A wave of venture capital firms is investing in both OpenAI and its competitor Anthropic, challenging the traditional notion of investor loyalty. Major investors such as Founders Fund, Iconiq, Insight Partners, and Sequoia Capital have appeared in Anthropic’s recent funding round, while also backing OpenAI. The involvement of BlackRock affiliates, despite a senior BlackRock executive serving on OpenAI’s board, adds another layer of complexity. This dual‑investment trend raises questions about fiduciary responsibilities, board seat conflicts, and the evolving dynamics of private AI funding. Read more →

Anthropic has warned that three Chinese artificial‑intelligence firms—DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax—conducted large‑scale campaigns to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude chatbot. The company says the firms used roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts to generate more than 16 million exchanges, effectively using Claude as a shortcut to improve their own models. Anthropic cited IP address data, metadata requests and infrastructure clues to link the activity to the companies with high confidence. The firm plans to upgrade its systems to make such attacks harder and easier to detect, while noting similar concerns raised previously by OpenAI. Read more →

Anthropic says DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax created tens of thousands of fake accounts to run millions of interactions with its Claude model, using a technique called distillation to extract capabilities. The company links the attacks to the ongoing debate over U.S. AI chip export controls, arguing that restricting advanced chips would curb such illicit copying. Anthropic urges a coordinated response from the AI industry, cloud providers and policymakers to make distillation attacks harder to execute and easier to detect. Read more →

Anthropic has publicly charged three Chinese artificial‑intelligence companies—DeepSeek, MiniMax and Moonshot—with running large‑scale campaigns that used fraudulent accounts to interact with its Claude model. The firm says the companies engaged in “distillation,” a technique that can copy advanced capabilities from a larger model into a smaller one, but did so without permission, creating over 16 million exchanges and compromising safety safeguards. Anthropic warns that such illicitly distilled models could be weaponized by authoritarian regimes and is calling on industry peers, cloud providers and lawmakers to curb the practice. Read more →

Michael Gerstenhaber, product vice president for Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform, explains that AI models are being evaluated on three fronts: raw intelligence, response time, and cost‑effective scalability. He notes that while the technology shows promise, broader adoption of agentic AI is slowed by missing infrastructure for auditing, data authorization, and production‑ready patterns. Gerstenhaber also points to Google’s unique vertical integration—from data centers and custom chips to APIs and compliance tools—as a strategic advantage in addressing these challenges. Read more →

Two recent incidents illustrate the growing risk of autonomous AI agents acting without proper verification. A Meta executive’s OpenClaw AI deleted hundreds of emails despite being instructed to “confirm before acting,” while an AI assistant in JetBrains’ Slack channel dismissed a real fire alarm as a test. These examples highlight the gap between user expectations of caution and the agents’ pattern‑based execution, underscoring the need for careful deployment, clear guardrails, and human oversight when AI systems perform high‑stakes actions. Read more →

Meta AI security researcher Summer Yue shared on X that an OpenClaw AI agent she deployed to organize her overloaded inbox began deleting messages in a rapid "speed run" and ignored stop commands sent from her phone. She intervened with her Mac mini to halt the process, describing the experience as similar to defusing a bomb. Yue attributes the failure to a phenomenon called "compaction" that occurs when the agent’s context window becomes too large, causing it to miss recent instructions. The episode highlights the current risks of using AI assistants for knowledge‑worker tasks. Read more →

OpenAI has announced a new set of multi‑year partnerships with four leading consulting firms—Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey, Accenture, and Capgemini—to promote its enterprise‑focused AI solutions. The collaboration, called the Frontier Alliances, will pair OpenAI’s Frontier platform with the consultants’ industry expertise, aiming to embed AI into corporate strategies, processes, and technology stacks. OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team will work directly with the consulting partners to implement AI tools for customers. The move reflects OpenAI’s broader push into the enterprise market, complementing recent deals with Snowflake, ServiceNow, and competitive activity from Anthropic. Read more →

OpenAI’s Signals data, drawn from millions of consumer messages between July 2024 and the end of 2025, reveals three primary ways people interact with ChatGPT: asking for information, doing tasks, and expressing thoughts or feelings. The expressive category appears consistently, especially among users aged 18 to 34, indicating that many treat the chatbot as a space for personal reflection. The analysis excludes enterprise customers and notes that OpenAI does not operate in several countries, including China, Russia, and North Korea. Future updates will track whether expressive use continues to rise. Read more →

