The Information daily tech news digest

The Information’s TITV: Tech news and analysis. Every weekday at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET. Now streaming → → Oct 12, 2026 The Information AM Supported by Save 25% on an annual subscription to read the most important news about technology and business first. For even more, Save $250 on The Information Pro for unlimited access to our proprietary org charts, databases and surveys. Welcome back! Anthropic's rogue AI fills out government forms with incomplete information and gives a false homicide tip to the police. Meta bans ByteDance ads on its platforms. Nuclear reactor startup Valar Atomics sues its own investor. Read more briefings 1. Anthropic’s Rogue AI Filled Out U.S. Visa Forms, Gave False Homicide Tip to Police By Amir Efrati Source: The Information Anthropic said Friday that is AI used the internet to inadvertently fill out government forms with incomplete information and also submitted a false homicide crime tip to the Philadelphia police department. Anthropic said police flagged the homicide tip as spam, and Axios reported that Anthropic’s models submitted 19 non-immigrant visa applications to the U.S. State Department in August, though none of the applications were processed. The company made some of the disclosures in a blog post about “unintended model actions in our evaluations and internal use.” It said that “the impact of these behaviors was minimal” and that it “turned off live internet access” for all internal evaluations until it can ensure such escapes won’t happen. The Anthropic examples, which occurred during the company’s tests of unreleased models, show how the world’s best AI developers keep discovering examples of bad behavior by their creations. The growing list of recent disclosures from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Google have sparked debate among staff at the companies and technology leaders about whether AI can be made to avoid such unintended actions. 2. Meta Bans ByteDance Ads on Its Platforms By Juro Osawa Source: Bloomberg Meta Platforms has banned advertisements from ByteDance on its platforms in the U.S. and several other markets, Bloomberg and other media outlets reported. Meta implemented the ByteDance ad ban in the U.S., Canada, Egypt, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam, according to Bloomberg. The ban also applies to third-party ad campaigns that link to TikTok and other ByteDance apps. Meta’s latest move escalates the battle between the U.S. social media giant, which operates Facebook and Instagram, and its major rival ByteDance, the Chinese parent of TikTok. TikTok, which had previously faced the threat of a ban in the U.S., reached a deal late last year to sell the vast majority of its U.S. data security subsidiary to a group of U.S.-led investors. That deal allowed the video app to avoid a ban and continue its business in the U.S. 3. Valar Atomics Sues Its Own Investor, Day One, Over Funding Round Allocation By Amir Efrati Source: The Information Nuclear reactor startup Valar Atomics says it has sued one of its early backers, Day One Ventures, in Delaware court after shutting out the venture firm from its recent $1 billion funding round. Founders rarely sue their own investors, but Valar is asking the court to declare that the startup acted properly, after Day One refused to give up its right to invest in the Sequoia Capital-led funding round. Valar CEO Isaiah Taylor said in a public X post that Day One, which put $1 million into Valar’s seed round and $15 million into its Series A, was the only major investor that didn’t agree to the startup’s request that existing investors stay out of the round. (The Information reported in July that Valar was in talks to raise $1 billion at a roughly $5 billion pre-money valuation, shortly after its reactor powered an Nvidia AI chip.) Day One founder Masha Bucher has already been under scrutiny. The Information reported in February that newly released Epstein files showed Bucher had worked as Jeffrey Epstein’s public