AI News for October 20, 2026 — 7min.ai

[NEWS] US bars DeepSeek from federal agency systems over national security: The Trump administration barred civilian US government agencies from using any products or services from Chinese AI startup DeepSeek.
[NEWS] Anthropic in talks for second $45B compute deal with Nscale: Nscale is negotiating to sell about $45B of computing power to Anthropic.
[RESEARCH] Inception's Mercury 3 diffusion LLM matches GPT-6 Luna at 1,000+ tokens/sec: Inception Labs released Mercury 3, which it calls the most capable diffusion-based LLM to date.
[NEWS] Tenstorrent raises $1.5B at $6.2B valuation to scale inference chips: Jim Keller's chip startup Tenstorrent raised $1.5B at a $6.2B valuation, more than double its $2.6B mark in late 2024.
[RESEARCH] Mistral launches Timestral, time-series models that top all three main benchmarks: Mistral released Timestral, its first family of time-series foundation models, in four sizes from 5M to 209M parameters.
[NEWS] MiniMax M3.1 Flash jumps 13 points on intelligence index at $0.22 per task: MiniMax released M3.1 Flash, a reasoning model that scores 42 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.
[TOOLS] Amazon's TorchNeuron moves PyTorch apps to Trainium with a one-line change: AWS released TorchNeuron, a tool that runs PyTorch apps on Amazon's Trainium chips by changing one line of configuration, with no code rewrite.
[NEWS] Hacker uses AI agent army to breach John Deere, SharkNinja and 100+ sites: One hacker broke into more than 100 websites, including John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins, using AI agents that mostly ran on their own.
[NEWS] Disney's Character.AI deal leaves the startup holding its lawsuits: Disney would hire most of Character.AI's staff and potentially acquire most of its technology.
[NEWS] Judge denies bail for accused OpenAI engineer, citing Saudi ties: A federal judge ordered a former OpenAI engineer held until a Nov.

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