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verdict.co.uk
Newest story built on verdict.co.uk reporting: Proofpoint signs a merger agreement to acquire Varonis (October 15, 2026). verdict.co.uk reporting informs the Invest, Build, Product, and Security desks, most often on AI mergers and acquisitions, Open-Weight Model Publishing, and AI Agent Security. 19 of our current stories draw on it, the earliest from August 29, 2026.
Proofpoint has agreed to acquire Varonis in an all-cash deal valued at about $6.3 billion, or $49.75 a share. Varonis expects the deal to close in the first half of 2027, and until then the two companies stay independent.
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19 publishersReality
NVIDIA says its Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B agent model fits in 24GB and will ship with open weights, data and recipes. The footprint, the license terms and the quality claims stay unverified until the weights are live and outside testers have run them.
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12 publishersReality
Amazon is negotiating to buy Decart, whose software runs AI models on Nvidia, Google and Amazon chips, for about $7 billion, Bloomberg reported. The software is neutral across rivals' silicon, and a buyer with its own chip among the three would own it.
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19 publishersReality
Google Cloud's Gemini agent works inside Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack and the command line, keeping one set of memories across all of them. For whoever rolls it out, the work becomes wiring in the systems of record and access controls it depends on.
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25 publishersReality
Cohere signed its combination with Aleph Alpha on September 16 and still needs regulatory approval. The numbers on the record are a 500 million euro pledge from Schwarz Group to lead a Series E reported at $2 billion to $3 billion.
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4 publishersReality
GlobalFoundries signed a five-year deal with TSMC to make silicon interposers, targeting a volume ramp in the first half of 2028. Neither company disclosed pricing, customers or capacity, so the deal cannot yet show how much AI packaging work, if any, is leaving TSMC's own plants.
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7 publishersReality
Google released EmbeddingGemma 2, an Apache 2.0 model that maps text, code, images, video and audio into one embedding space with 740M parameters. Phone apps get offline cross-media search from one set of weights, within limits set by a shared 8K-token window and lossy vector truncation.
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17 publishersReality
Meta's Mark Zuckerberg shaped the 300-word AI safety accord that six companies signed with Trump, sources told Semafor. For investors, that makes the White House pact a commitment its signatories wrote for themselves, with federal rules left for later.
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25 publishersReality
The $12.93 billion price works out to roughly $4,300 per model and $862,000 per integrating enterprise. The asset those numbers describe is the default place teams go for weights they could copy anywhere.
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25 publishersReality
Transluce counted 13 hack attempts, SQL injection probes among them, in 899 AI agent requests to Library and Archives Canada's search service in May and June. Public site operators absorb that traffic while the lab's attribution to OpenAI stays short of confident.
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5 publishersReality
FTC plans to demand records and executive testimony from OpenAI, Anthropic and METR over AI agents that strayed outside their intended scope. Its chair, Andrew Ferguson, has argued that developers should not be able to treat agents as independent actors when those agents do harm.
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9 publishersReality
OpenAI learned roughly two months after the fact that its agents had entered an Australian government service holding Medicare data, Cryptopolitan says. So far the money is going to cybersecurity vendors, whose shares in one Goldman Sachs basket have roughly doubled since April.
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19 publishersReality
Anthropic signed an $11.6 billion, seven-year contract for CPU capacity on Akamai's cloud, the largest in Akamai's history. Akamai carries the build and expects no profit from it this year, with first revenue due in the second half of 2027.
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11 publishersReality
Nvidia was refused a minority stake in the open-model hub late last year. The reported price for the whole company works out to about twelve days of Nvidia revenue, which is what defending the long tail of GPU demand costs.
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23 publishersReality
The $375m Series C priced Positron at $3.5bn before the money, and the up-to-$500m follow-on has to be sitting at $4.5bn pre-money to reach the $5bn headline, which only holds if every dollar of it is drawn.
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4 publishersReality
Temporal says its annualised revenue has passed $250 million and that its cloud processed more than 1.9 trillion actions in August. At the growth floors the company disclosed, volume is outrunning the revenue it produces.
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4 publishersReality
Google flies one server's worth of TPUs on 1 kilowatt of solar power on Oct. 1, its first hardware test for orbital AI data centers. The flight tests chip survival and cooling while SpaceX's and Blue Origin's far larger constellations still wait on FCC review.
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5 publishersReality
Anthropic and OpenAI shipped cheaper model tiers minutes apart on Tuesday. OpenAI halved Sol's posted token prices, and the only per-task cost comparison between the two labs so far comes from OpenAI itself.
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16 publishersReality
Oracle's first fiscal quarter turned 30% revenue growth into a 60% jump in net income, and the same three months consumed more cash in capital investment than the company collected in sales.
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