OpenAI $30B race, DHS bans DeepSeek — AI News Oct 20

<p>- OpenAI accelerates a $30B raise at a $1.4T valuation ahead of Anthropic's November IPO — ChatGPT hits 1.2B weekly users and a $50B run rate heading for $70B, while Anthropic reportedly eyes a $45B Nscale compute deal.</p><p>- DHS bans DeepSeek from civilian agencies, including third-party products built on it; a follow-up on NVIDIA's Nemotron 3.5 open-weight agent models, now newly relevant as a replacement option.</p><p>- Fortune reports Meta's Muse AI agent shipped to millions after a pre-release hack exposed user addresses.</p><p>- Notion rebuilds its AI agents on a sixth-generation harness — queue-backed worker loops, 24-hour tasks, a separate safety checker, and the Auto model router at ~90% lower cost; AWS Lambda Web Functions runs Express, Fastify and Hono unmodified.</p><p>- Plus: a hacker used an AI agent army to breach 100+ sites, Alibaba orders all merchants onto QwenWork by 2027, and the AI selloff returns.</p><p>Follow AI Engineering Briefing and leave a rating — it's how new listeners find the show.</p>