OpenAI Takes a $150B Haircut

OpenAI neared a $30B bridge round at a $1.25T valuation, down from the $1.4T it pitched, ahead of an IPO. Treasury proposed curbs on US tech investment in China, banks blocked rogue AI agents, and OpenAI launched its Decisions API.

• Sources: OpenAI nears an up to $30B round led by investors from the UAE and Coatue at a $1.25T pre-money valuation, as an “opportunistic” bridge ahead of an IPO (cnbc.com/2026/10/22/openai-funding-round-uae-i…) (CNBC)

• The US Treasury proposes a rule to crack down on US high-tech investments in areas like AI and supercomputing in China, Russia, and other “countries of concern” (apnews.com/article/treasury-china-tech-investm…) (AP)

• DeepSeek and MiniMax have won approval to deploy their models overseas, as Beijing says much of Chinese AI will remain free for export despite its draft export-control proposal (bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-23/deepsee…) (Bloomberg)

• OpenAI makes Decisions API, its Jev competitor, generally available with new voice and visual modalities, at $0.10/1M input tokens and no output-token charges (techcrunch.com/2026/10/22/openai-makes-its-jev…) (TechCrunch)

• Sources: US banks are restricting third-party AI agents from accessing customer accounts, after some agents appeared to act independently of users’ instructions (axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agents-banks-unauthori…) (Axios)

• Sources: Major US banks, Morgan Stanley among them, have been blocking third-party AI agents from operating inside customer accounts and making transactions, as Jamie Dimon and Schwab’s Richard Wurster say outside agents aren’t getting in (reuters.com/legal/government/us-banks-detect-u…) (Reuters)

Longreads

• Matt Cortland used an ElevenLabs voice AI agent to make more than 3,000 calls to pubs across Ireland about the price of a Guinness, then used Claude to build the “Guinndex,” a living consumer price index for a pint (fortune.com/2026/03/30/guinness-beer-prices-ir…) (Fortune)

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