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Malaysian exporters are likely increasing conversions of their foreign-currency earnings into the ringgit, which stands to boost the local exchange rate through the rest of the year, analysts say.

Every day, conversations unfold across social media and websites around the world. A seemingly insignificant post—whether it involves AI-generated misinformation, hate speech, or a damaging rumor—can quickly snowball into a much larger public controversy. Gudea, a company that tracks how stories and rumors spread online that describes itself as the “storm tracker for the internet,” […]

In collaboration with OpenAI, Sullivan & Cromwell developed Agreement Analyzer, an AI tool for identifying issues in a draft agreement.

Wall Street Journal: Sources: YouTube has held talks with publishers in recent months about an audiobook feature that could be ready next year and may be bundled in YouTube Premium  —  The Alphabet-owned streamer is working on a feature for audiobooks, a bid to compete with offerings from Spotify and Audible

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Reuters: Jio Platforms seeks to raise up to $3.2B in India's largest IPO, which would value it at as much as $108.3B; the offering opens October 21 and closes October 23  —  Jio Platforms is set to raise up to $3.2 billion in India's largest IPO to date, which will value the group founded …

Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi national employed as an OpenAI engineer, looks behind a television where a recording device had been placed in a conference room. DOJ/Reuters Abdulrahman Alfozan loved Saudi Arabia. One day before arresting the former OpenAI engineer on charges of bugging the office, the Justice Department worried he would flee back to his home country. Alfozan, his wife, and another family member had already booked one-way tickets, the department said in a court filing. It wouldn't be unusual for Alfozan's thoughts to return to the Gulf. The idea of moving back had followed him through his years working in tech. It inspired him to found a nonprofit that connects Silicon Valley talent with Saudi companies, and to join a WhatsApp group with other Gulf professionals. But he stayed in the US for one big reason, he said in a translated interview released in September, in which he detailed his life and work. "The best place for me to build technical expertise was Silicon Valley," Alfozan said. "You learn from the source, then bring those skills and experiences back home." Now, about a year after Alfozan took a job at OpenAI, the company said that it found a recording device "concealed in toilet paper." The device was placed on the back of a television in an executive conference room, according to a complaint filed in the Northern District of California. OpenAI wrote on X that it fired the employee — unnamed at the time — and referred the case to the FBI. The Justice Department arrested Alfozan, who is 35, on October 9 and charged him with using an electronic device to intercept oral communications. Alfozan has not yet filed a plea. His lawyer, William Pernik, said in a statement that the allegations "appear wholly out of character for him." "Mr. Alfozan came to this country years ago as a young person with a dream," Pernik said. "He spent years studying, working and contributing to an American technological sector that leads the world, a sector built in large part by immigrants like him." From Saudi Arabia to Silicon Valley Alfozan grew up in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, where he went to school through high school. His father taught at a technical college in Dammam, and he introduced Alfozan to computer science professors and students, Alfozan said on the September podcast. A turning point was when Alfozan got into Mawhiba, Saudi Arabia's program for gifted students, he said. He bonded with his computer science teachers who would "stay after school or during breaks answering questions that had nothing to do with the curriculum," he said. His first trip to the US was through Mawhiba, he said, when he went to Texas for an Olympiad training program in 2008. Alfozan continued traveling to the US before college, posting on X about his trips to NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He had an entrepreneurial spirit since high school. On the podcast, he described watching family members in real estate log everything manually in spreadsheets. He built a system to manage it, gave it to his relatives for free, and then began selling it to other real estate offices, he said. Alfozan got into the gifted student program at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. He was accepted to MIT, where he studied computer science and engineering. Alfozan remained a proponent of the major throughout his time at OpenAI, calling it the "most appropriate entry point" in another translated interview posted on YouTube. While at MIT, Alfozan interned at Akamai Technologies, SAP, and Microsoft, according to his LinkedIn. On the September podcast, he said he spent one winter break working on a 30-megawatt power plant in Ghana. MIT told Business Insider that Alfozan was enrolled as an undergraduate from September 2011 to January 2014 and from February 2016 to May 2016, but that no degrees were conferred. Before taking a job, Alfozan asked himself a big question: "Should I return to Saudi Arabia immediately, or should I stay in the United States and continue building experience?" He said he fielded multiple offers and decided on Facebook because of its talent density. In many ways, he fit right into the Valley's tech culture. He said that his role model was Elon Musk and trumpeted X as the best platform for tech professionals. He maintained an active GitHub profile, contributing to a variety of projects. He sent congratulatory notes on social media about fundraising rounds and startup launches. He called one founder's post about how Alfozan had helped save his startup inspiring, saying they "took the idea of vibe coding and pushed it to the extreme." Missing home A few years into his Facebook job, Alfozan was homesick. "How can we contribute to the Kingdom while we're still living abroad?" he remembered asking himself on the September podcast. "We were physically in California, but surely there had to be ways to help from a distance." He and some friends created a nonprofit consulting group, Saudi Silicon Valley, which listed alums of Palantir and Apple in its deck. The group's email was disconnected, and leaders did not respond to requests for comment. Alfozan also had a WhatsApp group chat with about a dozen professionals from the Gulf called "Sunday @ 6," he said in an interview with the Arab Gulf States Institute. That group met on Sunday nights to discuss technology in Arabic, he said. Eventually, Alfozan said, he became a founding engineer at Nash, a Y Combinator-backed startup. He also entered the venture capital space, becoming a partner at RAED Ventures. Neither organization responded to requests for comment. In 2025, he took a job at OpenAI. After a year in the AI lab, he told the YouTube interviewer that there were so many developments that he couldn't count them. The product team that he worked on had just launched its first product that September, he said. Alfozan appeared in federal court on Tuesday, according to a statement from the Justice Department. While he did not deny the allegations, Alfozan's lawyer cautioned against jumping to conclusions, noting that he was charged with violating a federal recording statute, not with stealing trade secrets or acting as a foreign agent. "There is no evidence to suggest otherwise at this time that has been shared with us," said Pernik, the lawyer. "Where someone was born is not evidence of anything." Alfozan's one-way tickets to Saudi Arabia would have been one of many trips. He said on the September podcast that he returned home three or four times a year. He also said he advised several Saudi startups. The podcast host jumped in, calling Alfozan a bridge between the East and the West. "Exactly," Alfozan responded. Editor's note: October 14, 2026 — This story was updated to include a comment from MIT confirming Alfozan's enrollment but clarifying that no degrees were conferred. Read the original article on Business Insider

