On October 14, AI security platform Harmonic Security announced a $50 million Series B round led by Crosspoint Capital Partners with participation from existing investors, bringing total funding to $76 million. The funds will be used to expand engineering and go-to-market teams in the US and UK; the company currently protects AI use for more than 100 enterprises and millions of employees.
On Monday, October 5, Qualcomm and Arm appeared in the U.S. District Court in Delaware for a five-day jury trial. Qualcomm accused Arm of withholding contractually required chip testing tools and leaking to the media a threat to terminate a key licensing agreement in 2024, harming Qualcomm's chip deal with Meta. Qualcomm sought to suspend billions of dollars in royalty payments for up to five years. Arm said Meta had shifted to AI glasses, causing no losses. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon testified.
According to a memo obtained by Axios, Acting Army Secretary Adam Teller ordered the U.S. Army to establish a new Autonomous Systems Command and appoint dedicated acquisition officials to accelerate the procurement and fielding of intelligent equipment. The memo requires autonomous capability adoption in at least six branches including aviation, armor, sustainment, and training, designates an acquisition lead for the autonomous systems portfolio, prioritizes capabilities such as autonomous fires, combat vehicles, water resupply, breaching, surveillance and target acquisition this fiscal year, and expands the 15X and 390A military occupational specialties to all applicable units.
Kevin Mandia's AI security startup Armadin announced a $255.5 million Series B at a valuation of over $2.5 billion, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, with participation from several major venture firms. The company provides always-on defensive security testing for the AI era, using agentic swarms to simulate attack chains and uncover vulnerabilities.
On September 21, U.S. stocks closed higher, with the Nasdaq up 2.26% and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index up 4.29%. Semiconductor stocks surged, with ARM up over 17%, Intel up over 12%, Meta up over 11%, AMD up about 10% and crossing $1 trillion in market cap for the first time, becoming the fourth U.S. chip company to do so. Qualcomm rose over 9%.
The 2026 Zhangjiang Pharma Conference and the opening forum of Shanghai International Biomedical Industry Week were held, featuring a fireside chat between Nobel Chemistry laureate Michael Levitt and Insilico Medicine CEO Ren Feng. Levitt said AI-driven drug development has surpassed his expectations, while Ren's team has advanced the world's first innovative drug with AI-identified targets and AI-designed molecular structures into Phase III clinical trials.
Arm engineer and Linux kernel developer Lorenzo Stoakes used a large language model to identify performance bottlenecks in the Linux kernel build process. The AI found issues accurately but generated poor-quality fix code; after extensive rewriting and verification, he submitted 23 patches that speed up kernel builds by up to 90%.
Arm officially launched the Arm AI Portal at the Arm Create developer conference in Shanghai, providing developers and agents with a unified entry point for discovering, optimizing, and deploying AI software on Arm compute platforms. The first batch of pre-optimized models includes Qwen, Google Gemma, and Ultralytics YOLO, with ecosystem partners including Alibaba, Raspberry Pi, and Ultralytics. The AI Portal is now live.