AI Furnace Newsroom: Cursor Raises a Whopping $2.3B, AI Cyberattacks from China and 'Big Shorting' the AI Boom

💡 Furnace Insights

Cursor

Cursor Announces Major Funding Round as AI Code Generation Continues its Disruptive Streak

Cursor announced its series D funding round of $2.3B at a $29.3B valuation. Cursor’s revenue reached $1B in annualized revenue off the back of demand for AI code generation tools disrupting the software space and proving a key use case for LLMs.

The company serves millions of developers, works with top engineering teams and continues to scale its in-house AI models. It aims to push tighter integrations into IDE workflows and handle larger codebases with real context.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called the company his “favorite enterprise AI service” in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in October.

Anthropic

Claude Code Used by Chinese Hackers in First AI Agent-Driven Cyberattack on the U.S.

Anthropic reported that financial firms and government agencies were attacked largely ‘without human intervention’ by a Chinese state-backed hacker group, who used Claude Code to automate a campaign beginning in September 2025.

It was discovered that the hackers sidestepped Anthropic’s safeguards by telling the model they were conducting security audits on behalf of the targets. Anthropic said that the AI scanned systems, found exploitable vulnerabilities, wrote exploit code, harvested credentials and stole data faster than any human team could.

This spells the dawn of AI fighting AI in the world of cyber attack and defense, where scaled up attacks without humans will need to be countered by AI driven cyber defense.

Meta

Meta’s AI Chief, Yann LeCun, Leaves to Pursue AI World Models

Meta’s long-serving Chief AI Scientist, Yann LeCun, has expressed that he is leaving Meta. This points to internal differences as Meta moves away from fundamental research and internal factions grow sceptical of Meta’s commercial AI strategy.

LeCun is said to leave to pursue an AI startup based on his Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), which trains systems to learn from observation instead of text prediction.

This provides insight into a wider trend in the AI world of companies focusing on larger chatbots vs those focusing on world models. The chatbots enable us to glean and extract data at scale, provide answers, draft emails, responses, etc. This is where the majority of the innovation has been happening. The world models on the other hand, if they take shape in the right way, will be able to observe and understand the world - opening up the applications of AI in the physical world beyond what we’ve seen so far. For example, they’d able to watch robots, cars, warehouses, clinics, and more.

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Michael Burry

Michael Burry’s Big Short on NVIDIA and Palantir

Michael Burry, who famously bet against subprime mortgages before the 2008 financial crisis, warned last week that AI enthusiasm resembles the late-1990s tech bubble. He placed short bets against NVIDIA and Palantir, leading to their recent stock price turbulence.

Burry said that the AI hyperscalers (major cloud and infrastructure providers) are understating depreciation expenses by estimating that chips will have a longer life cycle than is realistic.

He estimated that the accounting manoeuvre would understate depreciation by about $176 billion from 2026 through 2028, inflating reported earnings across the industry.

Burry then ominously announced he is shutting down his fund, Scion Asset Management. Essentially, this is a bet on AI infrastructure demand which relies on how much ROI will accrue from AI, or if the stated ROI is over hyped. This is something that we will see play out over the next few years.

📈 AI Venture Deals of the Week

• Gamma, a startup that creates AI-generated presentations, websites, and social media posts, raised its $68 million Series B.

• Wabi, a consumer-AI startup founded by the creator of Replika, raised a $20 million Pre-Seed round.

• CoRun.ai, a Berkeley-based fleet performance platform, raised its $3.5 million Seed round.

• 1Mind, a San Francisco-based startup focused on AI-led enterprise sales agents, raised $30 million Series A.

• Fastbreak AI, an AI-driven sports operations software company, raised $40 million Series A.

• Sweet Security, a provider of runtime CNAPP & AI security solutions, raised its $75 million Series B round.

⚒️ New AI Product Launches You Don’t Want to Miss 

• Group Chats by OpenAI, a collaboration feature in ChatGPT that lets multiple people join a conversation with the AI and each other to plan, brainstorm or work together.

• Kimi K2 Thinking by Moonshot AI, an open-source “thinking” large-language-model variant designed for advanced reasoning and agentic tool use.

• Researcher with Computer Use by Microsoft, an AI agent that autonomously browses, analyzes, and performs tasks on a virtual computer.

• Perplexity Patents by Perplexity, an AI-powered patent-research agent that lets users search patents (and related prior art) using natural-language queries.

• Scribe v2 Realtime by ElevenLabs, an ultra-low-latency (≈150 ms) speech-to-text API supporting 90+ languages and built for live agents and real-time applications.

Upcoming Events 📅

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Interested in meeting the Who’s Who of AI?

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Get ready to meet and greet speakers and attendees from OpenAI, NVIDIA, Haleon plc, Legora, Anthropic, Cursor, Eleven Labs, Adobe, Walmart, Insight Partners & more.

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