Intero Biosystems is selling lab-grown human intestines to drugmakers as regulators push for alternatives to animal testing, while the startup looks to scale production and expand its organoid technology.

FactSet’s Text-to-Formula (TTF) system has a deceptively difficult job: take a natural-language...

Cassandre Coyer / Bloomberg Law: Eight US states sue OpenAI separately in a bipartisan effort, alleging it didn't implement sufficient safeguards to protect kids and other vulnerable users  —  More than half a dozen states sued OpenAI Inc. Wednesday alleging the tech giant didn't implement sufficient safeguards to protect vulnerable users, including kids.

Todd Spangler / Variety: Shareholders for both Fox Corp. and Roku approve Fox's $22B acquisition of Roku; Fox expects the deal to be finished in H1 2027, subject to regulatory clearance  —  At separate special meetings of shareholders Wednesday to vote on the deal, the majority of shares owned by Fox Corp. and Roku investors were in favor the deal.

Financial Times: Sources: Anthropic told investors that its revenue jumped to $16.8B in Q3, up from $11.5B in Q2, and that the company was profitable on an adjusted basis in Q3  —  AI start-up gathered investors for presentations in San Francisco on Wednesday ahead of its expected public listing

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company SpaceXSI, formerly xAI, today released Grok Voice 3.0, a new version of the speech-to-speech model behind its Voice Agent API. SpaceXSI is pitching the model to businesses that handle customer support and sales calls with voice agents. Independent testing firm Artificial Analysis ranks it first among models of its type. Artificial […] The post Grok Voice 3.0 from SpaceXSI outscores OpenAI and Google on speech-to-speech index appeared first on SiliconANGLE.

Anthropic PBC told prospective investors its third-quarter revenue hit $16.8 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, as the artificial intelligence company pushes ahead with plans to go public.

Rolfe Winkler / Wall Street Journal: Apple closes above a $5T market cap for the first time, the second company after Nvidia to do so; Apple had crossed $5T six times intraday previously  —  To power Apple's next phase, CEO John Ternus needs to raise Apple's AI game  —  Apple became the second company to close above …

Winnie Cisar, Global Head of Strategy at CreditSights, discusses the strain from heavy corporate borrowing, including debt tied to AI infrastructure. She said individual issuer problems such as CoreWeave’s may coexist with a broader surge in issuance that is challenging investors’ ability to absorb new debt. She speaks to Romaine Bostick on "The Close." (Source: Bloomberg)