US stocks closed with broad declines in the optical communications, storage, semiconductor, and Neocloud sectors, with CIEN and LITE falling nearly 10%.

Per HTX market data, Bitcoin’s pullback below $82,000 has triggered sharp declines across altcoins. Key 24-hour performance figures: BOME down 30.04% to $0.000768; BLUR down 29.48% to $0.01349; STRK down 28.35% to $0.08599; CKB down 22.50% to $0.0014796; PONS down 20.35% to $0.281; USELESS down 16.82% to $0.16969; ENA down 15.55% to $0.204; NEAR down 13.44% to $5.039.

The New York Times reports that since early July, Elon Musk has quietly poured over $276 million into Republican groups and their Super Political Action Committees (PACs), launching a large-scale mobilization effort to help the GOP address unfavorable conditions in the midterm elections. This massive sum makes Musk the largest single donor in U.S. midterm election history. To preserve the Republican Party’s Senate majority, Musk donated a total of $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund this summer—one of the largest individual political donations in U.S. history. Musk also built a key Republican voter mobilization operation through America PAC, the Super PAC he founded in 2024. He contributed over $76 million to the group this summer to develop an extensive get-out-the-vote (GOTV) program aimed at mobilizing hard-to-reach Republican voters. In the 2025-26 election cycle, Musk has donated approximately $366 million to federal committees, far exceeding the roughly $290 million he spent in the 2024 election. According to sources familiar with the matter, he has also provided additional undisclosed donations to both election cycles.

Meta has launched two AI models, Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, stating that they match or outperform top-tier products from OpenAI and Anthropic across multiple benchmark tests, and will be used to boost retention for its Muse assistant. Muse Wonder surpassed Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, and OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra in select technical benchmarks, and is capable of handling complex tasks including lease understanding, financial or health information analysis, and more. Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted that the company has caught up to the "cutting edge" of artificial intelligence, will continue to invest heavily in AI development, and rejected calls to slow down AI progress. Following the news, Meta’s US stock closed up 3.38% at $742.96, according to market data from BIT (bit.com).

Yuga Labs’ Vice President of Blockchain Quit has issued a reminder that following Blur’s announcement of plans to shut down its website frontend, users should immediately revoke authorizations to Blur’s smart contracts. Quit stated that he has inspected Blur’s current contracts and found no exploitable vulnerabilities, but noted these contracts support upgrades, meaning malicious logic could still be introduced in future iterations. He pointed out that NFTs worth tens of millions of dollars remain authorized to Blur’s contracts, and the security of these assets effectively depends on the Blur team’s operational integrity. The executive added that the Blur team appears to be in the process of disbanding, so he recommends users revoke authorizations via tools such as revoke.cash to mitigate risks from potential contract vulnerabilities or future upgrades. Quit also referenced last month’s exploit of Magic Eden-related contracts, which resulted in millions of dollars in losses, noting he assisted in recovering a significant portion of those funds. That incident underscores the risks of retaining contract authorizations—especially as attackers gain access to more powerful vulnerability-detection tools. Yuga Labs CEO Figge also issued a reminder, emphasizing that Blur’s contracts are upgradeable, and users should revoke authorizations to avoid future security issues.

According to Bitget data, South Korea’s KOSPI index opened lower on Tuesday, October 13, falling 208.95 points, or 3.27%, to 6175.29 points. SK Hynix declined 4%, while Samsung Electronics dropped 3%.

Beating AI Insight News Brief: Anthropic released a statement saying preliminary evidence shows new security measures have reduced the number of Claude inference tokens extracted by distillation attackers from its platform by approximately 90% to 99%. The company noted attackers typically use networks of fake accounts to bulk-collect model responses, unauthorizedly replicating its capabilities, adding that full inference records are more valuable for training than final answers. The new measures include restricting the transfer of inference records between conversations, models, and accounts, deploying a two-stage classifier to identify and block extraction requests, and rate-limiting or banning accounts that repeatedly attempt such attacks. Anthropic added the classifier has a false positive rate of less than 0.1%, and it has banned tens of thousands of distillation-related accounts, often completing bans within two hours of the start of relevant attacks. Additionally, since September 24, the company has resumed charging for requests blocked by security protections in specific categories such as distillation. Anthropic acknowledged that some developers will need to update their integration methods, and the classifier may also incorrectly block legitimate requests. It remains unclear how long the protective effects will last, and the company has not yet encountered highly sophisticated, sustained circumvention attempts, so it will continue to iterate on its defense measures.