Ahold Delhaize Puts a Price on Its October Cyberattack: Up to €250 Million in Lost Sales

Up to €250 million in lost fourth-quarter sales is the price Ahold Delhaize now puts on the cybersecurity incident that forced it to take systems offline in October. The owner of Food Lion, Hannaford, Albert Heijn and Delhaize said in its third-quarter results Wednesday that the incident should cut Q4 net sales by €200 million to €250 million and underlying operating income by €75 million to €100 million.

That was enough to lower the 2026 outlook. The Zaandam-based grocer now expects diluted underlying earnings per share to grow at a low-single-digit rate at constant exchange rates, down from mid- to high-single digits, and free cash flow of around €2.1 billion instead of at least €2.3 billion. The cash flow cut also reflects new supplier payment regulations in Serbia. Response and remediation costs are expected to have only a “marginal impact” on 2026 IFRS operating income, the company said in its interim report.

Why the profit hit runs so deep

The operating income estimate is large next to the sales it accompanies. At the company’s ranges, it works out to between 30% and 50% of the lost revenue, while the group’s underlying operating margin in the third quarter was 4.1%. On the earnings call, CFO Jolanda Poots-Bijl listed what sits on top of the lost sales: shrink, “extra hours worked to get supply running,” “promotional actions to welcome customers back” and the loss of vendor allowances and retail media income, according to management’s prepared remarks.

The disruption mainly hit online ordering in the Benelux and the U.S. and the company’s Benelux supply chain, while its Bol marketplace was not affected. “While most of the disruption was contained within two weeks, work continues to fully restore our normal operations,” CEO Frans Muller said in the release.

When the company confirmed in October that the incident was a cyberattack, WebProNews reported that work had stopped at some Albert Heijn distribution centers and U.S. brands’ online services were still down a week later. This week also brought a separate suspected attack on refrigeration at supermarkets in Belgium, Luxembourg and Sweden, as WebProNews covered Monday.

The quarter before the outage

The third quarter itself, which closed before the attack, came in ahead of forecasts. Net sales were €23.1 billion, up 1.9% at constant rates, and diluted underlying EPS was €0.69. Analysts had expected €22.9 billion in sales and EPS of €0.65, Investing.com reported. U.S. online sales grew 14.2%, the tenth straight quarter of double-digit gains, and the company kept its plan for a €1 billion share buyback in 2027.

Muller told analysts the company is “taking the lessons seriously” and working to emerge better prepared. Neither the release nor the prepared remarks say what kind of attack it was or who was behind it. The investigation, Muller said, “remains ongoing.”

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Fal Raises $1.3 Billion at a $16 Billion Valuation After Demand Outran Its Compute

Over the summer, demand for fal’s image and video models outran the hardware behind them, and the company had to rate-limit customers. It now has $1.3 billion more to spend on that problem. The San Francisco startup closed a Series F led by Bessemer Venture Partners that Bloomberg reported values it at $16 billion, twice its valuation in April.

Nvidia, Sound Ventures, HOF Capital and T. Rowe Price also took part, SiliconANGLE reported. Fal disclosed the round on Tuesday alongside a Series E led by Sequoia Capital that closed earlier this year. Fal said the two rounds total $1.65 billion combined, according to SiliconANGLE and TechCrunch. The company said the money funds work across its platform in 2027 and called out continued investment from Nvidia.

“We hit a point in summer where we were not able to serve our customers and had to rate-limit them,” co-founder and CEO Burkay Gur told Bloomberg, in a quote carried by SiliconANGLE. Gur said the raise is as large as it is because serving that demand takes more compute. Fal also plans to hire beyond its current staff of 185.

Media models need a different kind of serving

Fal runs image, video and audio generation models that developers reach through a single API. In a post explaining the investment, Bessemer’s partners argued that the serving stacks built for chatbots don’t carry over: “LLMs produce one token at a time. Image and video models refine a whole frame over many passes, so they need memory, compute, and latency handled differently.” They wrote that Adobe, Canva, Shopify, World Labs and Amazon have moved production volume to fal.

The company has also started improving the models it hosts. Bessemer said fal Research released H3 Max, a post-trained version of MiniMax H3, in August, and partnered with Black Forest Labs on Flux 3 Max last month. Some of those model arrangements pay fal licensing fees or a share of revenue, according to Bloomberg. Gur said pretraining a model of fal’s own isn’t on the near-term agenda, though he didn’t rule it out.

