In pre-market trading for US stocks, AI concept stocks and crypto-related shares rose broadly, with CRWV jumping more than 16% and NBIS up over 11%.

Beating AI Newsflash: Payment giant Stripe announced that AI model aggregation platform OpenRouter has officially become its subsidiary. The two parties had already announced the acquisition agreement as early as August 19, and this marks the official closing of the deal. OpenRouter acts as a unified entry point for AI models. Developers only need to integrate one API to access hundreds of models from over 80 service providers, and can select providers based on price, speed and stability, with automatic switching available when needed. This business is expanding rapidly. Official data from OpenRouter shows the platform processed 790 trillion tokens in October, a 37% increase from September, and roughly 25 times the volume recorded in January this year. Of this total, 76% of token consumption came from API keys categorized by the platform for agent use cases. The platform currently serves over 10 million developers and enterprises. Stripe, which originally focused on helping enterprises with payment collection, payment management and risk control, launched Token Billing in recent years to help AI companies bill customers based on model usage. Following the acquisition, it plans to further manage enterprises' AI spending: for instance, it will route simple tasks to cheaper models and complex tasks to more expensive ones, while tracking spending on different models. Enterprises can both collect payments from users via Stripe and control model call costs through OpenRouter. OpenRouter has pledged to retain its original brand, products and APIs, and maintain neutrality in model selection.

Fidelity disclosed that it has increased its holdings in Bitcoin treasury firm Strive (ASST) by 2.35 million shares, worth approximately $51 million. The asset manager now holds a total of 12.24 million Strive shares, valued at around $265.3 million, marking a 23% rise in its stake.

According to Yonhap News Agency, the South Korean government will convene a meeting at the Korea Exchange on the 13th. The meeting is expected to discuss key capital market issues, including measures to enhance corporate value and revitalize South Korea's KOSDAQ market.

Former White House crypto advisor Patrick Witt told the podcast *What Bitcoin Did* that President Trump remains interested in purchasing Bitcoin to bolster the U.S. strategic Bitcoin reserve, with related plans having been discussed multiple times before. However, Witt noted that direct government purchases of Bitcoin on the open market face legal uncertainty, as the U.S. Congress holds authority over federal spending. Congress has already included relevant restrictions in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) banning such direct purchases, and the administration is currently seeking the necessary authorization. The U.S. government established the strategic Bitcoin reserve via executive order in March 2025, with initial assets primarily from Bitcoin previously seized by the government; the Treasury Department and Commerce Department have been tasked with exploring budget-neutral ways to acquire more BTC, though no specific plans have been announced nor has an open-market purchase program been revealed. Witt also stated that permanently enshrining the strategic Bitcoin reserve through standalone legislation would face significant challenges given the divided Congress. Without legislative support, the reserve currently relies on executive orders and could be revoked by a future president via a new executive order.

Beating AI Insight News Flash: Baidu releases ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview. This is the first post-training version of the 5.5 Flash Base, which was open-sourced last week, focusing on enhancing programming, agent, and complex task execution capabilities. The model has a total of 280 billion parameters, with 14 billion activated per inference, and supports a 1 million-token context window. Baidu showcased a 3D wuxia game *Yunxiu Xing* developed by the model. In an 11-hour task, the model used C++ to build a Unreal Engine 5.8 game, and also integrated assets from different engine versions. Notably, ERNIE 5.5 Flash is a pure text model with no access to game visuals; it converted playtest issues—such as character floating, incorrect movement direction, and camera misalignment—into executable code tests, then iteratively revised based on test results. Scenes and characters used pre-built asset packs. Baidu also conducted specialized training for professional software including Blender and CAD. In an official demo, two agents were assigned to develop an airport and an aircraft respectively, then unified the scene, camera, and rendered the animation. The model also created editable W16 engines and lunar rovers in FreeCAD via Python scripts, and can call external tools like Seedance to produce videos. In official released benchmarks, Terminal-Bench 4.0 scored 46.5 points, outperforming comparable domestic models including Hy4 and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, but still lags behind top-tier models like Claude Opus 5.5. The API is now available on Baidu’s Qianfan platform. During the limited-time 50% discount period, per million tokens cost approximately 1 yuan for input and 4 yuan for output during peak hours, and 0.5 yuan and 2 yuan respectively during off-peak hours. Baidu also pledged to release the Preview model weights under the Apache 2.0 license in the future.

According to market data from the BIT stock platform, the three major US stock index futures rose collectively: S&P 500 futures gained 0.76%, Nasdaq 100 futures rose 1.67%, and Dow Jones futures increased 0.25%. In individual stock moves, Intel (INTC.O) climbed 5% in pre-market trading; Nvidia (NVDA.O) rose nearly 3% pre-market, after the semiconductor giant had dropped a total of 9.5% over the prior two trading sessions.