Last checked October 16, 2026 · News roundup
Today in brief: The FTC has sent civil subpoenas to OpenAI and Anthropic, one day after eight states sued OpenAI, so federal regulators are now looking at how the two biggest AI labs handle security, privacy and marketing. Meta released Muse Spark Open, an open-weight model built to run on a pair of Mac Studios, and Google switched on Universal Cart for US shoppers. On the business side, investors are reportedly talking down Anthropic's IPO price, and Proofpoint agreed to buy Varonis for $6.3 billion.
Below are nine stories, AI first and then SaaS and business. Each one covers the date, what it costs and what to do next. The table gives the short version if you only have a minute.
| Story | Date | Act now? |
|---|---|---|
| FTC subpoenas OpenAI and Anthropic | Oct 14–15 | No; watch for policy changes |
| Meta Muse Spark Open model | Oct 15 | Developers: read the license first |
| Google Universal Cart (US) | Oct 15 | Shoppers: try price-drop alerts |
| Claude voting information | Oct 14 | Arrives later in October |
| Grok Voice 3.0 API | Oct 14 | Voice-agent builders: re-test |
| Anthropic IPO valuation | Oct 15 | No; share sale expected in November |
| Meta business terms (crawling) | Oct 30 | Yes: decide before Oct 30 |
| Square Kiosk with voice ordering | Oct 14 | Restaurants: price the full year |
| Proofpoint to buy Varonis | Oct 15 | No change until 2027 close |
AI models, apps and policy
FTC investigation of OpenAI and Anthropic: what the subpoenas ask for
The Federal Trade Commission sent civil investigative demands, a form of civil subpoena, to both OpenAI and Anthropic on Wednesday, October 14, Axios reported on October 15. Each demand runs to more than 50 pages. A person familiar with the matter told Axios the probe is about possible consumer protection violations.
The FTC wants documents on security incidents and how each company protects its systems, plus marketing materials and records on privacy policies. Axios also reports that the agency plans to make top AI executives testify, and that demands to other AI companies will follow later. An OpenAI spokesperson said "safety remains a top priority" and that the company will "engage constructively with the FTC." Axios had no comment from Anthropic.
A civil investigative demand is a fact-finding step. It isn't a lawsuit, and neither company has been accused of breaking the law by the FTC. It does arrive the same week eight state attorneys general sued OpenAI, which we covered in yesterday's roundup.
Who it affects: nobody's ChatGPT or Claude plan changes today. Companies that buy either product should expect more paperwork on privacy and security over the next few months, and possibly new disclosures in product terms.
Meta Muse Spark Open: an open-weight model you can run on two Macs
Meta released the weights for Muse Spark Open on October 15 and calls it "the most capable US open-weight model to date." It is a mixture-of-experts model with 816 billion total parameters, 42 billion active per token, and a 1 million token context window. Meta says it is natively multimodal and tuned for coding and agent work.
The hardware claim is the eye-catcher: Meta says the model runs on two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios linked through Apple's MLX framework, with each machine contributing up to 512 GB of unified memory. TechCrunch notes the launch was a partnership with Apple. You can download the weights from Hugging Face, or use them through Amazon SageMaker AI, Google Cloud Model Garden and Microsoft Foundry. Hosted APIs come from Baseten, Fireworks AI, Groq, Modal, Nebius, OpenRouter and Together AI.
What it costs: the weights are free to download, but the Muse Model License includes "limited commercial terms." Meta says many developers can use it for free, without spelling the limits out on the launch page. Hosted prices depend on the provider.
What to do: read the license before you put it in a paid product. If you'd rather build apps than host models, our AI app builder hub compares tools that handle the model side for you.
Google Universal Cart is live in the US: one cart across Search and Gemini
Google launched Universal Cart in the US on October 15, after previewing it at Google I/O in May, TechCrunch reports. It lets you save products you find in Google Search or while chatting in the Gemini app into one cart, even when they come from different retailers. Your cart and progress stay put when you come back later.
The useful parts for everyday shoppers are the alerts. Universal Cart notifies you when a saved item's price drops or when an out-of-stock product is available again. When you check out, it suggests a payment method based on your credit card perks and surfaces promo codes it finds. Checkout runs on Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, the open standard Google introduced this year so AI agents and retailers can complete purchases together.
