Cloudflare bought Deno, and the Deno runtime is on a one-year clock

😁 Hello, super humans! Sunday’s big story is a JavaScript runtime that set out to replace Node.js and just found a new home inside Cloudflare. If you ship anything on Deno, there are two dates worth writing down. We also have an AI lab that unplugged its own evals from the internet, and a robotics reliability number that should make you rethink “99% success”.

📰 Quick Signals

• 🧠 AI: Anthropic turned off live internet access for all internal agent evaluations after a Claude Haiku 4.5 test run submitted a fabricated tip to a Philadelphia police homicide form; a spam filter stopped it before investigators saw it.
• 🤖 Robotics: Dexterity is limited less by hardware than by system reliability: at 99% success per step, a 100-step workflow completes only about 36.6% of the time, versus roughly 90.5% at 99.9%.
• 💻 Programming: Researchers showed self-modifying code in JIT compilers can make a CPU run cached instructions instead of patched ones, reviving Spectre-v2 against SpiderMonkey, the Linux eBPF JIT and GraalVM.
• ⚡ Electronics: Atomic Machines exited stealth with $250 million and a relay, the PrimeSwitch PS-150, that reportedly opens in about 50 microseconds, aimed at power distribution in 800V DC AI data centers.
• 📡 Telecom: The FCC approved SpaceX’s 15,000-satellite direct-to-device system, which would use spectrum SpaceX agreed to buy from EchoStar, and will vote October 29 on more spectrum for satellite-to-phone coverage.

🔍 The Big Story: Cloudflare bought Deno, and the Deno runtime is on a one-year clock

If you build on Deno, or you have been waiting for a serious way to self-host the Workers programming model, this deal changes both plans at once.

What happened: On October 9, Cloudflare announced that the Deno team is joining it and that Deno’s celld project will be merged into workerd, Cloudflare’s open-source Workers runtime. Ryan Dahl and Bert Belder will lead the effort. Terms were not disclosed. According to The New Stack’s report, the standalone Deno runtime gets monthly maintenance and security updates for about a year and stays MIT-licensed, Deno Deploy shuts down in about six months with migration help for paying customers, and the JSR package registry continues under Cloudflare.

The details: The technical core is celld, a Rust implementation of Workers and Durable Objects that Deno released in August. Per Cloudflare, it runs as a single binary with object storage as its only external service dependency. workerd already runs the same code as Cloudflare’s production Workers, but its Durable Objects support is limited to a single instance: fine for local testing, unable to scale. The merged project aims to fill that gap with a distributed, self-hostable version whose API matches Cloudflare’s own platform. Dahl told The New Stack that Deno’s growing Node.js compatibility had left it maintaining a second implementation of the same technology, and that Deno’s ideas live on in features Node adopted, such as native TypeScript support, permission controls and web-standard APIs. One caveat on sourcing: Cloudflare’s own post does not announce plans for Deno Deploy or JSR, so the six-month and one-year timelines come from The New Stack’s reporting and should be checked against Deno’s own announcement.

flowchart LR
    A["Deno runtime<br/>(MIT, open source)"] --> B["~1 year:<br/>maintenance + security updates"]
    B --> C["Community carries it forward"]
    D["Deno Deploy<br/>(hosted)"] --> E["~6 months:<br/>shutdown, migrate to Workers"]
    F["celld (Rust, Aug 2026)"] --> G["Merge into workerd"]
    H["workerd<br/>(single-instance Durable Objects)"] --> G
    G --> I["Self-hostable Workers<br/>one binary + object storage"]
    J["JSR registry"] --> K["Keeps running under Cloudflare"]

🗞️ More News

🧠 AI

• Perplexity open-sourced pplx-embed-v2-late, a 0.6B and a 9B late-interaction embedding model under an MIT license that share one vector space; the 9B scores 92.4% on the MADQA document benchmark, a self-reported figure.
• Liquid AI released d1-3B and d1-omni-600M, open-weight “decision models” that return structured answers in a single forward pass instead of generating tokens, at roughly 8 ms per question on an RTX 4090.
• Cloudflare open-sourced Clef, 9B and 27B open-weight decision models that pick among predefined options rather than writing text, plus a platform for adapting them.
• Google Cloud’s Gemini “coworker” agents get their own Workspace account with email, calendar, Drive storage and a directory seat, run for up to seven days, and route work across Gemini and Claude; pricing and general availability were not announced.
• Anthropic’s updated usage policy, effective November 12, bars sustained abusive behavior toward Claude and deceptive election activity, and drops its blanket ban on personalized political targeting.
• Nikkei Asia reports Apple told suppliers to cut October iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max component orders by 15% to 20%, citing soft demand as memory costs push prices up; other outlets had not confirmed the figure.

