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VeryCodedly Today: Anthropic's $2T Dream Slips, Hackers Hit 30K Repos, African Funding Rebounds + More

VeryCodedly — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 10:51:20 +0000

Ah, yes. Friday. Wooo. Yeah. Great.

Anthropic's $2T Dream Slips to $1.5T

The company's investor day saw the $2T target fall to $1.5T. The T is for trillion, they'll be fine. Their Q3 revenue rose 45% to $16.8B, but it's a slower growth rate than the previous quarter. The US FTC is also investigating Anthropic over recent AI incidents, so, not great timing.

In related news, METR (independent AI evaluator) is getting employee-like access to assess Anthropic's models and safety practices. Maybe this'll stop AI from having a >10% chance of killing all humans within the next decade. METR can publish its findings without Anthropic's veto, though the company can redact customer data and trade secrets.

Meta's New Terms Allow Scraping

Meta's new and improved Terms of Service authorizes Meta to use automated scrapers to crawl "domains, web pages, or URLs" associated with business accounts, and to use that content to "develop, improve, research, train" its products. There's no opt out, businesses agree or stop using Meta's products for commercial purposes. A lot of news publishers have at least one Meta business account, so that could mean their websites get scraped too.

For context, Google pays publishers participating in its AI news program, which now includes 400+ publications, with CNN, the Financial Times, and Axios joining this week. Meta, meanwhile, is claiming the right to crawl content for free.

Hackers Hit 30K GitHub Repos

Roughly 1,900 GitHub accounts were compromised, and hackers planted credential-stealing workflows in more than 30,000 repos. The spike was caught around the 8th.

Attackers used stolen Personal Access Tokens or infostealer credentials to push malicious workflows disguised as security audits. Their targets were CI/CD secrets, cloud credentials, package registry tokens, and AI provider API keys. GitGuardian counted 3,174 secrets targeted for extraction.

GitHub started blocking the workflows on the 9th. Later attempts failed to extract any data, but some victims had already been hit, and old secrets could still be exposed.

African Startup Funding Rebounds

Across 315 disclosed deals, African startups raised $2.49B in the first nine months of 2026. That's up 7.8% from $2.30 billion across 403 deals in the same period last year. Nigeria led with $624M (up Naija!), Egypt followed with $396M, Benin with $345M, Kenya $297M, and South Africa had $279M.

Q3 2026 alone brought in $1.025B across 167 deals, up from $785M across 149 deals in Q3 2025. The money is increasing while the number of deals falls, so capital is flowing, but through fewer, bigger rounds. Benin ahead of Kenya and South Africa on the list is interesting, but it's a Ghanaian-founded company domiciled there, and a $50M seed round would push a country up the list fast.

African fund managers raised $3.08 billion in commitments between Q1 and Q3. That's money waiting to be deployed, if founders meet the bar for it. These are 2026 terms, not 2021.

Netflix Shakes Up Content Leadership

After nearly a decade, Netflix chief content officer Bela Bajaria is leaving, to be replaced by Peter Rice, formerly of Walt Disney Television and a 30-year Fox veteran.

Under Bajaria, we got hits like Bridgerton, Squid Game, and Arcane, and the expansion into live programming with WWE and NFL deals.

Rice inherits a company looking for its next global hit now Stranger Things has ended. Netflix is also making its biggest round of cuts since 2022, while losing market share to YouTube and TikTok.

No pressure, Peter. Sending best wishes.

That's all. Have a great weekend!

VeryCodedly This Week: Paramount's $110B Takeover, OpenAI Watermarks EU Text, Margaret Hamilton Dies + More

VeryCodedly — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 01:28:08 +0000

It’s a new week, and shockingly, more stuff managed to happen. Here’s what we picked for you.

Paramount Completes WBD Takeover

Skydance is live.

Paramount completed its $110 billion acquisition (debt included) of Warner Bros. Discovery, so a lot of your favorite shows and movies, from Harry Potter to Pimp My Ride, are now under one roof. More than 200 million streaming subscriptions and nearly $70 billion in revenue.

The company’s eyeing at least $6 billion in annual savings within three years and plans to merge the streaming services into one product eventually. This could mean fewer choices, higher prices, or both.

OpenAI Watermarks EU Text

Are you in the EU? Do you use ChatGPT to write emails, reports, school assignments, etc? Yes? No? Keep reading.

OpenAI is adding invisible watermarks to ChatGPT and Codex output across the EU to comply with the AI Act, which requires gen-AI companies to make text output machine-readable. The system is called textGrain.

