Google Gemini 4 Carbon hunts software flaws + Cohere C$7B

Samantha: Welcome to The State of Tech, The European Edition, Friday October thirty, 2026. I'm Samantha Lawrence.

Bob: And I'm Bob Russell. Today: Google builds an AI model to hunt down software flaws, banks line up sixty-three billion dollars for Anthropic's computing power, Cohere lands Canada's biggest private funding round with European backing, and Amazon and YouTube see their ad growth slow. Plus two things to try yourself: the breach checker Have I Been Pwned, and the file-sharing app LocalSend. Let's start with Google.

Google unveils Gemini 4 Carbon, an AI model that finds and fixes software security flaws.

Samantha: Google has a new AI model built for one job: finding holes in software and fixing them. It's called Gemini 4 Carbon, and it's designed for cybersecurity and long, sustained engineering work. In one industry test for spotting vulnerabilities, it scored just over eighty-eight percent. In another test, which checks whether the model can actually write a repair for a security weakness, it hit seventy-one percent. Those are strong numbers for a task that normally eats up hours of specialist time.

Bob: And Google is clearly cautious about who gets their hands on it. Carbon is not going out to everyone. It starts with a restricted group of selected cyber defenders through a Google programme called Fairwind. Only after that comes a wider, gradual release. On top of that, Google is taking part in voluntary testing by the US government. The concern is simple: a tool that finds weaknesses for defenders can, in the wrong hands, find them for attackers too.

Samantha: That double-edged nature is the whole story here. Security teams are chronically short of people, and there's always more code to check than hands to check it. A model that reliably points at the weak spot and drafts the fix could shrink the window between a flaw being found and a flaw being closed. But the same logic applies to criminals hunting for an opening. Google's staggered rollout signals that, in this field, capability and risk arrive in the same package.

Bob: For Europe, the access question stands out. Google decides who counts as a selected defender, and the source doesn't say whether European firms or agencies are in that first group. European cybersecurity companies and governments could gain a powerful tool for defence, but they may also need to adapt their own security protocols if attackers eventually get similar capabilities. And the testing Google signed up for is American and voluntary, run in Washington, not Brussels.

Samantha: Which leaves European regulators and security agencies watching from the outside for now. Still, once the wider release happens, the effect could reach regional security practices fairly quickly. The bottom line is that AI in cybersecurity is shifting from helpful assistant to something that does a big chunk of the actual work. The coming months of that gradual rollout will show whether Google's cautious approach holds up, and who in Europe gets access first.

A bank consortium pledges sixty-three billion dollars to finance Anthropic's AI computing expansion.

Bob: Next, the money behind the machines. A group of major financial players, including Bank of America, Citi, Morgan Stanley and Blackstone, has pledged sixty-three billion dollars to finance Anthropic's expansion of AI computing capacity. The structure is worth spelling out. The money is used to buy custom AI chips and networking gear from chipmaker Broadcom, and that hardware is then leased to Anthropic, starting in 2027. So Anthropic doesn't buy the equipment outright. It rents it.

Samantha: That leasing setup is a telling detail. Building frontier models, the most advanced AI systems on the market, now demands so much hardware that an AI developer turns to banks and investment firms to carry the bill. It looks less like classic tech funding and more like the way airlines finance aircraft or energy companies finance power plants. Wall Street takes on the asset, and the AI company pays to use it over time.

Bob: And that's the trend the deal underscores: the financial sector is moving deeper into the AI race. For the lenders, financing physical hardware is a way in without having to bet on one model beating another. For Anthropic, it means a faster route to more computing power, the raw material for training bigger models. The flip side is the timeline. The leases only start in 2027, so this is a bet on demand years down the line.

Samantha: For Europe, the scale is the message. Sixty-three billion dollars for a single company's computing power is a figure that European financial institutions and AI developers will study closely. It could spur similar large-scale financing schemes for AI infrastructure here, with European lenders carrying the hardware for European developers. Whether that actually happens remains an open question. But this deal offers a template, and it shows how deep the American capital pool currently runs.

Samantha: Quick interruption. If you listen to The State of Tech regularly, hit that like button and subscribe, that way you'll never miss an episode. Okay, moving on.

Cohere raises up to seven billion Canadian dollars for sovereign AI, led by Schwarz Group.

Bob: Cohere, which builds AI for governments and heavily regulated industries, has announced the initial close of a funding round targeting up to seven billion Canadian dollars. It's the largest private financing in Canadian history, and it values the company at thirty-five point seven billion Canadian dollars. The Government of Canada is taking part, and the lead investor is the European group Schwarz Group. The money goes into computing infrastructure, new frontier models and complete AI products.

Samantha: Cohere's pitch is what's called sovereign AI. In plain terms: AI that an organisation or a country can control itself, deciding where its data lives and how the system is deployed, instead of depending entirely on a handful of big platforms. That matters for a bank, a hospital or a ministry that can't simply send sensitive information wherever a provider's servers happen to be. The round highlights a broader global shift towards secure, controlled and independent AI.

Bob: Note the contrast with our previous story. Anthropic's deal is about raw scale, financed by Wall Street. Cohere's round is about control, backed by a national government and a European investor. Both chase the same thing, more computing power and better models, but they sell it with a different promise. And the word "targeting" matters here. This is an initial close, so the full seven billion isn't necessarily committed yet.

