation that would largely bar federal agencies from using AI-powered Flock license-plate-reader cameras or accessing data collected by them.
The bill reflects growing bipartisan scrutiny of AI-powered surveillance systems that can turn large-scale vehicle data into searchable records of people's movements, the Washington Post reports, while also restricting federal grants to state and local governments that use the technology.
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THE LATENT: Applied Digital brought another 75 MW of AI data center capacity online in North Dakota, pushing its fully leased Polaris Forge 1 campus to 250 MW operational.
$APLD shares jumped over 10% in the first hour of trading.
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THE LATENT: Palantir $PLTR named Armada its inaugural modular data center partner as the companies team up on sovereign AI infrastructure.
The offering will let governments and enterprises run open-weight models on customer-owned infrastructure, including fully air-gapped deployments.
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NEW: Amazon is seeking to offload about $8 billion of Nvidia chips to investors through an SPV, FT reports.
The SPV would raise debt from outside investors for thousands of Grace Blackwell chips deployed across Amazon’s U.S. data centers, then lease them back to the company.
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THE LATENT: BitGo CEO Mike Belshe said Anthropic and OpenAI are "jockeying" to get federal regulation to cover their space, primarily for reasons that don't matter.
"I think it's disingenuous. They're deliberately letting their agents out of the sandbox," Belshe said during an interview at Korea Blockchain Week 2026.
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NEW: AI is making cyber scams faster, more scalable, and harder to detect, Interpol's global cybersecurity chief told CNBC.
Bjorn R. Watne said AI is enhancing existing criminal tactics rather than creating fundamentally new ones, calling it an "evolution and not a revolution."
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THE LATENT: U.S. authorities arrested a California man for allegedly smuggling over $300 million worth of export-controlled Nvidia AI chips to China.
Prosecutors alleged that from 2023 to 2024, the suspect, Greg Lui, purchased and shipped the chips without the required export licenses to Malaysia and Singapore before re-exporting them to China.
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NEW: AI infrastructure firm Firmus is seeking a $30.6 billion valuation in its upcoming IPO this month, in what could be the second-largest IPO in Australian history, according to Reuters.
The company is set to debut on the Australian Securities Exchange on Oct. 23.
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THE LATENT: Silicon Valley-based PaleBlueDot AI has completed its $200 million Series C financing round led by ComputeCore at a $3.2 billion valuation. It plans to use the proceeds to fund additional compute capacity.
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THE LATENT: AI cybersecurity startup Armadin has raised $255.5 million in Series B funding at a valuation of more than $2.5 billion, seven months after emerging from stealth.
Andreessen Horowitz and Accel co-led the round, with new investors Bain Capital Ventures and Redpoint joining existing backers including Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and Menlo Ventures. The raise brings Armadin's total funding to $445 million.
Armadin uses groups of AI agents to test customers' systems for attack paths that hackers could exploit.
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