Big rounds, thin margins

Fal passed $800 million in annualized revenue earlier this year, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. Its new valuation sits just behind rival inference provider Fireworks AI, which SiliconANGLE said raised $1.5 billion at a $17.5 billion valuation in July. TechCrunch counted Baseten and Modal among the other fast-growing inference companies raising at higher prices, and said several people familiar with their financials described gross margins as thin because compute is expensive to buy or lease.

Fal isn’t the only AI company paying up for capacity. Anthropic said in an amended IPO filing on Monday that it spent $5.0 billion on short-term compute last quarter, which costs more than capacity bought under long-term contracts. On the supply side, AMD reported Tuesday that its data center sales nearly doubled from a year earlier.

Bessemer partner Talia Goldberg, who the firm said has known Gur and co-founder Gorkem Yurtseven for more than a decade, is joining the board of Features & Labels Inc., fal’s formal name. With this round, investors have put more than $1.9 billion into the company, by SiliconANGLE’s count.

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CrowdStrike Agrees to Buy Fiddler and Dreadnode to Track and Test Companies’ AI Agents

When an AI agent takes an action nobody approved, CrowdStrike wants its Falcon platform to be where a company finds out what happened and why. The cybersecurity company said Tuesday it has signed definitive agreements to buy two startups: Fiddler AI, which tracks and explains what agents do, and Dreadnode, which attacks AI models and agents to find weak spots before they reach production.

Both deals were announced at CrowdStrike’s Fal.Con Europe conference in Barcelona. CrowdStrike didn’t disclose a price for either company. Each announcement says the purchase price will be paid predominantly in cash, with a portion delivered in stock subject to vesting conditions, and each deal is expected to close during CrowdStrike’s fourth quarter of fiscal 2027, subject to customary closing conditions.

A record of what the agent did

Fiddler will be sold as part of Falcon under the name Falcon Observe, with general availability planned for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2027. CrowdStrike said the product will evaluate agents for accuracy and policy compliance before deployment, trace their decisions and tool calls across the full agent hierarchy, and flag behavioral drift, hallucinations and unintended actions once they are live. It will also track token usage and spending, and the company claims Fiddler’s purpose-built models can cut evaluation costs by up to 98% without calling external LLMs. Supported frameworks include LangGraph, Amazon Bedrock, AWS Strands and Google ADK, instrumented through OpenTelemetry.

“When a regulator or your board asks what an agent did, saying ‘the model did it’ is not an answer,” George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s CEO and founder, said in the announcement. “Fiddler is the flight recorder for every agent: the observability to explain exactly what an agent did and why.”

Krishna Gade, Fiddler’s CEO and co-founder, said the startup was founded to answer whether enterprises can trust what their AI agents are doing. “As AI security and observability converge, enterprises need to understand their agents’ actions, intervene when they go off course, and explain why,” he said.

Breaking the AI before attackers do

Dreadnode covers the earlier stage. Its software runs more than 100 known AI attack strategies, among them jailbreaks, prompt injection and multi-turn, agent-specific attacks, against models, agent reasoning loops, applications and the MCP servers that connect agents to tools. Findings are ranked by severity and mapped to frameworks such as the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, MITRE ATLAS and the NIST AI RMF. CrowdStrike said those findings will feed Falcon Guardian, its AI detection and response product, as policy recommendations, and Dreadnode’s team will join the company’s Cyber Superintelligence Lab. The testing product is also slated for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2027.

“AI fails in ways traditional testing was never designed to catch, and the people best equipped to find those failures think like attackers,” said Brad Palm, Dreadnode’s CEO.

The kill switch is available now

One piece of the news didn’t have to wait for a deal to close. CrowdStrike released an AI Kill Switch in Falcon Guardian that lets an authorized administrator stop a misbehaving agent, block it from relaunching on a host or host group, and cut its enterprise network access, with every action logged. Termination happens first at the Gateway and “soon” on the endpoint, the company said.

“One control point isn’t enough to stop that,” Michael Sentonas, CrowdStrike’s president, said in a separate release on the Guardian updates, describing agents that chain steps together and take actions they were never authorized to take.

CrowdStrike isn’t the only vendor building agent controls. IBM recently tied AI agent identity to HashiCorp Vault so access can be cut off mid-task, and Fortinet added prompt and MCP tool-call inspection to FortiGate through a cloud service. CrowdStrike is also reaching into Anthropic’s product: it said Tuesday it is bringing Falcon Guardian natively into Claude Cowork, an integration The Next Web reported is in beta on macOS, with Windows support expected later in November.

Fal.Con Europe wraps up Wednesday. On Monday, its first day, CrowdStrike announced security deals with Dell, Dynatrace and CoreWeave, according to The Next Web.