Samantha: For Europe, Schwarz Group leading the round is the headline. It significantly boosts European involvement in developing sovereign AI, and it gives European organisations another option when they want to keep data under their own control and deploy AI within the region. For governments and regulated companies weighing their dependence on American providers, a Canadian company with a European lead investor offers a different kind of alternative, with a direct stake from this side of the Atlantic.

Amazon and YouTube both report slowing ad revenue growth in the third quarter.

Bob: Moving on to advertising, where two of the biggest video ad platforms in the US slowed down at the same time. Amazon's ad revenue grew eleven percent in the third quarter, to nineteen point six four billion dollars. That's less than half the growth rate of the previous quarter. Amazon puts it down to the timing of Prime Day, its big annual shopping event.

Samantha: YouTube's slowdown came without that kind of explanation. Its ad revenue rose nine point two percent to eleven point two one billion dollars, short of what analysts had projected. And it landed alongside a broader disappointment at YouTube's parent company Alphabet, whose latest earnings missed Wall Street expectations, mainly on weaker than expected search sales. Alphabet's shares fell after the report.

Bob: Analysts tie that Alphabet miss to a deeper worry: the company hasn't yet shown a clear path to making its AI-powered search engine profitable. That has rekindled doubts across the tech sector about whether huge AI spending will pay off, and it weighed on other AI-related stocks. But the advertising slowdown itself is an older, simpler business: brands paying to reach viewers. When that engine cools on two platforms at once, the industry pays attention.

Samantha: Two platforms at once is the key signal. One slowdown can be a quirk of the calendar, like Prime Day. Two simultaneous slowdowns at the largest video advertising platforms in the US point to possible shifts or challenges in the digital ad market more generally. The source doesn't pin down a single cause, so calling it a trend would be premature. But advertising pays for an enormous share of the free internet.

Bob: For Europe, advertisers and digital platforms will watch these numbers closely. A slowdown in the major US ad markets could foreshadow similar challenges here, or create openings if budgets shift. For European tech investors, the Alphabet result adds a second lesson: impressive AI technology and profitable AI technology are not the same thing, and markets are increasingly asking companies to prove the second.

Have I Been Pwned shows in seconds whether your email appeared in a data breach.

Samantha: To close out, two things you can actually use today, and given our lead story, let's start with security. Have I Been Pwned is a free website that tells you whether your email address has turned up in a known data breach. You type in your address, and it lists the leaked databases it appears in, with the name of the service and what kind of information was exposed, like passwords, phone numbers or home addresses. It takes about thirty seconds.

Bob: The point isn't to panic, it's to act. If a service shows up in that list, change the password there, and anywhere else you reused it. Where the service offers two-step login, with a code on your phone, switch it on. The site also lets you sign up for free email alerts, so you hear about it when your address appears in a breach that gets added later. That turns a one-off check into an early warning.

Samantha: There's a second tool on the same site for passwords. You can check whether a specific password has appeared in leaked collections. The site says it never receives the full password for that check, but if you'd rather not type a password anywhere, simply skip that part and stick to the email lookup. One important limitation: the site only knows about breaches that have been made public and loaded into its database. A clean result doesn't mean you've never been exposed.

Bob: It works in any browser, on a phone or a laptop, and there's no account needed for a basic search. It also takes some of the guesswork out of the vague breach emails companies sometimes send. A practical starting point is the email addresses you actually use, beginning with the one linked to your bank, your main shopping accounts and your cloud storage. Five minutes, and you know where to change passwords first.

LocalSend moves files between phones and computers over Wi-Fi, without cables, accounts or cloud.

Samantha: The second find solves a daily annoyance: getting a file from your phone to your laptop, or to someone sitting across the table. LocalSend is a free, open-source app that sends photos, videos and documents directly between devices on the same Wi-Fi network. No internet connection needed, no cable, and no account. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iPhone, so it bridges devices from different makers.

Bob: That cross-platform part is the real selling point. Built-in sharing tools tend to work best inside one brand's ecosystem. Move a video from an Android phone to a MacBook, or from an iPhone to a Windows PC, and suddenly you're emailing yourself or uploading to a cloud service just to download it again. LocalSend skips that detour. Open the app on both devices, they show up for each other, you pick the file and the other side accepts.

Samantha: Because files travel over your local network rather than through a company's servers, they don't pass through a cloud first. The developers say transfers are encrypted. That makes it handy in an office, a classroom or at home, where a big video file can move quickly without eating into your mobile data. You can get it from the usual app stores, and the project's website also offers downloads for desktop systems.

Bob: The limitation is right there in the name. Both devices need to be on the same local network, so it won't help you send something to a friend in another city. And some public or corporate Wi-Fi networks block devices from seeing each other, in which case the app simply won't find the other side. At home or on your phone's own hotspot, though, it's a five-minute install that can replace a lot of cable hunting.

Samantha: Today we covered: Google's new AI model for hunting software flaws, sixty-three billion dollars of bank financing for Anthropic's computing power, Cohere's record funding round with Schwarz Group in the lead, the ad slowdown at Amazon and YouTube, and two things to try yourself: Have I Been Pwned and LocalSend.

Bob: Want to know more or react? Visit stateoftech.eu or email us at info@doorzetters.net.

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