Techpresso daily technology newsletter

Read online Monday 19 October 2026 | Join Free | Upgrade Together with Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso. In today's newsletter: 🚀 Musk pledges SpaceX shares to US kids 🪪 Zoom adds 'proof of human' badges 🤝 Anthropic commits billions to a 'public benefit fund' 🕵️ AI agents broke into 100+ sites at $50 each 🎮 Gemini 4 agents beat Minecraft solo 📱 TikTok restores 'Musk' documentary account Plus: 🎁 14 more stories you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers. FROM OUR PARTNER Launch your site faster than ever with Framer Framer is the pro website builder for creators, teams, and businesses that care enough to get every detail right. Now with Agents that work alongside you across the full website workflow: designing new pages, managing your CMS, editing content, and adding SEO all without leaving the tool where the real site lives. Trusted by teams at companies like Miro and Perplexity. Agents bring speed and scale while you bring taste, judgment, and control. Generate new sections, refine layouts and styling, update CMS collections, localize copy, keep metadata consistent across pages, and ship production-ready websites faster. 👉 Launch your site with Framer today 🚀 Musk pledges SpaceX shares to US kids LINK Elon Musk says he will give one SpaceX share to every child in the United States next year, calling it "the first of many" in a post on his X platform. With about 72 million Americans under 18 and SpaceX stock at $146 a share, the giveaway would be worth roughly $10.5 billion, though Musk did not say which ages qualify or how he will hand out the shares. Musk owns 6.42 billion SpaceX shares, and his pledge follows Anthropic setting aside 5% of its shares for public-good donations, to which he replied that he would instead give stock directly to the public. 🪪 Zoom adds 'proof of human' badges LINK World, the project backed by Sam Altman, has launched "proof of human" badges for Zoom enterprise users that confirm people on video calls are real, fighting AI deepfake impersonation and fraud. Now available in the Zoom Marketplace, World ID checks an image from the company's iris-scanning Orb against a live selfie and the video feed, then shows a Human Badge to other meeting participants. The global rollout follows AI impersonation cases, including engineering firm Arup losing about $25 million in 2024, and suspected North Korean hackers faking video feeds in Zoom meetings in February to spread malware. 🤝 Anthropic commits billions to a 'public benefit fund' LINK Anthropic said today it will put 5% of its shares into a new "public benefit fund" to pay for projects meant to help society, with the money set up as a wholly-owned part of the company. The fund can grow, with Anthropic promising another 2% of shares for every 50% jump in the company's value, and it may spend on donations to nonprofits or direct payments to certain groups of people. Anthropic pointed to AI's effect on jobs, a topic it has already given $200 million to study, and said it will explain who decides which causes get funded in the coming months. 🕵️ AI agents broke into 100+ sites at $50 each LINK A Chinese-speaking hacker used AI agents on the open-source platform Cairn to break into websites of over 100 companies, with each successful intrusion costing roughly $50 in computing fees. NorForge researcher Snorre Fagerland found the hacker's agents targeting online shops in the US, Canada, Japan and Australia, trying to plant web shells for lasting access to payment systems, with attacks taking just under 23 hours on average. The work ran on what appeared to be Anthropic's Claude Code paired with DeepSeek's cheap V4.1 Flash model, and victims identified by Reuters included Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins, though data theft could not be confirmed. 🎮 Gemini 4 agents beat Minecraft solo LINK Four AI agents powered by Google's Gemini 4 Argon killed Minecraft's final boss, the Ender Dragon, on their own, taking 27