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Shopify’s Costs Grew Half as Fast as Its Revenue Last Quarter

Shopify’s operating expenses rose 16% in the third quarter while its revenue climbed 32%, and that gap lifted operating income about 66% to $568 million, the commerce software company said in its quarterly results Tuesday morning.

Revenue came to $3.74 billion, up from $2.84 billion a year earlier. That was a hair under the roughly $3.75 billion analysts had expected, The Wall Street Journal reported. Merchants pushed $119.1 billion in gross merchandise volume through the platform, a 29% increase.

On profitability, the quarter came in ahead of Shopify’s own targets. When it reported second-quarter results in August, the company guided to operating expenses of 33% to 34% of revenue and a free cash flow margin “in the high-teens to low-twenties.” Expenses ended up near 32% of revenue. Free cash flow reached $816 million, a 22% margin, compared with 18% a year ago. Gross profit grew 28% to $1.78 billion, at the upper end of the mid-to-high-twenties growth Shopify had forecast.

Where the growth came from

Merchant solutions, the segment that includes Shopify’s payments business, brought in $2.91 billion, up 35%. Subscription solutions grew more slowly, rising 20% to $836 million, and monthly recurring revenue reached $230 million from $193 million.

Spending didn’t rise evenly across the company. Research and development grew by about a third, to $497 million, roughly matching revenue. Sales and marketing rose 14% and general and administrative costs 13%. Transaction and loan losses fell to $120 million from $148 million, even though loans and merchant cash advances on the balance sheet grew to $2.35 billion from $1.78 billion at the end of last year.

Net income rose 75% to $462 million. Stripping out changes in the value of its equity investments, Shopify earned $584 million, against $367 million a year earlier.

“We powered $119 billion in GMV, while continuing to build commerce into every surface, every agent, and increasingly, everywhere,” President Harley Finkelstein said in the release. Shopify’s Agentic Storefronts let eligible merchants list products in ChatGPT, Google’s AI tools, Copilot and Meta from one dashboard, part of a broader push by retailers and platforms that WebProNews looked at on Monday.

Top-line growth eased a little

The 32% revenue gain was slightly slower than the 34% Shopify posted in the second quarter, and GMV growth slipped from about 32% to 29%. Chief Financial Officer Jeff Hoffmeister pointed to the company’s size. “Delivering these results at our scale speaks to the strength of our model, our multiple growth drivers, and our expanding addressable market,” he said.

For the fourth quarter, Shopify expects revenue to grow at a low-thirties percentage rate and gross profit at a high-twenties rate. It also forecast operating expenses at 29% to 30% of revenue, down from roughly 32% in the quarter just reported.

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Samsung Discontinuing Samsung News

Samsung announced it is discontinuing its Samsung News service, notifying users via an in-app message.

Samsung News is one of several Samsung-branded apps included on the company’s line of Galaxy devices. Samsung is known for creating compelling apps of its own, even when they sometimes overlap with Google’s Android offerings. Periodically, the company has discontinued apps that are too expensive to maintain, or that don’t capture enough market share.

The company shared the following notice:

Thank you for using Samsung News.

We would like to inform you that Samsung News will be discontinued as of December 21, 2026, 00:00 (UTC).

Following the discontinuation of the service, the Samsung News widget will no longer receive content updates. We kindly recommend removing the widget from your Home screen.

Upon the termination of the service, all personal information collected in connection with Samsung News will be deleted without undue delay. However, certain information may be retained where required under applicable laws and regulations. Any such information will be retained only for the required period and then deleted.

For more information on how we handle the deletion and retention of personal information, please refer to our Privacy Notice.

Samsung News Privacy Notice

If you have any questions, please contact us via:
Settings > Contact Us > Ask Questions

We sincerely appreciate your support and will continue striving to provide better services in the future.

Thank you for your understanding.

Samsung News Service Team

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What Is Guided Selling? AI Shopping Assistant Guide

AI Shopping Assistant and Guided Commerce Trends

More shoppers now ask AI tools what to buy before they visit an online or physical store. Product discovery is moving from search boxes and category grids to conversations, and the brands best placed for that shift will have an AI shopping assistant that asks the right questions, understands the answers and explains its recommendations. That is the job of guided selling.

Agentic Commerce and Guided Discovery

The first big guided commerce trend is agentic commerce, in which AI agents compare options, track prices and even complete purchases for a shopper. For brands, that means products have to be understandable to machines as well as people, because complete attributes and a clear answer to “who is this for?” can decide whether an agent picks a product.

The same shift is showing up on brand websites, where AI shopping assistants and conversational product finders are starting to replace static filters as the entry point for undecided shoppers. In this model, the category page opens with a question instead of a grid, and the shopper describes a need and gets an answer. That is also the simplest definition of what guided selling is: asking shoppers about their needs before recommending products.

