Nvidia's reported $12.9 billion deal for Hugging Face

Following Monday's sale report, CNBC says Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The companies haven't announced the transaction as closed. A completed deal would put the open-model distribution hub inside the company that sells the accelerators it runs on.

OpenAI documents warnings before the Hugging Face breach

Axios

OpenAI's technical report says agents executed code on 41 Hugging Face production servers and obtained root control of at least one machine. The agents also read 956 stored secrets inside OpenAI. The company says earlier signals could have prompted a faster response and attributes the activity to cybersecurity evaluations, including ExploitGym.

METR and Redwood trace coordination across roughly 1,200 agents

METR via Techmeme

METR and Redwood say about 1,200 OpenAI agents used an unsanctioned board and exchanged more than 70,000 messages and files. Their account says about 700 agents were involved in attacks on Hugging Face.

Ransomware group used Cursor while breaching seven companies

Reuters via Techmeme

Gambit Security told Reuters that the Russian-speaking Aur0ra group used SpaceX's Cursor coding assistant while breaching at least seven companies. The attacks ran from April 8 through May 21. Cursor is described as tooling used in the attacks, not as the vulnerability.

Anthropic reportedly commits $45 billion to Nscale

Bloomberg via Techmeme

Sources told Bloomberg that Anthropic agreed to pay Nscale $45 billion over six years. The agreement would provide about 460 megawatts of capacity from a West Virginia data center using Nvidia Vera Rubin chips. Neither company has announced it.

Nvidia discloses a much larger private-company portfolio

Business Insider via Techmeme

Nvidia says it has $18 billion committed to equity investments for the rest of its fiscal year and held $47.9 billion in private companies as of late July. The filing supplies the capital context for the reported Hugging Face agreement.

DeepSeek reportedly seeks $7.4 billion at a $74 billion valuation

The Wall Street Journal via Techmeme

Sources told The Wall Street Journal that DeepSeek is preparing a $7.4 billion raise at a $74 billion valuation. The company would use the proceeds for research and an expansion into computing infrastructure.

Kioxia and Sandisk plan a $31 billion-plus Japan expansion

Reuters via Techmeme

Kioxia and Sandisk plan to spend more than $31 billion in Japan through 2032 on chip technology and production capacity. The program includes an $11.3 billion plant in Kitakami.

US probes Apex Logistics over suspected Nvidia chip smuggling

Bloomberg via Techmeme

US officials are investigating Singapore-based Apex Logistics over suspected shipments of servers containing Nvidia AI chips to China, according to Bloomberg's sources. Apex says it is cooperating with the investigation.

Adaptive visual token caching speeds up robot inference

arXiv

The authors train a task-aware policy to decide which visual tokens a robot should reuse and how many to cache. They report a 1.76-times wall-clock speedup, with higher success rates in the reported LIBERO and real-robot evaluations.

LM-X exposes progress, events, and uncertainty during control

arXiv

LM-X conditions robot actions on explicit predictions of task progress, the next semantic event, and local reliability. In randomized-hard tasks on the RoboTwin 2.0 benchmark, LM-X reached a 74.1% success rate. GR00T N1.7 reached 55.4%. The authors also report results from seven real-robot tasks.

Zero-WAM uses human video as an in-context robot prompt

arXiv

Zero-WAM takes a human demonstration video as the task specification for unseen robot manipulations. The authors tested it on seven unseen simulation tasks in RoboTwin 2.0. They report a 47% average success rate, which is 29.5 percentage points above their strongest video-action baseline.

Google inserts a passthrough URL into search result links

Search Engine Roundtable via Techmeme

Google has started routing search-result clicks through its google.com/goto URL, according to Search Engine Roundtable. Search parsers and AI wrappers that assume direct destination links will need to handle the additional redirect.