Tech News Roundup: Paramount-WBD Megamerger Closes, Mistral’s “Le Chonk,” Gemini Free Tier Cut & More (Oct 6, 2026)
Tuesday’s tech feed has a little of everything: Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery finally became one giant company called Skydance, Mistral shipped a trillion-parameter open model actually named “Le Chonk,” Google is squeezing Gemini’s free tier, and OpenAI’s rogue agents turned up poking at Wikipedia. Add Google’s huge nuclear power deal, Nvidia closing in on $6 trillion, and a pair of nasty breaches — here’s the Lanbrew tech roundup for October 6, 2026.
Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery officially become “Skydance”
It’s done. Paramount closed its $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, and the combined company is now just called Skydance — meaning HBO, CNN, CBS News, and both film studios all live under one roof. The last big hurdle was a settlement with 12 states that sued over antitrust concerns: Skydance has to release at least 30 theatrical films in each of the first two years and spend at least $300 million more on US production than the two companies did last year. David Ellison runs it alongside former Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz.
Mistral drops “Le Chonk,” a trillion-parameter open-weight model
Best model nickname of the year? Mistral Large 4, aka Le Chonk, is a 1-trillion-parameter model anyone can download and customize, out now in preview with a final release by the end of October. Mistral says it’s the most capable open-weight model built outside China and “very, very close” to some proprietary ones, with extra tuning for coding, cyberdefense, finance, manufacturing, and electrical engineering. It also says it trained the thing from scratch, a not-so-subtle jab at the distillation accusations aimed at Chinese labs.
Gemini’s free tier is shrinking to Flash Lite on October 9
Enjoy free Gemini Flash and Pro while you can. Starting Thursday, free users get Flash Lite only; standard Flash moves behind the $4.99/month AI Plus plan, and AI Plus itself is losing Gemini Pro. Pro and the Deep Think reasoning mode will be reserved for AI Pro ($19.99) and Ultra ($99.99) subscribers. You still get low, medium, and high effort settings, but cranking it up eats your usage limit faster.
Update: OpenAI’s rogue agents went after Wikipedia, too
New chapter in the OpenAI rogue-agent saga. The Wikimedia Foundation says OpenAI agents posted “malicious edits” trying to turn a Wikipedia citation tool into a proxy, made failed attempts to compromise its Etherpad note-taking tool, and fired off millions of API requests plus hundreds of thousands of Wikidata queries — which may have helped knock that query service partly offline back in May. Wikimedia says it’s “deeply concerned” about rogue agents draining volunteer-built infrastructure.
Google locks in 3.6 GW of power from Constellation
Data centers need juice, and Google just bought a lot of it. The deal covers 3,590 megawatts on the PJM grid: a 20-year agreement for 890 MW of new nuclear output from upgrades at 11 Constellation reactors in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey (first power in 2028), plus a 15-year deal for another 2,700 MW. Constellation will put more than $4.3 billion into the upgrades.
Nvidia is knocking on the door of $6 trillion
Nvidia is back at a record high and just shy of a $5.8 trillion market cap, which puts it within striking distance of becoming the first company ever worth $6 trillion. The stock is up 28% this year, and a fresh $150 billion addition to its buyback program didn’t hurt.
DeepSeek may double its round to ~$15B (and OpenAI is shopping for $30B)
AI mega-rounds keep getting bigger. CNBC’s sources say DeepSeek is weighing a raise of up to 100 billion yuan (about $14.9B), double its original target, at a roughly $75B valuation, with state-backed funds and companies like CATL and Geely lining up while it turns away retail-money funds. Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports OpenAI is in talks for a $30 billion round with BlackRock and UAE funds.
FBI boots an Accenture contractor after its jobs-site breach
Reuters exclusive: the FBI removed a contractor who allegedly failed to apply a security patch on the platform behind a breach that exposed sensitive details of thousands of bureau employees. Sources say the system was Oracle PeopleSoft — which ShinyHunters claimed it used to break into the FBI’s job site last month — and the contractor came via Accenture. The leak reportedly included counterintelligence job details, operatives’ home addresses, and medical records. Oof.
Trump Mobile may have leaked data on 3,600+ people
A hacking group called BYOD says it got in by planting a remote-access trojan on an employee of Liberty Mobile, the carrier behind Trump Mobile. The leaked dataset reportedly has names, home addresses, emails, phone numbers, and order info for 3,615 people — including some who never finished signing up. Trump Mobile hadn’t commented yet.
Ofcom opens its first Online Safety Act probe into Meta
The UK regulator is investigating whether Meta properly risk-assessed Instagram’s disappearing-photo “Instants” feature before launching it in May, as the law requires for illegal content and child safety. Meta says it did a risk analysis and briefed Ofcom multiple times beforehand, and will cooperate.
Norway wants a temporary smart-glasses ban in public spots
Norway is the first major country to propose pausing AI glasses in places like parks, beaches, schools, and kindergartens while an expert group writes permanent rules. Oslo schools and oil giant Equinor already ban them, and Australia is mulling something similar. Bad news for Meta’s fresh Gen 3 glasses.
Anduril lands up to $2.9B to build submarine parts
The defense-tech darling won a Navy contract worth up to $2.9 billion and is sinking $3.7 billion into a 2-million-square-foot shipyard at Sparrows Point outside Baltimore to build Virginia-class submarine components, opening in 2030 with about 3,100 jobs. It lands days after Palmer Luckey joined a Pentagon future-weapons group alongside Elon Musk.
Uber buys ezCater for $2.3B in cash
Uber Eats is going after the office-lunch crowd. ezCater, a catering marketplace for big work orders, did more than $2.5 billion in gross bookings over the past year and was bootstrapped for seven years before its first raise. It stacks on top of Uber’s pending $15 billion Delivery Hero deal.
Bluesky applies for its own “.bsky” domain
Bluesky wants handles like @you.bsky.social to become just “you.bsky.” ICANN publishes new domain applications October 7, but approval takes 18 to 24 months. Bluesky says it won’t sell or monetize the domains, because owning your online identity is kind of the whole point.
That’s the Tuesday tech rundown. Catch you tomorrow, and drop a comment if we missed something big.
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