• Latestly AI
  • Posts
  • šŸ“° This week in AI. 4 minutes. Every Monday.

šŸ“° This week in AI. 4 minutes. Every Monday.

Your 4-minute guide to the week ahead. AI found a hole hiding in the web for decades. Attackers found it too. Plus: Big Techā€™s AI bill comes due.

Author

Latestly AI
October 26, 2026

In partnership with

šŸŽ $1,000+ in free AI tools. Access Offers

A critical PHP flaw needs your attention, Big Tech reports on AI spending, and one free check is worth running today.

Here's what matters this week. ā˜•

Discover laptops with built-in intelligence.

Shift your workforce into hyper-productivity mode with Dell Pro laptops powered by IntelĀ® Coreā„¢ Ultra with Intel vProĀ®. Shop on Dell Premier.

šŸ—“ļø The week ahead

WEDNEDSAY
Microsoft and Alphabet report, hours after the Fed.
The Fed is expected to hold rates on Wednesday. Microsoft and Alphabet report after the close the same day.
šŸ‘€ Watch for: Azure growth, Google Cloud, and any change to capex plans.

THURSDAY
Amazon and Intel close out the week.
Amazon reports after the close on Thursday, with a call at 5:00 p.m. ET (22:00 CET). Intel reports the same evening.
šŸ‘€ Watch for: AWS growth, and whether Amazon changes its roughly $200 billion spending plan.

ALL WEEK
Oracle AI World runs in Las Vegas.
Oracleā€™s flagship AI event runs October 25ā€“28 at the Venetian.
šŸ‘€ Watch for: new enterprise agent products in Oracleā€™s business software.

šŸ“° The big story

AI helped find a decades-old hole in the web. Attackers are already using it.

What happened

  • The flaw: PHP released emergency fixes on October 21 for two critical flaws, called PHP2Shell. Both are rated 9.2 out of 10. They let attackers run code on a server without logging in.

  • The reach: every PHP setup that serves web pages is affected, including Apache, PHP-FPM and LiteSpeed.

  • Who found it: researchers from Calif, OpenAI and Wiz.

  • The attacks: Cloudflare saw early exploitation attempts before the patch even shipped.

Why it matters this week

PHP runs a large share of the web, including WordPress and WooCommerce. If you run a website, your business probably depends on it.

The fix is simple: update PHP. PHP says no settings change fully protects you.

šŸ‘€ Watch this: confirmed break-ins. Patching is still in progress, so this story is not over.

9 Plays. One Mission: Keep More of Your Holiday Profit.

Holiday profit rarely disappears all at once. Deeper discounts, rising ad costs, fulfillment fees, and returns take their share little by little.

Get 9 Plays to Defend Your Margin This Holiday Season, tactical advice from ecommerce experts to uncover where profit gets lost and what you can do to keep more of it this Q4.

Reach 165.000+ AI decision makers every week. Advertise with us.

šŸ§Ŗ Try this this week

Aikido PHP2Shell checker
A free tool. Enter a public website address and it says whether that site is vulnerable, mitigated or patched.
Try it for: checking your own site and every client site today.

āœ¦ Xero
Accounting software that tracks income, expenses and cash flow in one place. Get 95% off for your first 6 months.
Try it for: connecting your business bank account and closing Octoberā€™s books before month-end.

āœ¦ Patriot Software
Payroll for US businesses, with unlimited payrolls and free direct deposit. Start with 30 days free, then 50% off for 6 months.
Try it for: setting up one employee and running a test payroll before Novemberā€™s first pay date.

āœ¦ Latestly partner or affiliate. We may earn from some links. Everything here is selected because we think it is genuinely useful.

Turn today's calls into tomorrow's proposal

Wispr Flow Notetaker brings your meetings into Claude or ChatGPT through a built-in connector. Ask for a proposal draft or a deal recap, and your AI works from an accurate record of what was said.

šŸ”¢ One number

āˆ’$2.1B

Metaā€™s free cash flow last quarter. Capex hit $34.9 billion, more than the $32.8 billion its operations brought in. A year earlier, free cash flow was a positive $10.6 billion.

Why it matters: investors now ask one question of every Big Tech report: does the AI spending pay back?

Reach 165.000+ AI decision makers every week. Advertise with us.

šŸ“” On our radar

šŸ“ Notionā€™s agent credits go live for everyone
Existing Business and Enterprise customers move to the new credit system on November 2. Weā€™re watching how many teams actually turn agents on.

šŸŽ Appleā€™s ā€œPro and tellā€ event
Apple shows new products in Los Angeles on Wednesday, with a touchscreen MacBook Pro widely expected. Weā€™re watching how much of the pitch is about AI on the Mac.

šŸ’¬ Latestly AI Take

Two stories, one pattern. AI is getting good at finding problems that humans missed for decades. It is also getting very expensive to run.

So expect more vulnerabilities, found faster, and bigger AI bills.

The quiet winners will be teams that budget for both: patching fast, and spending on AI only where it pays back.

Sources: CyberScoop, BleepingComputer, Help Net Security, Akamai, Armis, Qualys, The Hacker News, Aikido, watchTowr, Seeking Alpha, Gotrade, TradingKey, StockTitan, FX Leaders, Oracle, CMSWire, Meta (SEC 10-Q), The Elec, BigGo Finance, Simple Tech Trend, Benzinga, Investing.com, Notion, Business Today, GadgetBond. Reuters items are as reported by The Daily Guardian. Partner offers (Xero, Patriot Software) are the providersā€™ own terms, so check each site before you sign up. Data as of October 26, 2026. Latestly AI is independent. Sponsored content clearly labelled. No undisclosed paid placements.

We hope you enjoyed this Latestly AI edition.
šŸ“§ Got an AI tool for us to review or do you want to collaborate?
Send us a message and let us know!

Was this edition forwarded to you? Sign up here

Latestly AI is now operated by GHE Operating Company II LLC (174 Good Hope Road, Bluffton, SC 29909), which is responsible for your subscriber data.