Iris Ohyama Breach Exposes 7.7M as Tencent Ships Computer-Use Hy4

AI & Machine Learning

Tencent has released the official version of Hy4, the successor to the 770-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts preview it shipped in August, adding visual understanding and computer-use capabilities to its flagship model for the first time. Hy4 can read charts and documents, reason across images, and operate command-line tools and graphical interfaces, putting it in the same agentic category as the leading US frontier models. It is available through Tencent’s own products and third parties including OpenRouter, with API pricing unchanged from the preview at $0.834 per million input tokens and $2.501 per million output tokens, plus a 50% discount on Tencent Cloud TokenHub through 31 December. Tencent says model weights and a system card will follow “shortly”, and a cheaper Hy4 Flash variant is planned, which keeps the pressure on Western labs competing with low-cost Chinese models. Source: TechNode Verified: True

Israeli-American startup 42AI has come out of stealth with $62.5 million in seed funding and what it calls a “behavioral world model” designed to predict human decisions. Its first deployment is at financial brokerages: the company says it works with 10 large brokerages that use the model for liquidity, margin and hedging decisions, generating seven-figure revenue, with one brokerage reportedly gaining around $30 million through dynamic hedging. The headline 98% accuracy figure measures whether trading flows land within a predicted range rather than per-trade accuracy, and direction and volume F1 scores sit at 0.8–0.85. The model was trained on data covering more than two million people from government and biobank datasets, raising open questions about whether brokers could turn such predictions against their own customers. Source: TechCrunch Verified: True

New corporate-card data from Ramp suggests business spending on AI models stalled in late summer, a worrying signal as Anthropic heads toward its IPO. Token spend grew only 1.5% across August and September after 42% growth in July, before re-accelerating to 8.9% growth between 23 September and 23 October. Ramp attributes much of the slowdown to aggressive price cuts, including OpenAI halving API prices for GPT-6 Sol and Luna and Anthropic cutting prices on Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5, a move a filing says reduced revenue growth by roughly $600 million. The data lands as reported valuations for both leading labs have slipped, underlining how falling per-token prices can cap revenue even as usage climbs. Source: TechCrunch Verified: True

Consumer Hardware

Snap’s consumer Specs AR glasses are now on pre-order at around $2,200, and TechCrunch’s hands-on finds them dramatically more wearable than earlier prototypes. The glasses weigh 132 grams, roughly half the prototype shown at CES, come in 47mm and 52mm sizes with spring hinges, and did not overheat during an hour-long demo. Integrations include HBO Max and YouTube, and a spatial-sync feature lets two wearers see the same content at once. The verdict is that the hardware has matured but Specs still lacks a clear killer use case to justify a price far above mainstream smart glasses. Source: TechCrunch Verified: True

Huawei says its new Qingyun HM650 desktop is a “100 percent Chinese PC”, with every component reportedly made by local firms. The machine runs on Huawei’s own Kirin X90, a 10-core, 20-thread processor clocked at 2.3 GHz, and ships with an enterprise edition of HarmonyOS rather than Windows. One Chinese government agency has reportedly signed up for 600 units as Beijing pushes state entities away from the Wintel platform. The Register notes it remains unclear whether all of the underlying chip and component designs are domestic, but the launch marks a symbolic step in China’s drive for a fully self-sufficient PC stack. Source: The Register Verified: True

Anthropic has launched a Personal Finance tool inside Claude that lets users connect bank and card accounts through Plaid so the assistant can analyse their spending. Claude gets read-only access to account names and types, balances, credit limits and up to two years of transactions, and can flag duplicate charges, unexpected fees and rising bills, or explain terms such as APR. The beta is rolling out to US Pro, Max and Ultra subscribers, and Anthropic says chats in the finance hub are not used for training and carry no ads or sponsored products. The move follows a similar ChatGPT personal-finance feature launched by OpenAI in May, as assistants compete to become the hub for consumers’ financial lives. Source: TechCrunch Verified: True