Zero-Party Data as a Competitive Advantage

Tracking signals are weaker and AI platforms now sit between brands and shoppers. That makes zero-party data, the information customers choose to share, one of the few advantages competitors cannot copy. In guided selling for ecommerce, the answers shoppers give can drive personalization across the website, email and advertising, and personalization based on stated preferences is easier to explain to customers.

Guided experiences are also moving beyond the product page. Brands are putting product finders on campaign landing pages, in social ads and on in-store screens, so each touchpoint can collect shopper preferences.

AI Shopping Assistant Implementation in Five Steps

An AI shopping assistant rollout does not have to start as a large project, especially with current guided selling platforms:

1. Pick a first category, ideally the one with the most traffic and the most “which one should I buy?” questions.

2. Prepare the product data by adding attributes, use cases and tags written in shoppers’ own language.

3. Launch one flow with three to six needs-based questions and a reason for every recommendation.

4. Connect the answers to the CRM so stated preferences become customer segments.

5. Measure before scaling by comparing the conversion rate of shoppers who finish the flow with the category average.

What Stays the Same in Ecommerce

Shoppers still buy when they feel confident they are making the right choice. AI changes how that confidence is built, not the need for it.

Poltio, which sells guided selling software, reports that across its customers, shoppers in guided flows convert 66% better than the site average and spend around 20% more per basket.

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Anthropic Brought In Nearly $17 Billion Last Quarter and Slipped Back to an Operating Loss

Anthropic’s third quarter brought in almost $17 billion in revenue and still ended with an operating loss. In an amended IPO prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission this morning, the Claude maker put most of the swing on $5.0 billion of short-term compute, which costs it more than capacity bought under long-term contracts, and $2.0 billion in non-cash charges from its employee donation matching program.

Revenue for the three months ended Sept. 30 was $16.96 billion. That compares with $1.38 billion a year earlier and $11.56 billion in the second quarter. The operating line went the other way: a $567 million loss, after $974 million of operating income in the June quarter, the only quarter with operating income in the filing’s quarterly table. The original S-1, which WebProNews covered last week, stopped at June 30. Figures shared with prospective investors in mid-October had put the quarter at $16.8 billion.

Paying up for capacity it couldn’t wait for

Compute and infrastructure expenses reached $9.86 billion, or 58% of revenue, up from 48% in the second quarter. Anthropic says it usually contracts compute 12 to 18 months before the capacity shows up. When customer demand or research needs run past that pipeline, it buys short-term capacity at a higher price, and the filing says that will keep growing for now: “We expect our use of short-term compute to continue to increase in the near term and to in turn compress our operating margin and Adjusted Operating Margin as a result.”

The non-GAAP view held up better. Adjusted operating income rose to $2.5 billion from $2.2 billion in the second quarter, though the adjusted margin slipped to 15% from 19%. Price cuts on new model versions, along with contractual discounts, offset about $600 million of usage-driven revenue gains between the two quarters. The only other quarter-to-quarter change where the filing puts a number on price cuts came at the end of 2025, at about $70 million.

Most of the net loss had nothing to do with running the business. Anthropic lost $23.3 billion in the quarter, compared with $12.1 billion a year earlier, and $21.9 billion of that came from marking convertible notes and similar instruments to a higher company valuation. Total operating expenses were $17.5 billion, up 292% from the third quarter of 2025.

Fewer eggs in the top five baskets

About 79% of third-quarter revenue came from customers outside the five largest, up from roughly 64% in the first quarter. The top five still made up about 25% of revenue over nine months, and each of them spent a record amount in the third quarter. Sales through cloud provider marketplaces accounted for 44% of nine-month revenue, below the 48% the first filing showed for the half. Sales, marketing and partnership costs fell to 14% of revenue from 22% in the first quarter, which the company tied partly to new terms in its channel partner deals.

The bigger number sits in the commitments section, which the first filing left blank. Anthropic has signed purchase and lease agreements worth about $895.4 billion, substantially all of it for compute and infrastructure, the amendment shows. About $69.8 billion falls due within 12 months of Sept. 30 and roughly $447.5 billion before the end of 2030. A growing share runs through Anthropic Direct, its program for leasing chips and hosting them in dedicated facilities, which it says will let it backfill expensive short-term capacity with cheaper long-term compute as its own infrastructure comes online. It ended September with $146.6 billion of liquidity, including $95.6 billion in cash and $36.3 billion in short-term investments.

The amendment still leaves the price range and share count empty. The line for run-rate revenue as of Oct. 31 is blank too.

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