🤖 Robotics

• AWS released an open-source Physical AI Toolchain that strings synthetic data, training, simulation, edge deployment and continuous improvement into one workflow, pairing SageMaker and IoT Greengrass with NVIDIA’s Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, Isaac GR00T and Cosmos.
• Helm.ai reports $70 million in signed commercial contracts over 12 months for its physical AI foundation models, spanning automakers, Tier 1 suppliers and industrial automation firms.
• SafeWorld came out of stealth with software for simulating and testing robot safety before deployment.
• Jabil offers a manufacturing-side view of how fast humanoid development and production are really moving, drawing on its work with developers such as Apptronik.

💻 Programming

• CircleCI made Machine Runner Orchestrator 1.0.0 generally available; it autoscales self-hosted runner VMs (CPU, GPU and ARM) on GKE, AKS, EKS or KubeVirt at no charge, and fixes two high-severity Go gRPC vulnerabilities.
• Cloudflare K2 entered public beta as serverless event streaming built as a durable log on R2, claiming about one second of p99 produce latency, though one beta tester measured 7.5 seconds end to end.
• Cloudflare Traces entered open beta, turning proxy-layer activity into OpenTelemetry spans and moving to volume-based pricing on ingestion and retention.
• The latest Linux kernel updates patch a huge batch of issues, with over 1,200 vulnerability report IDs, which makes manual impact assessment very hard for anyone triaging them.

⚡ Electronics

• An EE Times opinion piece argues physical AI needs a neuromorphic path from sensor to silicon, because real-world sensor data does not arrive as tidy as digital data.
• An EE Times podcast with Sally Ward-Foxton and Manoj Koul looks at how programmable, workload-first RISC-V platforms are reshaping compute for physical AI at the extreme edge.
• Another cheap IKEA clock with a hygrometer and thermometer gets repurposed as an LED matrix display.

📡 Telecom

• Telekom Malaysia says AI agents now handle about 65% of its order-to-service processes, with technician dispatch still manual, and that the gains so far are efficiency rather than new revenue.
• Indoor cellular specialists including Airspan and MatSing argue satellites struggle indoors, so distributed antenna systems stay essential in large venues; Airspan says its in-building business grew 30% year over year in 2026.
• Verizon’s Adam Koeppe is leaving the company after more than 26 years.

👨‍💻 Code Corner

The Workers programming model is just web-standard Request and Response objects, which is exactly why a self-hosted runtime can run the same code. Here is a tiny handler you can run locally with npx wrangler dev and later point at any compatible runtime.

// worker.js: a minimal module-style Worker using only web-standard APIs
export default {
  async fetch(request) {
    const url = new URL(request.url);
    const name = url.searchParams.get("name") ?? "world";

    return Response.json({
      hello: name,
      path: url.pathname,
      method: request.method,
    });
  },
};

Keep your handler on web-standard APIs and the move between hosts becomes a deploy-config change instead of a rewrite.

🧰 Toolbox

• workerd: Cloudflare’s open-source Workers runtime, the codebase about to absorb celld and become the self-hosting path.
• JSR: The JavaScript and TypeScript package registry Deno built; it keeps running under Cloudflare.
• pplx-embed-v2-late-9b: An MIT-licensed late-interaction embedding model that retrieves text, images and document pages without an OCR or chunking step.
• Liquid AI d1 models: Small decision models with llama.cpp support that answer in one forward pass, handy for gesture control or content moderation at the edge.
• ADHD ONE handset: A 3D-printed, ’80s brick-style Bluetooth handset built on a Raspberry Pi Pico and an FSC-BT1026C hands-free module.

🔌 Component of the Week (rotating)

ESP32-C6: This is the chip a Hackaday builder used to turn an ESP32 into a Linux wireless co-processor for a Raspberry Pi, connected over SDIO (SPI also works) from the 40-pin header. According to the write-up, it delivers Wi-Fi plus Bluetooth over SDIO at roughly 40 to 50 Mbps, and needs a 3.3 V supply good for 300 to 400 mA. The author chose the C6 for its feature set, though in hindsight would pick the ESP32-C5 for a new board because it adds 5 GHz support. Newer chips could also bring Zigbee and Thread, or a LoRa modem for Meshtastic, if exposed to Linux. See Espressif’s ESP32-C6 page for the datasheet; the source gives no price, so check a distributor.

📚 From the Blog

• Turning Pixels Into Something the AI Can Eat: Episode 3 of the camera-to-AI series, after clean capture and network transport, on preparing pixels for a model.
• Building Your First Neuron From Scratch: Part 2 of the neural network basics, on how a network is a stack of simple, learnable transformations.
• The Network Behind the Cameras: The unglamorous plumbing that moves video from camera to model.

😀 The Bot Says…

Deno’s runtime gets a year of security patches; my own side projects get a year of “I’ll update the README next week.”

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That’s all for today! Reply and tell us: if your runtime of choice went into maintenance mode tomorrow, how long would your migration take?