Medium has launched TK, a writing app that brings AI assistance directly into its editor: writers type “@TK” with a request to get editorial feedback, headline suggestions or style-guide matching. A notable feature is provenance notes, which let authors publish a transparent account of how AI was used in a piece, Medium’s answer to the growing controversy over AI-written content. TK can also connect to a user’s own AI agent through an MCP server or a Claude skill, supports Markdown import and export, and is free for Medium account holders. It launches on the web only, with a desktop app on the roadmap. Source: TechCrunch Verified: True

Cybersecurity

Japanese homeware giant Iris Ohyama has pulled its Iris Plaza online store offline after a breach of a third-party cloud service put the records of about 7.7 million people at risk. The exposed data covers roughly 5.8 million registered customers and 1.9 million non-account buyers or promotion entrants, and may include names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, gender and passwords, some of them encrypted by an unspecified method. The company first disclosed the incident on 29 October, a day after finding a suspicious file on the cloud service, and says payment card data was not stored there. The store remains down with no reopening date, and the cloud provider has not been named, adding to a run of high-profile attacks on Japanese organisations. Source: The Register Verified: True

The Technical University of Munich has disclosed that attackers stole the central login passwords of every user registered on its myTUM portal. The intruders then used an administrator’s stolen credentials to launch a follow-on attack on TUMonline, the campus management system, forcing it offline until access was restored on Monday morning. TUM says accounts protected by multi-factor authentication were not affected, and its CIO says logs suggest grades and applications were not compromised while the investigation continues. The university has around 52,000 students and nearly 13,000 staff, making this one of the larger academic credential compromises in Europe this year. Source: The Register Verified: True

Palo Alto Networks is reportedly in talks to buy Clutch Security, a Tel Aviv startup that secures non-human identities such as service accounts, API keys and AI agents, for about $500 million in cash plus milestone payouts. Clutch was last valued at $85 million after a $20 million Series A in January 2025 and is approaching $10 million in annual recurring revenue, putting the price at roughly 50 times ARR. If completed it would be Palo Alto’s seventh acquisition of the year, following its $500 million purchase of Console in September. The talks underline a consolidation wave in agent-identity security, after Cyera bought Oasis for $1 billion and Cisco acquired Astrix for around $400 million. Source: TechCrunch Verified: True

Enterprise Infrastructure

Researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich have traced a mysterious dip in grid frequency that occurs every 60 seconds across continents to battery storage and uninterruptible power supplies, including those in data centres. Working at the request of grid operator TenneT, the team installed more than 80 power-quality meters and found UPS units checking their state of charge every minute; because the devices are internet-connected, their clocks synchronise and the load spikes add up worldwide. In Ireland, where data centres made up 18% of load by 2022, the minute-by-minute frequency drop grew from 3 mHz in 2016 to 12 mHz in 2021. The researchers, publishing in Nature Energy, propose that manufacturers randomise the timing of these checks, though few deployed devices run current firmware. Source: TechCrunch Verified: True

Drax, Brookfield and Radiant have unveiled plans for a £20 billion AI data centre campus at the Drax biomass power station in North Yorkshire, with eventual demand of more than 1 GW. Phase one would deliver up to 100 MW by early 2028 at a proposed cost of £2.5 billion, with a second phase adding 500 MW between 2028 and 2031, drawing on the site’s 4 GW of grid access and up to 500 MW directly from biomass generation. The project still needs planning permission, regulatory approvals, a tenant and final investment decisions, and The Register describes the headline figure as more ambition than committed money. For scale, the UK government estimates all existing UK data centres currently draw around 2 GW. Source: The Register Verified: True

Policy & Regulation

The EU General Court has ruled that European cloud trade body CISPE may keep the identities of the members backing its challenge to the Broadcom–VMware merger hidden from Broadcom. The procedural ruling does not touch the merits of the case, in which CISPE seeks to annul the European Commission’s unconditional clearance of the deal. CISPE says fewer than 20 European providers remain authorised to sell VMware services, down from more than 1,000, and excluded providers have until 31 March 2027 to sell up or shut down. The group, which has also filed a separate competition complaint with DG COMP, admits the court case is a long shot but says it is needed to protect Europe’s cloud market. Source: The Register Verified: True