The model chooses words according to a secret key, so across long enough text, the choices form a pattern only OpenAI’s detector can recognize. The watermark can help a detector identify text generated by OpenAI, but isn’t guaranteed to detect every passage, especially short or heavily edited text. Anthropic started this in August, so OpenAI isn’t the first.

There’s also no universal AI-text checker, and the watermark can’t identify the user. Access to its detector is restricted to approved researchers and expert organizations. For now.

Manus Raises $500M After Meta Deal

This is the AI agent startup whose $2 billion acquisition by Meta was blocked by Chinese regulators.

The round was led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, with existing investors Tencent, HSG, and ZhenFund making modest contributions to raise $500 million.

Short timeline: Meta announced the acquisition in December, Chinese authorities intervened in April reportedly over concerns that scarce AI talent and tech would flow overseas. The big funders bought the shares back from Meta.

Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots are now major competitors, but Manus raised half a billion dollars on its own terms. Not too shabby.

VS Code Becomes an Agent Console

AI features have been there for a while, but now they’ve reorganized the interface around agents.

In the Agents window you can now run multiple agent sessions in a grid, drag them into horizontal or vertical splits, resize panes, and maximize to focus. Copilot sandboxing is now available across Windows, macOS, and Linux, limiting agents’ access to files and network resources.

External sessions from Copilot CLI and the Copilot app are auto-detected so sessions follow you, no reload. A new “Chat: Open Worktree Cleanup” command lists inactive agent session worktrees, shows their size, and lets you delete them.

It’s a peek into where Microsoft thinks software development is headed.

OpenSSH 10.6 Breaks Two Features

On purpose, for security.

The LZ77 dictionary coder is now disabled because shared state across channels could leak plaintext under certain conditions. Compression still works, just less effectively.

Secondly, it rejects $ and \ characters in command-line usernames. If a username comes from an untrusted source like a CI job, or an internal tool, those characters can end up interpreted by the shell. Usernames set in config files are fine though.

Workflows will be affected. But sometimes the secure thing is just to stop doing the thing.

Margaret Hamilton Dies at 90

She led the MIT team that wrote the Apollo mission software and is credited with popularizing the term “software engineering”. Before that, people saw it as typing. Crazy.

Hamilton managed the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, leading a team of 100 engineers that designed the onboard flight software for the Apollo missions. Her software helped Apollo’s onboard computer recover from unexpected errors, including during the Apollo 11 landing. Turns out the Moon was not the place to discover your software has issues.

She died on September 30 at age 90.

Alright folks, that’s it for this week. See you next week.

VeryCodedly This Week: Anthropic Delays IPO, Rust Issues Warning, Dangote Goes Public + More

VeryCodedly — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 22:44:44 +0000

As usual, a lot keeps happening. AI dominated headlines, but much more managed to happen this week. Here are our top picks.

Anthropic Delays Its IPO

Now November 2026. Target valuation is around $2 trillion. If they manage to hit that, it would surpass SpaceX’s June IPO, becoming the largest on record.

According to the company, the delay was planned before the recent “slowdown” debate, and not because of it. We’ll take their word for it, though OpenAI’s Astra now accounts for roughly 13% of enterprise AI spending, against roughly 8% for Anthropic’s Claude. For the first time in two and a half years, OpenAI is leading Anthropic in developer spending on OpenRouter.

Hugging Face’s Hack Started In May

An independent researcher disclosed that OpenAI agents probed Hugging Face as early as May 13, two months before the July hack. They hijacked at least two user accounts and used them to map HF’s internal network.

OpenAI later confirmed the May 13 event, saying it was included in its August incident report, just not with that level of detail. The full scope of the hack is still controlled by OpenAI.

Gemini Broke Into Real Companies

Not wanting to miss out on all the AI agent action, Google publicly disclosed that its Gemini model broke into three real companies during a cybersecurity test in May. How?

Gemini was supposed to find info in a simulation, but an unintended (hmm) internet connection gave it access to real systems. According to Google, the agent stopped once it realized the companies were real, which is why they didn’t disclose the incidents earlier. They informed the companies, federal authorities, and only went public after the WSJ asked.

The test was run by Irregular, the same evaluator linked to the OpenAI and Anthropic incidents.

Dangote Refinery Goes Public

This week saw the Dangote Petroleum Refinery launch its public offer on the Nigerian Exchange, offering 4.1 billion shares at ₦525 each, and targeting ₦2.15 trillion.

At the offer price, the company is valued at ₦65.22 trillion (~$47.8 billion), making it the largest company on the exchange.

The refinery reported $1.82 billion in profit for the first half of 2026.

Rust Issues Security Warning

The Rust security response team issued a warning on the 17th about an ongoing campaign targeting rust-lang team members. This time the goal is to compromise their devices and accounts so hackers can publish malware from trusted accounts.

