The week in tech.

In September 2026, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy blocked Meta's Muse agent over violated conditions. Despite the ban, over 10 million users in the US and Canada adopted the service, while 400 million Alexa users remain unaffected. Walmart and Shopify struck deals to buy into the agent.

In the third quarter, Meta's ad revenue increased 26% to $63.1 billion, while Google's search division grew 12% to $63.4 billion. This 14-point gap is the widest in Meta's favor since 2021. Google's search revenue growth is slowing as chatbots become alternatives, whereas Meta's AI tools drove almost 5% more conversions for advertisers.

Binance customers withdrew more than $3.6bn after the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange reopened following a record hack. The incident impacted $6.3bn of assets, with the FBI accusing North Korea of responsibility. Binance covered 95% of stolen assets while withdrawals stabilize.

HSBC announced on October 15, 2026, plans to open a new AI institute in Hong Kong by early 2027. The bank aims to grow its local team to 300 specialists, focusing on AI, blockchain, and post-quantum cryptography to address regulatory concerns regarding its Singapore operations.

Chinese embodied AI companies raised 93.5 billion yuan ($13 billion) across 322 deals in the first half of 2026, five times the amount a year earlier. This funding boom shifts focus from hardware to developing the artificial intelligence brains needed for robots to perform useful tasks across various jobs.

President Lee Jae Myung proposed a 21.3 trillion won ($15.97 billion) investment in artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and data centers for next year's budget. This funding aims to boost economic growth and strengthen the nation's technological edge amidst intensifying global competition.

US spot bitcoin ETFs shed $643.3 million on Friday, marking their largest single-day outflow since June 25. This drop followed a $6.3 billion hack at Binance by North Korean hackers. Spot Ethereum ETFs also saw $155.9 million in net outflows on Friday, their largest since Oct. 7. Bitcoin rose 1% to trade at $78,491 as of 11:20 p.m. ET Sunday.

Chinese AI firm DeepSeek released a prototype called Super-Agent that listens to developer group chats to solve coding problems without waiting for prompts. The company raised about 100 billion yuan or $15 billion in its latest fundraising round ahead of a planned initial public offering.

SenseTime announced on October 30 the release of SenseNova Loop-9B-Preview, an open-source multimodal model running 24 decoder layers twice. This architecture allows the nine billion parameter system to process sequences of up to 262,144 tokens for tasks like coding and document understanding under an Apache 2.0 license.

Meituan released LongCat-2.5 on November 2, a 1.6 trillion parameter model with 48 billion activated per token. The system features enhanced visual understanding and coding capabilities for AI agents.