Quick pulse for Saturday, October 24. Short takes, with credit to where each one came from.
Hackers reached Quest’s lab portal. Claude went the other way#
Quest Diagnostics says someone got into Quanum Lab Services Manager, the portal clinics use to order lab tests and look up results. Quest found it on Oct 21, cut off access and called in law enforcement. In its 8-K, Quest says the intruder “accessed certain patient records.” Its notice confirms health and identity data were involved. Quest hasn’t said how many people. TechCrunch notes Quanum is used by about half a million clinicians.
Quest says this is not PHP2Shell. No attacker has been named. The portal was back online on the evening of Oct 23 (US Eastern time). Quest has been here before: in 2019, a hack at its billing collector AMCA exposed data on about 11.9 million of its patients. You can reset a password. You can’t reset your lab results.
Your brokerage login deserves the same paranoia. InvestAnswers’ James flagged a viewer whose Schwab account was hacked and about $49,000 of stock sold. His checklist: ask your broker in writing to block outgoing transfers (ACATS and external pulls) unless you approve them, set a verbal password for phone support, use app-based or hardware-token 2FA instead of SMS, and turn on alerts for logins, trades and address changes.
The same day, Anthropic showed what AI does on defense. Working with Theorem, Claude wrote machine-checked proofs that 239 fuzz-test entry points across 123 open-source libraries never crash on any input under 64 MB. That’s about 180 million lines of proof in the Rocq proof language, done over a few weeks. Along the way it found and patched bugs that fuzzers had missed for years, including one that only showed up on ~20 MB inputs. The fine print matters. The proofs assume single-threaded static binaries on RISC-V Linux, and most of us run x86 or ARM. Anthropic says plainly that “formally verified” doesn’t mean bug-free. It also says Opus 5.5 needs about 40% fewer tokens than Opus 5 to finish half its test proofs.
CrowdStrike’s George Kurtz put the stakes simply on No Priors, per Superintelligence: “the new apex predator is the agent state, not the nation state.” His company’s 2026 threat report puts average eCrime breakout time at 29 minutes. The fastest was 27 seconds.
Video: No Priors with CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz.
Washington rips out DeepSeek, and everything built on it#
DHS has ordered civilian federal agencies to stop buying DeepSeek products and remove the ones they run. The order went into the Federal Register on Oct 20, though it was issued July 24. The wide part is the scope. It also covers “third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations.” So a vendor tool that runs DeepSeek’s open weights on US servers is caught too. Agencies had 60 days from July 24 to ask for exceptions. National security systems are carved out.
DHS’s reasoning: DeepSeek’s servers sit in China, and Chinese law gives state agencies broad access. It also warns the models themselves “may contain malware or other security vulnerabilities.” If you sell software to the US government, you now need to know which model sits inside your product.
GPUs are the next thing crypto wants to lend against#
Milk Road’s Friday issue asks a good question: how do you lend against a GPU? Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta plan to spend roughly $730B on capex this year, up from about $410B in 2025. Goldman Sachs expects the four to spend $5.3 trillion from 2025 to 2030, and expects more of it to be borrowed.
Step one is a price. GPU rental deals are private, so there’s no public benchmark like oil has. CME wants to list futures on Silicon Data’s H100 and B200 rental indexes, each contract covering 730 GPU-hours. They were meant to launch Oct 5. The CFTC extended its review to Nov 9. That date ends the review. It doesn’t guarantee a launch.
Lenders aren’t waiting. USD.AI makes non-recourse loans backed only by the GPUs and the income they earn. Its biggest so far: a $128.9M facility in September for 32 Nvidia GB200 NVL72 racks in British Columbia. Milk Road says USD.AI has funded about $420M of GPU loans in total. Its analyst John thinks Aave could be next, since it already lends against Coinbase’s tokenized stocks outside the US. His math: if 1% of Goldman’s $5.3T found its way onchain, that’s $53B, above the roughly $34B deposited on Aave today. Milk Road’s own reality checks are fair. Aave doesn’t lend against compute today. GPUs lose value fast as new chips ship. And even the CFTC isn’t sure compute is standardized enough to trade like a commodity.
Bitcoin ETF money now changes direction daily#
US spot bitcoin ETFs took in $524.8M on Wednesday. On Thursday they lost $635.6M, the biggest one-day outflow since June 25. IBIT led the exits with $254.1M, then FBTC with $217.5M and ARKB with $109.4M, per Farside. Friday added another $137.9M out. The week still finished about $301M in the green, because Monday and Wednesday were so big.
Source: Farside Investors daily flow data, retrieved Oct 24, 2026.
The trigger was stocks. The Nasdaq fell 2.6% on Thursday as the AI selloff deepened, and bitcoin briefly dipped under $81K. More than $440M of leveraged positions got wiped out, most of them longs, per The Token Trenches. As of Saturday morning BTC is about $80.7K (CoinGecko). Mando Minutes flags that bitcoin is testing the average ETF buyer’s cost basis near $81K. Analysts are watching $80K.
