Today's Headlines

  • Anthropic commits 5% of its shares to a new public benefit fund, with 2% more possible for every 50% rise in value
  • Disney agrees to hire most of Character.AI's staff: at least 60 people at an estimated $60 million a year, per a filing
  • NVIDIA's RTX Spark laptops go on sale from six PC makers, starting at $2,399
  • DeepSeek opens its in-house Search and Fetch APIs to all developers

Where the value and the people of AI companies end up leads the day. Anthropic is setting up a fund that can hold a larger slice of the company the more the company grows. At Character.AI, court papers show that Disney agreed to hire most of the staff before the chatbot company filed for bankruptcy.

Today's Top Three

Anthropic commits 5% of its shares to a new public benefit fund, with 2% more possible for every 50% rise in value

Anthropic announced on October 18 that it will commit part of its equity to a new entity, the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund.

Subject to stockholder approval, 5% of Anthropic's shares go to the fund now. The board may add another 2% for every 50% increase in the company's value above a set baseline.

Anthropic chose a wholly owned LLC over a 501(c)(3) for the fund so it can move between different forms of giving, including large donations to traditional nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations. The equity it holds is barred from lobbying and political giving, in the US or abroad.

Anthropic named the labor-market impact of AI as one example of where the money could go. It has already committed $200 million to studying and addressing that issue.

The co-founders pledged at the company's founding to donate 80% of their equity, and about half of employees take part in a program in which Anthropic matches the equity they pledge. With the new fund, Anthropic says roughly 20% of its shares will be dedicated to the public good. It plans to publish the fund's structure, governance and valuation milestones in the coming months.

Disney agrees to hire most of Character.AI's staff: at least 60 people at an estimated $60 million a year, per a filing

New details emerged on Disney's deal to take on most of the workforce of Character.AI, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 12.

According to TechCrunch, a legal filing spotted by Bloomberg shows that Disney agreed to make job offers to at least 60 Character.AI employees, the majority of its workforce, with estimated annual compensation of $60 million. The filing says the "vast majority" of those offered jobs accepted.

A declaration filed in the Delaware bankruptcy court by Adam Dunayer, a managing director at Houlihan Capital, Character.AI's investment banker, says Disney agreed to hire most of the workforce, including the CEO, before the petition date. Disney agreed to pay $7.5 million of the $20 million cash consideration up front, and the employees it hired will help Character.AI run its platform for up to five months.

Disney's offer is a stalking horse bid, so other buyers can still come in higher. TechCrunch reports that the filing describes Character.AI as hobbled by high costs and potential litigation and regulatory liabilities despite a large and engaged user base.

NVIDIA's RTX Spark laptops go on sale from six PC makers, starting at $2,399

Windows laptops built on NVIDIA's RTX Spark chip are now on sale.

NVIDIA says ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and MSI are shipping machines, starting at $2,399, with more systems on the way.

RTX Spark combines a Blackwell RTX GPU and a Grace CPU in a single superchip, with up to 1 petaflop of AI compute and up to 128GB of unified memory. NVIDIA is pitching the machines as slim, premium PCs that run AI locally.

The company marked the launch with six retail events worldwide, and founder and CEO Jensen Huang made a surprise appearance at the one in Berlin.

Other Developments

Models & APIs

  • Alongside its updated V4.1-Flash on October 17, DeepSeek opened two APIs to everyone: a Search API powered by its in-house search engine, and a Fetch API that returns a web page as Markdown. Each costs $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests. Calls made as server-side tools through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code and Codex are free for now, with billing starting at 16:00 UTC on October 31. Search & Fetch (DeepSeek API Docs)

Research

  • In a guest post on Terence Tao's blog, Francesco Maggi asks whether AI will bring a golden age or a dark age for mathematics and science. He warns of a growing gap between the capabilities held by a few frontier companies and those available to universities, and calls on universities, professional societies and funders to build research AI infrastructure together (outside the inbox). Will it be a golden age or a dark age for mathematics (and science)? (Terence Tao)

Other

  • A woman in Philadelphia was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after she blocked an Uber delivery robot and refused police requests to move. The Verge reports that she told a local TV station she protests the robots whenever she sees them because they take jobs from human delivery workers. A woman was arrested in Philly for blocking a delivery robot (The Verge)

Source: Selected by the editors from the AI news inbox (collected October 19, 2026: 8 items, 2 primary and 6 secondary) and from a guest post on Terence Tao's blog that the editors added from outside the inbox.