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Galen Guan

Daily Briefing · 2026-10-26: Houthi strikes hit Saudi energy sites, OpenAI price cuts poach Anthropic coding customers, DeepSeek/MiniMax clear AI export registration

📰 Daily Briefing · 2026-10-26 Monday

🌐 Politics · Geopolitics

  • Houthi forces launch repeated strikes on Saudi energy facilities and Riyadh airport — On Oct 25 the Houthis claimed multiple attacks on Saudi airports and oil installations. Riyadh's international airport, which had only partially reopened that day, was hit again, and the Saudi stock market sold off sharply on the sustained campaign. The region sits in a doubly sensitive window: Israel held its election day while restricting Palestinian movement, and with key elections in both the US and Israel the situation is nearing a dangerous threshold. The US has already partially evacuated diplomats and their families from Middle East posts. Watch Saudi interception rates and the pass-through to oil prices. Sina Finance · Saudi market slump
  • Trump: Iran decision point is near; Tehran denies Strait-of-Hormuz deal report — Trump said on Oct 25 that on Iran it is either a deal or a complete resolution, a day after floating a small-scale "epic wrath" operation. Iran denied it had offered Hormuz access in exchange for lifted blockades, calling the report "lies and fantasy," and denied submitting a new proposal via Pakistan. Both sides are positioning leverage ahead of talks or escalation; Iraqi militia groups meanwhile accused US aircraft of violating Iraqi airspace 171 times in a month. Sina Finance · Iran denial
  • Brazil runoff eve: Bolsonaro and Lula dead even — Polling shows the two candidates level heading into the decisive round, with both camps requesting extended voting hours in disputed states. The outcome will shape Brazil's economic alignment with the US and China. Sina Finance · Lula requests extension
  • US midterms: Obama stumps against the Iran war; DOJ presses California on voter checks — Obama campaigned on Oct 25, attacking the administration's Iran war and White House renovation, while the Justice Department demanded California officials verify voter identity or face review. Election-year fights over voting rules continue to intensify. Sina Finance · DOJ vs California
  • US releases new outbound-investment restriction proposal; Beijing responds — The US published a proposed rule tightening outbound investment screening targeting Chinese semiconductor, AI, and quantum sectors. China's Commerce Ministry objected. The final scope will directly shape US dollar-fund exposure to Chinese tech. CLS
  • France dodges a Moody's downgrade — for now — Moody's held off on cutting France's rating, buying the government breathing room even as fiscal consolidation remains blocked by domestic political resistance. Sina Finance

💰 Finance · Markets

Snapshot (Friday Oct 23 close, weekend): S&P 500 7623.68 (-0.52%) · Nasdaq 25955.34 (-0.21%) · Dow 52215.16 (-1.23%) · Shanghai Composite 3690.48 (+0.89%) · CSI 300 4105.33 (+1.71%) · USDCNY 6.6702 (US 10Y / DXY / gold / oil futures not retrieved; CLS reported oil "surging" on Oct 24)

  • Goldman slashes Korea's Kospi 12-month target by 25%, citing AI-trade froth — Goldman cut its Kospi target by 25% on Oct 25 over mounting concerns about the AI trade — the first such deep cut by a major bank to Asia's most AI-exposed index, echoing Friday's US semiconductor pullback. Swiss equities, by contrast, were described as a haven from AI panic. Next catalyst: Korean memory giants' Q3 earnings, with the market expecting Samsung plus SK Hynix to post a combined ~185 trillion won in operating profit. Sina Finance · Memory duo preview
  • China weekend wraps: ¥700bn MLF, Citigroup Securities (China) approved, pro-birth policy push — The PBOC will conduct a ¥700 billion MLF operation Monday; the CSRC approved the establishment of Citigroup Securities (China), extending foreign brokerage access; and the State Council pushed building a "birth-friendly society." Index methodology changes to the Shanghai Composite and STAR Composite take effect Monday. CLS
  • Margin debt bleeds nearly ¥600bn in four months — how far to the bottom? — CLS tallied nearly ¥600bn of cumulative margin outflow over four months. Margin unwinds typically lead sentiment bottoms, but stabilization requires the pace to slow. Meanwhile, of six brokers reporting Q3, five posted declining net profit; only East Money grew (+8.86% Q3; nine-month net ¥11.9bn, +30.89%). CLS
  • SoftBank's Son plans $50bn Malaysia investment targeting AI and data centers — The proposed Malaysian program is the latest node in SoftBank's AI infrastructure map after its US megadeal, while Samsung's Lee Jae-yong visited the UAE hunting data-center orders. Southeast Asia and the Middle East are becoming the new frontier of compute capex. Sina Finance
  • Korea's Q2 current-account surplus topped Germany and Japan combined, driven by chips — Semiconductor exports powered the record surplus, a hard-trade counterpoint to the "AI trade has peaked" narrative. Sina Finance
  • Nomura: memory shortage to last until 2028; AI capex resilience intact — Nomura argued the market is "overly panicked" about AI capex, with the memory squeeze running through 2028 — a stark public disagreement with Goldman on where the AI cycle stands. CLS