Also noted#
Ethereum developers called off Monday’s Glamsterdam upgrade on the Hoodi testnet. ChainSecurity showed that new gas rules in EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 could change how existing contracts handle failed calls. In one case, creating a storage slot could cost 110,020 gas instead of 22,100. There’s no new Hoodi date, and no mainnet date. OpenAI is close to raising up to $30B at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation, led by UAE investors and Coatue, per CNBC. It wants signatures by the end of next week. That’s below the “more than $1.4 trillion” Reuters floated earlier this week. MiniMax kept its promise and put M3.1 Flash on Hugging Face: 428B parameters, 23B active, up to 1M tokens of context. It’s free for non-commercial use. Companies above $20M in yearly revenue need written approval. HSBC launched RedCoin, a Hong Kong dollar stablecoin, inside its PayMe app for more than 3.3 million users and over 100,000 merchants. And Robinhood got Dubai DFSA approval for crypto, stocks and ETFs, with a Middle East launch planned for 2027.
InvestAnswers: buying the bottom of the range, and a robot surgeon beat#
Video: InvestAnswers, “AI Running Out of Cash, Not Chips: 21 Charts and Where I’m Buying.” October 22, 2026.
James at InvestAnswers thinks this week’s AI scare is overblown. Brent above $110 and worries about who pays for AI capex hit semis, neoclouds and memory. He named his buy levels: Nvidia around $212, Alphabet $315 to $320, Broadcom around $322 (better near $306), Astera Labs $252 to $262 and CleanSpark around $8. Friday’s closes landed right in those zones: NVDA $210.96, GOOG $317.28, AVGO $321.68, ALAB $257.16 and CLSK $7.88. Two of his lines already broke, though. He said Tesla must hold $380, and it closed Friday at $372.22. He had bitcoin support near $82K, and BTC is about $80.7K this morning.
His weekly recap for Oct 19 to 23 has the same tone. AI names sit at the bottom of their range after a double top, software is leading, and he’s buying strength on dips. He hasn’t seen capitulation yet, which is why the setup is “not juicy enough.” The chip ETF SMH is up about 80% from its April low by his count and is drifting toward its 200-day moving average. Micron is near the bottom of its range after a huge run, and he says 3 to 12 months of sideways is normal after a move like that. His own trades this week were small: a tiny Lam Research buy and covered calls on Intuitive Surgical.
That ISRG trade is a hedge on a stock that just beat. Intuitive’s Q3 revenue was $3.05B, up 22%, against $2.91B expected. Adjusted EPS was $3.00 against $2.64 (Benzinga). GAAP EPS fell to $1.49 from $1.95, because of a one-time $450M antitrust settlement. Procedures grew about 15%, customers averaged more than 10,000 a day, and the installed base reached 12,094 da Vinci and 1,152 Ion systems.
Source: Intuitive Q3 2026 earnings release (SEC filing); estimates via Benzinga.
The stock fell about 10% after hours to $392, then recovered to close Friday at $452.29. James bought a small position near $452 and sold calls at $460 about 60 days out for $19.30. That caps his upside near $479 a share, in exchange for about 4% of cushion now.
One more from his feed: agents run on CPUs, not just GPUs. A chatbot answer is mostly GPU work. An agent that browses, runs code and calls tools leans hard on CPUs. Bank of America sees the server CPU market growing from $61.4B this year to about $210B in 2030. InvestAnswers’ own projection is about 2.5M agentic server CPUs shipped this year, rising to about 26M in 2030, and more than 20M extra CPUs for every billion agent users. Those unit numbers are his estimate. I couldn’t find them in BofA’s public summary. He sees AMD as the main winner.
-Q
Sources#
Quest Diagnostics: Quanum incident notice · Quest Diagnostics: 8-K filing · TechCrunch: Quest confirms patient data compromised · AP: Quest Diagnostics hit by a cyber breach · Superintelligence: The worst-case hack hits Quest Diagnostics · Anthropic: LLMs are making formal software verification feasible at a much larger scale · No Priors: George Kurtz on adversaries armed with AI agents (video) · CrowdStrike: 2026 Global Threat Report · Federal Register: DHS order on DeepSeek products · Haynes Boone: DHS DeepSeek exclusion order · Milk Road: Are GPUs the new crypto collateral? · Business Insider: Goldman’s $5.3T hyperscaler capex forecast · CME Group: Compute futures · TokenPost: GPU futures remain under CFTC review · USD.AI: $128.9M GPU financing facility · Farside Investors: Bitcoin ETF flows · Cointelegraph: Bitcoin ETFs lose $635M · The Token Trenches: Bitcoin ETFs gave back $636 million in one day · Mando Minutes: 23 October · TECHi: BTC slides toward $80,000 · Ethereum Foundation: Glamsterdam on Hoodi postponed · CoinDesk: Ethereum delays Glamsterdam test · CNBC: OpenAI nears $1.25T round led by UAE investors · Hugging Face: MiniMax-M3.1-Flash · SCMP: HSBC RedCoin launches for 3.3 million PayMe users · Robinhood: DIFC regional headquarters · InvestAnswers (Patreon): Beware brokerage account hacks · InvestAnswers (Patreon): IA Dashboard, 21 charts notes · InvestAnswers: 21 Charts and Where I’m Buying (video) · InvestAnswers (Patreon): Bottom of the range, but not juicy enough yet · InvestAnswers (Patreon): IA trade alert · InvestAnswers (Patreon): IA13, the 10x agentic explosion · Intuitive: Q3 2026 earnings release (SEC) · Benzinga: Intuitive Surgical tops Q3 estimates · Finvaulta: BofA raises server CPU TAM to $210B · Exa market data: ISRG Oct 23