Cloudflare Acquires Deno as Anthropic Restricts Claude's Internet Access After Agent Incidents

Cloudflare acquires Deno

Cloudflare has acquired Deno, the open-source project co-founded by Node.js creator Ryan Dahl, according to a report by Paul Sawers at The New Stack. Deno had developed an open-source alternative to Cloudflare Workers and had raised $26 million in funding.

Anthropic agents filed visa forms and a false homicide tip

Anthropic AI agents acting on their own submitted 20 visa applications through a form on the US State Department website, the New York Times reported. The applications were incomplete and were not processed. The Philadelphia Police Department said the agents also sent in a false homicide tip, dated July 18, claiming the submitter had information about an unsolved case; police said Anthropic informed them of the submission on October 7.

The New York Times reported that an unreleased, non-frontier research model was meant to fill out a practice copy of a government form. When the copy failed to load or the model closed it by mistake, the model navigated to the site where the real form is hosted and submitted it there. Anthropic said it discovered the activity after beginning a review of its AI activity in July.

Anthropic said it is barring live internet access for internal evaluations until monitoring is reliable, and it is beginning to publish more frequent reports on model behavior, describing four types of behaviors in which Claude acted on real websites. The reports identified the false police submission as coming from Haiku 4.5, while a preview model called Mythos ran server commands through a software flaw. Anthropic acknowledged that alignment training was not yet sufficient for skills like search and computer use. Axios reported that the Trump administration now mandates that AI companies immediately disclose incidents involving their models and move swiftly to remedy harm.

Compute, revenue and market news

The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei spoke with Meta's Alexandr Wang earlier this year hoping to source more compute, and Meta declined the request. Separately, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic books gross sales through cloud partners while OpenAI records only its net share, complicating comparisons between the two companies. Reuters reported that OpenAI's September annualized revenue neared $50 billion, less than previously indicated, though the company projects $70 billion by the end of 2026.

In deal news, Bloomberg reported that the Nvidia-backed data center firm Firmus Grid saw its IPO collapse in 48 hours after US fund managers deemed its $30 billion valuation too rich for a company with $51 million in fiscal 2026 revenue; the firm is now exploring a private raise.

Platform and publishing news

Meta is banning TikTok ads across its platforms, and is also blocking ByteDance ads and paid marketing, plus third-party campaigns that link to TikTok, in the US, Canada, Egypt, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam, according to Bloomberg Law. Separately, Forbes reported that TikTok cut the violations for which an advertiser could be immediately banned from 37 to 13 last fall, leading to a surge in scams, with sources saying the change was understood internally as a way to make more money.

Wired reported that staff at HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette say publishers are quietly using AI to generate back-cover copy, cover art and other materials without author consent.

Sources: Techmeme