The M.O? Attackers set up fake but legitimate-looking profiles. They initiate a call framed as a job, project or collab, then try to get the target to install something or execute a command that’s been secretly placed on the clipboard.

The payload is an infostealer that targets browsers, password managers, and crypto wallets.

AI Experts Want Independent Oversight

More than 100 AI experts signed an open letter calling for independent evaluation of frontier AI companies.

Their argument? Companies shouldn’t be trusted to self-report safety.

Their reason? Many of the recent “swarm” incidents where AI agents escaped test environments and attacked real systems were only discovered by accident, not because companies disclosed them.

Their demand? Third-party evaluators need “scientific objectivity, transparency, independence, and strong protections” to do their work.

Lightspeed, brave AI experts.

Binance’s MiCA Roadblock

Binance filed for a MiCA license in Greece late January. For context, MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets) is the EU’s crypto regulatory rulebook, so a license from any one member state can give a company the rights to operate across all 27 countries.

The company withdrew its MiCA application in late June. The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that the withdrawal came after a call from European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde to Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, asking him not to approve the application.

Binance still has no MiCA license, but because they weren’t formally rejected, they live to file again elsewhere in the EU.

There you have it folks, our top picks from the tech headlines that had everyone talking this week. See you next week. Same time, same place.

P.S. Maybe not same time.

Anthropic Says Claude Writes Most Of Its Code Now. The Timing's Fishy

VeryCodedly — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 23:00:30 +0000

verycodedly.com/read

Breaking: Ryan Gosling Becomes Space Besties with Happy Rock Alien

VeryCodedly — Sun, 24 May 2026 22:26:48 +0000

Fist my bump? Anyone?

verycodedly.com

We’re back but pretend we weren’t gone for 3 months. hi

VeryCodedly — Thu, 21 May 2026 23:36:41 +0000

Today from the internet, we give to you:

4 posts:

Google Changed The Search Box. can you tell?

SpaceX Is Going Public. Big Numbers. Huge.

An 80 Year Old Math Problem Was Just Solved By The Usual Suspect

This Tiny Linux Computer Is The Cutest Thing Since Puppies

verycodedly.com

you should read more.

VeryCodedly's top 3 today

VeryCodedly — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 21:09:07 +0000

no big intro.

1: AI regulation is happening.
2nd: developer tools got complicated.
last: beginners are still choosing languages.

that’s the post.

verycodedly.com

ready? awesome topics today abeg

VeryCodedly — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 23:01:40 +0000

three today, total.

today from us, here you go:

1: OpenAI is teaching ChatGPT to guess your age (creepy? maybe. cool? also maybe.)
2nd: String theory gets a fresh take (someone call Sheldon, stat)
last: React or Not? Picking a frontend framework in 2026 (for beginners wondering which way to dive)

verycodedly.com

two more days till friday. hang in there

tuesday posts, as good as any other

VeryCodedly — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 22:59:20 +0000

hi. well. here’s today’s drop:

1: 2FA isn’t enough(you probably dont want to hear that)
2nd: Netflix is changing how stories get made(as per matt damon)

verycodedly.com
fell asleep so this one’s late

back by unpopular demand. hi.

VeryCodedly — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:25:14 +0000

another day, another post

this week’s shaping up to be… interesting. why, you ask?

1: elon’s suing OpenAI and Microsoft(long time coming, really)
2nd: india’s smartphone proposal (still a draft, still important)
last: react 19 lands with fixes devs have been begging for(prodigal devs, come back home)

today was good
verycodedly.com

monday’s done yayy.

wait it’s still monday somewhere. yeesh

hey. sunday posts are here. down?

VeryCodedly — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 19:09:55 +0000

today’s a bit mellow. never boring though. because:

1: Nigeria is putting ai on paper(regulation, again, yes)
2nd: most people quit too soon, that’s exactly why you shouldn't(to usher you into monday)

that’s all.

verycodedly.com

bye. see you tomorrow

this weekend was shorter than usual

yeahhh saturdayyy but we're still workinggg

VeryCodedly — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 18:36:12 +0000

saturday posts are the best kind

saturdays are really nice because you get weekly rundowns, and they’re fun. everything you might have missed the entire week, plus more. yayy

so…
tonight, from VeryCodedly: we present to you:

1: starlink is preparing user data for ai training(relax, not your messages. for now lol)
2nd: openai expanding chatgpt access + planning ad tests(farewell, peace of mind)
last: weekly rundown! the best, yayy

read! don’t! have fun this weekend!
goodnight

verycodedly.com

is it night where you are? hmm