The Information nightly briefing newsletter

Oct 13, 2026 The Briefing By Martin Peers Supported by Thanks for reading The Briefing, our nightly column where we break down the day’s news. If you like what you see, I encourage you to subscribe to our reporting here. Greetings! When is someone going to make a TV show set at OpenAI? It’s got swarms of rogue AI agents causing havoc across the internet, not to mention periodic corporate drama. And today we learned that an OpenAI engineer allegedly planted a “sophisticated recording device” inside a company conference room. The Justice Department identified the engineer—who has been arrested—as a Saudi national and revealed that the bug was attached to the back of a TV set in a conference room where “discussions of highly confidential technical, commercial and strategic information” were often held. OpenAI is a gift that keeps on giving…to journalists everywhere. (Check out our scoop today about how OpenAI is trying to fix its safety issues). In other news, brace yourselves: We’re starting to see acquisitions of distressed companies dressed up as AI-driven purchases. At least, that’s how investment firm Ithaca Holdings described its deal, unveiled on Tuesday, to buy dating app Bumble at a $1.3 billion valuation. As Ithaca co-CEO Ravi Gupta, a former Sequoia partner, said in an X post, “Bumble stood out” from “hundreds of companies” Ithaca had reviewed to see which “would become more valuable as AI advances.” Sure, AI could improve Bumble’s service or at least make it more efficient. But Bumble could apply AI to its operations without being acquired. It could just hit up Google or Palantir for help: They send out AI consultants everyone loves to call “forward-deployed engineers” to help businesses adopt the new technology. The real reason Bumble is selling is surely that its business is troubled. Revenue fell 10% last year and another 15% in the first half of this year. The company had $450 million of debt as of June 30 but only $154 million in cash. That’s why it’s a bit hard to take at face value the “congrats” offered by Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky to Bumble’s founder and outgoing CEO, Whitney Wolfe Herd, in an X post Tuesday. Bumble is selling at $6.05 a share, one-seventh of its $43 a share IPO price. It’s not exactly the future Herd painted when the company went public. Then she wrote in Bumble’s IPO prospectus that the offering “marks the start of a very bright future for Bumble Inc, one that we believe will…drive great value for shareholders.” None of that is to say that Gupta and his co-CEO, former Meta Platforms executive John Hegeman, can’t turn Bumble around. Maybe Herd will turn out to be right, as she said in a statement on Tuesday, that “the best is yet to come.” It’s just a pity the public market investors who got burned won’t get a chance to participate in that bright future. Character’s Steady Slide Into Oblivion Another troubled company, early AI startup Character.AI, filed for bankruptcy on Monday in what’s likely to be one of the final steps in the company’s long slide into oblivion. Its investors probably didn’t mind too much, though, as they cashed out with a decent profit in 2024 when Google paid $2.7 billion to license Character.AI’s models. As part of that same deal, Character’s co-founders, former Google engineers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, rejoined Google. (Shazeer later bolted for OpenAI.) The Google licensing deal was one of a number of similar arrangements tech firms struck to get hold of key talent and technology from AI startups in 2024, also including a deal Microsoft did with Inflection AI and Amazon’s Adept one. By structuring them as licensing deals rather than acquisitions, the tech giants hoped to avoid antitrust scrutiny. (Many of the deals got investigated anyway.) Sometimes what’s left survives: Inflection recently launched Inflection AI Labs, which it said was an effort to shape “the future of personal intelligence.” On the other hand, Adept’s website hasn’t been up