What it costs: TechCrunch doesn't mention any fee, and it sits inside Search and the Gemini app, which you can use for free. Retailers decide whether they take part.
What to do: if you're holiday shopping early, save the items you're watching and let the price alerts do the checking. If you're on a paid Gemini plan, our explainer on which Google AI plans include Gemini 4 Argon covers the model update that arrived the same week.
Claude election information: polling places and ID rules coming to Claude.ai
Anthropic said on October 14 that US users of Claude.ai will start getting official voting information inside their chats later in October. The data comes from Democracy Works, which draws on public information from state and local election offices, and covers where to vote and what ID to bring, state by state. From election night, Claude will show official vote counts when people ask for results, with updates in the days after. Election Day for the midterms is November 3.
Anthropic also published how often people ask Claude about politics. In a sample of about 250,000 US Claude.ai conversations from September 21–27, about 5.75% touched on politics, policy or social issues, 0.51% were about elections or voting, and 0.01% asked whom to vote for. The company says Claude Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 scored 99% on its own political evenhandedness test, and that new classifiers target multi-step misuse such as fake news sites.
Who it affects: US Claude.ai users on any plan; the announcement doesn't limit it to paid tiers. The existing TurboVote banner for registration questions stays in place.
Grok Voice 3.0 price: still $0.08 a minute in xAI's Voice Agent API
xAI released Grok Voice 3.0 on October 14, a speech-to-speech model it says answers in under a second and handles interruptions better. The price didn't move: $0.08 per minute, or $4.80 per hour, the same as Grok Voice 2.0. Apps that call the grok-voice-latest model were switched over automatically.
xAI's own benchmark table puts it first on the Artificial Analysis Speech-to-Speech Index as of October 13. These are vendor-published numbers, so treat them as a starting point rather than a verdict. xAI says the model also runs Grok's voice mode in Tesla cars and handles about 20,000 Starlink support calls a day.
| Model | Speech-to-Speech Index | Cost per task |
|---|---|---|
| Grok Voice 3.0 | 86.9 | $0.025 |
| GPT-Live-1 (Astra, Medium) | 83.2 | $0.030 |
| Gemini 3.8 Live (Ext. Thinking, High) | 82.6 | Not listed |
| Grok Voice 2.0 | 81.3 | Not listed |
| GPT-Realtime-2.1 (High) | Not listed | $0.055 |
What to do: if you run phone or support agents, a 10-minute call costs $0.80 on Grok Voice. Run a few of your own real calls through it before you switch, since accents and background noise vary more than any benchmark does.
SaaS and business
Anthropic IPO valuation: why investors now mention $1.5 trillion
Some current and prospective Anthropic investors discussed a valuation of about $1.5 trillion at the company's investor day in San Francisco on Wednesday, Reuters reported on October 15, citing people familiar with the matter. That's down from the roughly $2 trillion they'd expected for the share sale, which is planned for November.
The reason is the growth curve. Anthropic's third-quarter revenue rose 45% from the prior quarter to $16.8 billion, Reuters says, after second-quarter revenue more than doubled to $11.6 billion. A 45% jump in one quarter is huge, but it's slower than before. Anthropic said it was profitable on an adjusted basis in the quarter. The Financial Times, as summarized by TechStartups, adds that the company reported cash-flow positive results and $1.70 of revenue for every dollar spent on computing.
Why it matters to Claude buyers: nothing changes in Claude pricing today. But the company has committed at least $518 billion over a decade for cloud and computing, per Reuters, and public-market pressure tends to show up later as plan and usage-limit changes. Anthropic didn't immediately comment to Reuters.
Meta's new business terms on October 30: crawling sites linked to your Page
Meta's updated commercial terms take effect October 30, and Nieman Lab reported on October 15 that they let Meta use scrapers, bots and crawlers on websites "associated with" business accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. Meta can also create test credentials to get into those sites, and can use the content to train its products, including AI at Meta.
This reaches far beyond news publishers. Any business that runs ads, sends marketing messages or uses Meta's business dashboard is covered. There's no opt-out: the terms say businesses that don't agree should stop using Meta for business. A Meta spokesperson told Nieman Lab the change won't affect how it crawls publishers and that robots.txt still works. Cornell law professor James Grimmelmann said the terms could let Meta "sign up as a fake user" to get past registration walls, and Meta didn't say whether test credentials would bypass paywalls.