🚀 Tech · AI

  • OpenAI's price cuts are working: multiple Anthropic clients switch coding workloads — Per a report carried by Sina Finance on Oct 25, OpenAI's API price reductions have flipped coding business at several former Anthropic customers. Coding is Anthropic's revenue core, so the price war means the rivalry has shifted from model capability to unit economics. Watch whether Anthropic responds with price cuts or doubles down on Claude Code ecosystem lock-in. Sina Finance
  • DeepSeek and MiniMax complete AI model export registration, legitimizing the outbound path — Confirmed Oct 25: both labs completed registration covering open-source releases and overseas licensing of their models, with MiniMax's filing spanning "recently released and soon-to-release models." This is the first time major Chinese labs have cleared the export-compliance process at scale, creating a replicable template for open-source going global. CLS
  • First AI theatrical film flops: "Sanxingdui · Future Past" grosses just ¥1.15m in three days — The Bona Pictures release posted a 1.1% seat-occupancy rate, even as its producer's stock briefly hit limit-up. The gap between AI's capital-market pricing and its consumer-market reality is stark — Bona's H1 revenue fell 31.9% to ¥458m with a ¥169m net loss. CLS
  • VW/Audi US plants take shape: Audi to invest $4bn in Georgia — Trump announced Oct 25 that Audi will build a $4bn Georgia plant, with a broader VW announcement teased ahead of the midterms. Tariff politics are physically redrawing automakers' production geography. Sina Finance
  • Musk: commercial Starlink barred from offensive drone warfare — Musk said Oct 25 that commercial Starlink is strictly prohibited from offensive drone operations and claimed Ukraine's military had violated that rule, adding that he discussed Ukraine with Trump. The boundaries of Starlink's military use are back on the table. Sina Finance
  • Robot IPO bar raised; embodied-AI private-market expectations shift — CLS reported regulators have raised IPO thresholds for robotics companies, forcing a repricing in embodied-AI private markets, even as robotics names test public markets via Hong Kong filings. CLS

📄 Papers · Research

arXiv paused over the weekend; latest batch is Thursday Oct 22 (outside the 72h window, noted honestly; cs.AI search).

  • Causal Chain of Thought: Mitigating Attention Leakage via Context Isolation — A causal CoT variant that blocks attention leakage through context isolation. Directly relevant to multi-step reasoning design: quarantine intermediate conclusions into separate context segments to reduce contamination. arXiv
  • Questioning Instrumental Convergence in RLVR: Checkpoint Evidence from OLMo-3 — Checkpoint-level empirical evidence from OLMo-3 challenging the "instrumental convergence" hypothesis in RLVR training — valuable counterintuitive evidence on how safety-relevant behavior evolves during RL post-training. arXiv
  • Direct Pass@k Optimization for Thought Pruning — Optimizes Pass@k directly as the training objective for chain-of-thought pruning, balancing quality and diversity along the test-time-compute allocation line of work. arXiv

🧠 Thinkers · Views & Research

  • Nothing retrieved today — Social-trend sources were unavailable this run, and the target bloggers (Lilian Weng, Chip Huyen, Baoyu, etc.) were silent over the weekend — no output within 24h.

📝 New Blogs (24h)

  • No updates within 24h across all target blogs — Verified by page-date scans with zero hits: Lilian Weng, Anthropic Engineering, Cognition, Manus, Baoyu (baoyu.io), Qwen Blog, DeepSeek, Jiqizhixin. Normal Monday-morning silence; no padding.

⭐ GitHub Trending

Via Search API created:>2026-10-23 (3-day window) + stars>100, manually filtered to remove spam (~7 repos: Roblox cheat scripts, "uncensored API" mirrors, no-description libs).

  • JustAResearcher/gpu-unlock-ada (C · ⭐2510 · Oct 23) — Source to unlock tensor-core restrictions on the RTX 4090 (and experimental 40-series), rocketing past 2,500 stars in three days. It targets NVIDIA's artificial limits on running datacenter workloads on consumer cards; expect a fast vendor countermove and note the warranty/compliance risk. repo
  • rddmwmddr/android-ad-cleaner (Python · ⭐719 · Oct 24) — Disables system-level ads, trending feeds, and push marketing on Chinese Android phones — no root, reversible, with one-tap execution via AI agents. Packaging "OS de-advertising" as an agent skill is a clever wedge, with unusually good docs. repo
  • morganlinton/BeautifulRust (Rust · ⭐634 · Oct 23) — A Claude Code plugin that teaches Claude to write idiomatic Rust — part of the new "inject domain style knowledge into agents" niche, structurally similar to skill-distribution patterns. repo
  • mizorewww/gdirect (Rust · ⭐543 · Oct 25) — A Google Drive direct-link downloader built on pinned libaria2, solving slow large-file transfers with a genuinely useful tool. repo
  • songjianyang/xss-audit (⭐393 · Oct 24) — A static XSS auditing skill with 14 layers of checks for React and similar frameworks. Security auditing shipped as a skill — alongside gpu-unlock, evidence that "agent skills" are becoming the new open-source release format. repo
  • mirkobrombin/raven (C++ · ⭐377 · Oct 24) — "A Windows your apps recognize" — a compatibility/virtualization-adjacent system tool. repo
  • designfuchen/word-atlas (TypeScript · ⭐364 · Oct 25) — 7,298 IELTS words each paired with an original illustration — a productized sample of education plus generative imagery. repo
  • wangrongding/tv-fresh (Shell · ⭐330 · Oct 24) — An agent skill for de-advertising Xiaomi TVs: clearing bloatware, changing launchers, and adding proxies. Same "domesticate your Chinese hardware" niche as android-ad-cleaner, with clearly strong domestic demand. repo

📡 New-Term Radar

  • No new terms captured — the HF trend board timed out this run and GitHub trending surfaced no new term candidates. Ledger unchanged.

🔭 GitHub Watch · Watchlist

  • No watchlist output today — The ShuJieTai board API was read successfully (70 tasks total), but no new [Watch] tasks were created in the past 24h (latest task dated Oct 7); the github-watch pipeline produced no new proposals overnight.

References