Weekly Intel - 2026-10-25

This week a New Mexico judge put a $25 billion price on Meta’s handling of user data, Google rewrote its privacy policy to let connected Gmail and Photos data shape ads, and Europe got another reason to ask who can switch off American technology.

Legal & Regulation

Meta ordered to pay $25 billion in case tied to Cambridge Analytica . Judge Francis Mathew of New Mexico’s First Judicial District ordered Meta on Wednesday to pay $25 billion in civil penalties, after a Santa Fe jury found in September that the company misled state residents about how it collects and protects user data. The jury found more than 43 million violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act, each carrying up to $5,000, which put the maximum possible penalty near $219.5 billion. The state had asked for $35 billion to $40 billion, Meta argued for no more than $3.4 billion, and the company says it will appeal.

AI Industry Moves

OpenAI models are coming to Google Cloud . OpenAI and Google Cloud announced on October 21 that OpenAI’s frontier models and Codex will be available in Google Cloud’s Model Garden, under Google Cloud’s data governance and access controls. Billing runs through Google Cloud Marketplace and counts against existing Google commitments. It starts as a private preview for selected enterprise customers, with wider access planned in the coming weeks and no pricing or general availability date published yet.

AI & Software

Anthropic launches Claude Duet . Anthropic released Claude Duet on October 21, an agent app that sends a morning brief, keeps watching connected services, and handles tasks like scheduling, building dashboards and drafting replies, asking for approval before it acts. It works across more than 6,000 connectors and plugins and runs on Opus 5.5. Duet is a research preview behind a waitlist, open to US Pro and Max subscribers on iOS, Android and the web (SiliconANGLE ).

Dream Labs releases Dream-1 . Dream Labs came out of stealth with $90 million in seed funding and released Dream-1, a robotics model available through a public API at $3 an hour (a lighter Dream-1-flash costs $2). The company says Dream-1 controls two-armed robots with parallel grippers without fine-tuning or robot-specific demonstrations, and reports testing it on 27 unseen robots in simulation and four real ones. It also sells fine-tuning for customers who want it, using as little as five minutes of extra data.

Moonshot AI releases Kimi K3.1 Pro . Kimi K3.1 Pro is a 3-trillion-parameter-class open-weight model with a 1-million-token context window and gains in coding, 3D work, financial research and agentic tasks. A K3.1 Pro Highspeed version runs two to three times faster. Both are available now on Kimi.ai, Kimi Work, Kimi Code and the Kimi API, with full model weights due by November 4.

Tech Industry

Steve Blank: Elon Musk just gave Europe a reason to replace American technology . Starshield, the military version of Starlink, was throttled for Ukraine starting around October 14, which disrupted drone missions. Who ordered it is disputed: the Wall Street Journal reported Musk ordered SpaceX to slow the service, Reuters reported the order came from inside the White House, and the administration denies involvement (Al Jazeera ). Ukraine’s defense ministry said access was restored around October 23. Blank argues the episode confirms a long-standing European fear that American-controlled systems carry a kill switch that can be used unilaterally, and that it will push European governments to reduce their reliance on American technology.

Cybersecurity

PingCAP confirms breach of TiDB Cloud . The extortion group FulcrumSec says it took 10.6 TB of data from PingCAP’s TiDB Cloud, including 115,308 plaintext customer API keys (42,612 of them active), 413 private source repositories, and four years of customer connection logs, and has started publishing it. PingCAP confirmed unauthorized access between September 9 and October 7 and theft of source code and customer data, including control-plane records, API keys, connection logs and billing data. The company says it has no evidence that data stored in TiDB databases was affected, has not verified the group’s figures, and is telling customers to rotate their management API keys.

Eight eMudhra CA keys cracked in milliseconds . The private keys for eight eMudhra intermediate certificates (six for TLS, two for code signing, all created in April 2025) were recovered from the public certificates in under a second, because the keys were numbers as small as 4, 56 and 115. After the October 17 report, Chrome and Firefox blocked the certificates that evening. Apple followed on October 19 and Microsoft on October 20, when Mozilla also removed the eMudhra root, and Chrome’s removal of the root is expected in an update around October 27 (The Hacker News ). eMudhra blamed a flaw in its key ceremony script and says only one of the intermediates was in production and none had issued end-user certificates, and its shares fell about 20% in Mumbai on October 21.

Privacy & Governance

Google says it may use your Gmail and Google Photos data to target ads . Google’s privacy policy, effective October 16, lets data from Gmail, Drive and Google Photos personalize content, including ads, once a user connects those apps to other Google services through Personal Intelligence. The policy says Google won’t use that content for personalized ads unless the user chooses to make it available. In 2017 Google said it would stop reading Gmail to target ads.

Economy & Labor

America has lost 200,000 jobs in media, film and the arts . Joseph Politano at Apricitas Economics counts more than 200,000 creative industry jobs lost over the past four years, about 50,000 of them in the last year, a decline matched only during the 2001 and 2008 recessions. Film and sound recording lost more than 100,000 of those jobs and written publishing more than 70,000, while in-person entertainment has held up. Politano writes that AI’s share is very hard to measure, partly because media companies disclose little about their AI use, and he also points to consolidation, offshoring and competition from social media creators.

That’s what I’m watching. What caught your attention this week?

-Eric