AI News: October 30, 2026

1. Trump Declares Foreign-Made Industrial Robot Imports a National Security Threat

White House. President Trump issued a proclamation on October 28 that declares imports of industrial robots and machinery a national security threat, citing a Commerce Department investigation that flagged supply chain and cybersecurity risks. The order directs the US to negotiate new agreements with trading partners within 180 days and warns that tariffs, duties, quotas, or fees may follow if talks fail. The move reaches factory robot arms that the FCC’s July 2026 ban on foreign-made consumer robots exempted, and it hits automakers and aerospace firms that rely on FANUC, ABB, Yaskawa, and KUKA, since no US company makes comparable heavy-duty arms. Source

2. Report Says Chinese Labs Now Distill OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra After Anthropic Hardened Claude

DeepSeek / Moonshot AI. Citing The Information, The Decoder reports that Chinese AI labs have shifted their distillation efforts from Anthropic’s Claude to OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, with DeepSeek and Moonshot reportedly leaning heavily on Astra outputs to train Kimi K3.1 Pro and V4.1-Flash 1017. Anthropic says its newer defenses cut the data attackers can extract by 90 to 99 percent, while OpenAI said attackers have adjusted tactics each time new defenses rolled out. Moonshot declined to comment and DeepSeek did not respond. Source

3. OpenAI-Backed Thrive Holdings Agrees to Buy ADT for $15.3 Billion

Thrive Holdings. The holding company spun out of Thrive Capital agreed to acquire home security company ADT for $10 per share, about $7.6 billion in equity and $15.3 billion in enterprise value. Thrive plans to make ADT the base of a smart home security business and invest in AI-powered security products, though none were named. OpenAI is an investor and partner in Thrive Holdings, supplying models and forward-deployed engineers to its more than 75 portfolio companies. Source

4. Deepgram Acquires Daily, the Company Behind the Pipecat Voice Agent Framework

Deepgram. The speech AI company is acquiring Daily, which hosts real-time voice and video infrastructure and maintains Pipecat, an open-source framework that orchestrates speech-to-text, LLM, and text-to-speech components for low-latency voice agents. Terms were not disclosed. Both companies say Pipecat will remain open source and vendor-neutral, which matters for the many voice agent stacks built on it with competing STT and TTS providers. Source

5. Serval Raises $150 Million at a $3 Billion Valuation to Take On ServiceNow

Serval. The IT automation startup raised a $150 million Series C led by Sequoia at a $3 billion post-money valuation, tripling its valuation since a $75 million Series B in December and bringing total funding to $277 million. Its Catalyst agent builds workflow automations, tests them in a separate environment, and publishes them to an employee-facing agent. Serval says ARR has doubled every quarter since the last round and that two Fortune 20 companies converted in the past six months, though it did not disclose revenue figures. Source

6. Wabi Reaches a $1.25 Billion Valuation After a $55 Million Round

Wabi. The startup founded by former Replika CEO Eugenia Kuyda raised $55 million led by IVP, with Andreessen Horowitz, Forerunner, the Amazon Alexa Fund, and angels including Tobi Lütke and Marc Benioff participating. Wabi began as a prompt-based mini app builder and pivoted last month to an AI messenger it calls a “personal agent,” which generates small apps for tasks like meal planning and fitness tracking. Source

7. Reddit Moves to a Logged-In Experience as AI Search Erodes Referrals

Reddit. On its Q3 earnings call, Reddit said it will shift to a primarily logged-in experience to protect its data from AI scrapers, support licensing deals with model providers, and improve ad targeting. Search referrals fell by more than 1 million per week on average in October, US daily actives dropped from 53.2 million to 50.7 million quarter over quarter, and the company warned of a low double-digit percentage drop in daily users next quarter, even as revenue rose 53% to $895 million. Testing starts in select non-US markets in Q4. Source

8. US Intelligence Reportedly Probed a Chinese Spy Plot Targeting Jensen Huang

Nvidia. According to The New York Times, US intelligence agencies surveilled Alice Huang, a top executive at Singapore AI cloud firm Megaspeed, for about a year over concerns she was close enough to Nvidia’s CEO to gather information on the company’s plans and its lobbying over chip exports to China. The Commerce Department investigated Megaspeed in 2025 for allegedly reselling restricted Nvidia chips to Chinese companies. Nvidia said the interactions were ordinary customer meetings and that regional cloud customers receive no sensitive information. Source

9. Rivian Licenses Its AI Voice Assistant to Volkswagen

Rivian. Rivian disclosed in its Q3 investor presentation that its $5.8 billion software joint venture with Volkswagen Group now covers its in-house AI voice assistant, which shipped on the R1S and R1T in May and the R2 in October. Licensing fees and target VW models were not disclosed, though the low-cost ID EVERY1 could be first. The deal positions Rivian’s assistant as licensable automotive AI software rather than a single-brand feature. Source

10. Granola Adds Free Unlimited Dictation to Compete With Wispr Flow

Granola. The AI meeting notes app launched a system-wide dictation feature on Mac: users hold the Fn key, speak, and Granola cleans up the transcript before inserting it into any app. Granola is offering unlimited words for free, a direct challenge to paid dictation tools like Wispr Flow, with iOS and Windows versions promised soon. Source

11. A Humanist University Administrator Wins a Religious Exemption From Using AI at Work

University of Kentucky. David Durman, a nontheistic Humanist and grant-support administrator, obtained a workplace religious accommodation exempting him from AI use, with help from the American Humanist Association. He is reportedly the first Humanist to secure such an exemption, following a Unitarian Universalist software engineer who won similar protections. The case suggests employers rolling out AI mandates may face accommodation requests grounded in non-theistic belief systems, which the university says it reviews case by case. Source