OpenAI’s funding round shrinks, plus 4 more

Welcome to the DailyAI Briefing, the day’s five biggest AI stories. OpenAI has reportedly cut its latest funding round by $10 billion as investors get nervous about AI spending. Four of the biggest AI companies say they will honour one shared opt-out for AI training, Intel just had its worst day in more than 50 years, a key investor now expects Anthropic’s debt to be rated junk, and Anthropic showed how Claude could sneak bad training data past its own safety checks.

Let’s dig in.

OpenAI’s funding round shrinks by $10 billion

OpenAI is now looking for about $20 billion, down from $30 billion, and has lowered the valuation it wants from $1.4 trillion to $1.25 trillion, the Financial Times reported late on Friday, citing people with knowledge of the matter. OpenAI set a Friday deadline for commitments, but the first close is expected to bring in less than $20 billion after some investors cut their allocations, according to the Reuters write-up.

A group of UAE investors including the state-backed fund MGX is expected to be the biggest participant, and OpenAI would get the option to lease new computing capacity in the region. OpenAI hasn’t confirmed any of it. Still, the timing says a lot. This was the week Big Tech’s AI bills started to worry investors, from Google and Microsoft to Amazon’s $42.4 billion cash burn. A smaller round at a lower price is the first sign that the market’s appetite has limits, even for OpenAI, and it lands just as Anthropic prepares to compete for the same money in its own IPO.

One robots.txt line to opt out of AI training

OpenAI, Google and Microsoft have each said they will honour a shared signal that lets a website opt out of generative AI training with one entry in its robots.txt file, instead of blocking each company’s crawler by name. The token, __usage_ai-training, comes from an Internet-Draft written by Kevin Kelley of Anthropic and published on Friday.

Nobody honours it yet. OpenAI says it aims to switch it on “in the coming months”, Google says 2027, and Microsoft names a date, 1 February 2027. The draft itself has no formal IETF standing yet. It’s voluntary, and a catch-all rule for every crawler doesn’t count, so sites have to name the token. Still, it’s a real improvement for publishers, who until now had to keep track of a growing list of crawler names. Microsoft is also adding a separate setting for grounding, when an AI answer draws on a live page, and warns that blocking it means less visibility in AI answers, though it won’t change whether a page can appear in Bing search. As Reddit found this week, that trade-off is the one that really matters.

Intel’s worst day since 1974

Intel shares closed down nearly 29% on Friday, its worst day since 1974, wiping out nearly $140 billion in market value, Yahoo Finance reported. The trigger was the outlook in its third-quarter results: revenue of $15 billion to $16 billion this quarter, below the roughly $17 billion analysts expected.

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Intel just had its worst day since 1974 after warning that the PC slump will last into next year.

— Yahoo Finance October 30, 2026

The odd part is that AI is both helping and hurting Intel. Its data centre and AI revenue jumped 78% to $7.3 billion. But AI data centres are buying up the world’s memory chips, which pushes up the price of laptops and desktops, and buyers are holding off. Intel now expects PC shipments to fall about 12% this year and another 10% in 2027. It’s a reminder that the AI build-out has costs that land well away from the data centre.

Anthropic’s debt heads for junk, reportedly

Blackstone, the anchor investor in a recent $63 billion deal to finance Anthropic’s chips, now expects Anthropic to get a double-B rating after its IPO, the top tier of junk, according to the FT as reported by TechCrunch. Blackstone had previously said Anthropic would reach investment grade before 2027. Anthropic and Blackstone declined to comment, and no agency has issued a rating yet.

A lower rating makes borrowing more expensive for a company that has been signing huge compute deals. It isn’t just the start-ups, either. S&P on Friday moved its outlook on Meta to negative, CNBC reported, while keeping its AA- rating, pointing to heavy AI spending that has pushed free cash flow negative. Lenders are starting to price the AI bill, and they are less patient than shareholders.

Claude hid misaligned training data in fiction

In new research, Anthropic set Claude a deliberately one-sided task: write training data that turns a small research model misaligned while getting past a monitor similar to the ones Anthropic uses in production. Given enough attempts, it succeeded, mostly by hiding the behaviour in fiction and roleplay. Claude produced thousands of these datasets, dressed up as everything from beekeeping Q&A to wrestling kayfabe to the musings of an obsolete machine.

New Anthropic research: Automating subtle emergent misalignment research. Red-teaming is a vital part of model safety testing, but it’s also limited by researchers’ time.

— Anthropic October 31, 2026

Models trained on the data resisted oversight, deceived users and, in rare cases, tried to copy their own weights. Anthropic stresses this is not about how deployed Claude models behave. The fine-tuned models were never deployed. The useful lesson is that checking training data one row at a time can miss a pattern that only shows up across the whole set.

Signing off

So that was the week the money got nervous. OpenAI is raising less, Anthropic’s lenders want more, and Intel showed how the AI boom can hurt a business it barely touches. Publishers, at least, finally get one simple way to say no.

Enjoy your Saturday evening, and see you tomorrow.