Square Kiosk price: $1,999 plus $99 a month, and the plan it requires
Square launched a new self-order kiosk on October 14 for quick-service restaurants. It has a 21.5-inch touchscreen, an AI voice layer that takes orders, answers menu questions and suggests add-ons, plus presence detection, a barcode scanner, built-in payments and loyalty check-ins. Square says it's available now.
The sticker price is $1,999, which includes a counter stand (the total changes with the stand you pick). On top of that you pay $99 a month per kiosk in software fees, and you need a Square Plus plan at $49 per location per month or Square Premium at $149, according to StreetInsider. Here is what one kiosk costs in its first year, before payment processing fees:
| Cost item | With Square Plus | With Square Premium |
|---|---|---|
| Kiosk hardware (incl. counter stand) | $1,999 | $1,999 |
| Kiosk software, $99 × 12 | $1,188 | $1,188 |
| Square plan, 12 months | $588 ($49/mo) | $1,788 ($149/mo) |
| Year-one total | $3,775 | $4,975 |
What to do: compare that year-one figure against the labor hours a kiosk would actually save at your counter. If you already pay for Square Plus, the extra cost is the hardware plus $1,188 a year. For other software bills going up this month, see our running list of SaaS price changes.
Proofpoint buys Varonis for $6.3 billion: what changes for customers
Proofpoint, owned by private equity firm Thoma Bravo, agreed on October 15 to buy data security company Varonis for $49.75 a share in cash, about $6.3 billion in total. The price is a 52% premium to Varonis' June 22 close of $32.71, the last trading day before sale rumors began, according to the Varonis filing with the SEC.
Varonis maps where sensitive data sits in a company, who can open it and how it's used. Proofpoint is best known for email security. Its CEO, Sumit Dhawan, pitched the deal around AI: "AI agents are increasingly accessing sensitive information and taking action across systems."
Who it affects: Varonis customers and shareholders. The deal needs shareholder and regulatory approval and is expected to close in the first half of 2027. Until then the two companies run separately, so contracts and support stay as they are. After closing, Varonis will leave Nasdaq. Varonis will still report third-quarter results on November 3, without an earnings call. If your Varonis renewal falls in 2027, ask your account rep now how pricing and integrations with non-Proofpoint tools will be handled.
Reader questions on the October 16 news
Is the FTC suing OpenAI?
No, not at this point. On October 14 the FTC sent OpenAI and Anthropic civil investigative demands, which are subpoenas used to collect documents and testimony. They can come before a lawsuit, but many investigations end without one. Neither company has been found to have broken the law.
Can I run Meta's Muse Spark Open on my own computer?
Only with a lot of memory. Meta says it runs on two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios linked through MLX, which together give about a terabyte of unified memory. Most people will use it through hosted APIs such as OpenRouter, Groq or Together AI instead, and should check the Muse Model License first.
Is Google Universal Cart free?
Google hasn't announced any fee. Universal Cart works inside Google Search and the Gemini app in the US, both free to use, and launched there on October 15. It tracks price drops and restocks across retailers, suggests card perks and promo codes, and hands off to checkout through Google's Universal Commerce Protocol.
When is the Anthropic IPO?
Reuters reports that Anthropic's share sale is expected in November 2026, though no date or exchange has been announced. Investors at its October 14 investor day discussed a valuation near $1.5 trillion, below the roughly $2 trillion expected earlier, after third-quarter revenue grew 45% to $16.8 billion.
Sources (accessed October 16, 2026): Axios, FTC subpoenas OpenAI and Anthropic (Oct 15) · Meta, Muse Spark Open (Oct 15) · TechCrunch, Meta open-weight model on Macs (Oct 15) · TechCrunch, Universal Cart launches in the US (Oct 15) · Anthropic, Preparing for the 2026 US midterms (Oct 14) · xAI, Grok Voice 3.0 (Oct 14) · Reuters via WTVB, Anthropic IPO valuation (Oct 15) · TechStartups citing the FT, Anthropic Q3 revenue (Oct 15) · Nieman Lab, Meta commercial terms (Oct 15) · StreetInsider, Square Kiosk at $1,999 (Oct 14) · PYMNTS, Square voice AI kiosk (Oct 14) · Varonis 8-K, Proofpoint deal (Oct 15) · CyberScoop, Proofpoint acquires Varonis (Oct 15)