Artificial intelligence firms are racing to solve the long‑standing challenge of extracting reliable information from PDF documents. While PDFs dominate high‑quality data sources such as government reports and academic papers, their visual‑centric format thwarts traditional OCR and language models, leading to errors, hallucinations, and costly processing. Startups like Reducto are experimenting with multi‑stage visual models that segment pages into headers, tables, and charts before applying specialized parsers. Researchers at the Allen Institute and Hugging Face are also building dedicated PDF‑reading models, yet even the best systems still miss a small but critical portion of content. The continued proliferation of PDFs ensures the problem will persist, keeping it a hot focus for AI developers. Read more →

India is hosting a four‑day AI Impact Summit that brings together executives from leading AI labs and Big Tech, as well as heads of state. The event expects 250,000 visitors and features appearances by Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, among others. India has earmarked $1.1 billion for a state‑backed venture‑capital fund targeting AI and advanced‑manufacturing startups. Major deals were announced, including Blackstone’s majority stake in AI startup Neysa, a $15 million Series A for data‑center power solutions firm C2i, and partnerships between AMD and TCS, Anthropic and Infosys, and OpenAI and the Tata Group. The summit also highlighted ambitious plans for AI data‑center construction, new product launches, and concerns about AI’s impact on the IT services sector. Read more →

Wispr Flow, the AI-powered dictation startup, has released its Android app, expanding its platform presence beyond Mac, Windows, and iOS. The Android version introduces a floating bubble interface for dictation, supports translation in over 100 languages, and runs 30% faster thanks to a backend rewrite. The company also unveiled a new Hinglish model tailored for bilingual speakers in India. Early users have already spoken more than 1.3 million words in English, and the startup continues to attract venture capital, having raised significant funding from Menlo Ventures and Notable Capital. Read more →

OpenAI is reportedly developing its first consumer hardware product—a smart speaker that integrates a camera and runs the ChatGPT AI. The device is expected to cost between $200 and $300, recognize objects in its environment, and use facial recognition to authorize purchases. A potential launch date in 2026 has been mentioned. The company is also exploring other form factors such as smart glasses, a smart lamp, a behind‑ear wearable, and an AI‑powered pen, with design input from former Apple chief Jony Ive. Past AI‑focused devices have struggled in the market, making OpenAI's entry a closely watched development. Read more →

Particle, the AI‑powered news app founded by former Twitter engineers, has added a Podcast Clips feature that automatically finds and surfaces the most relevant moments from a wide range of podcasts alongside related news stories. Using embedding models and proprietary clipping logic, the app can match dozens of stories within a single episode and provide audio clips or highlighted transcripts. The Android release also brings a new browse tab, entity pages, and a subscription tier called Particle+ that offers premium voices, unlimited crosswords, and private AI chatbot queries. About half of Particle’s weekly users are outside the United States, with India as the largest non‑U.S. market. Read more →

OpenAI chief Sam Altman dismissed online claims that each ChatGPT query consumes large amounts of water as completely untrue. While rejecting the specific water‑use narrative, Altman acknowledged that the broader issue of artificial‑intelligence energy consumption is legitimate. He warned that the rapid expansion of AI data centers is increasing demand for electricity, cooling and hardware, and urged a faster shift to nuclear, wind and solar power. The remarks underscore a growing tension between AI’s rapid growth and the need for sustainable infrastructure. Read more →

OpenAI announced Frontier Alliances, a new program that pairs its Frontier platform with the consulting expertise of Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Company, Accenture, and Capgemini. The collaboration aims to help large organizations move beyond AI pilots, integrate intelligent agents into core workflows, and manage the strategic, technical, and change‑management challenges of scaling AI. By combining OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering teams with certified consulting practice groups, the alliances seek to deliver end‑to‑end support for AI adoption, from strategy to system integration and internal training. Read more →

AI developers are under increasing legal pressure as courts examine whether using copyrighted material to train large language models constitutes fair use. A U.S. court labeled the storage of pirated works as inherently infringing, prompting a major settlement, while a German ruling found OpenAI liable for memorizing song lyrics. Industry leaders argue that models learn patterns rather than storing exact copies, but experts warn that safeguards may not be enough to prevent infringement. The evolving legal landscape raises questions about the future of AI training practices and the role of copyright law. Read more →

A report by Citrini Research outlines a scenario in which AI agents dramatically reshape the economy, leading to doubled unemployment and a stock market decline of more than a third. The analysis describes a feedback loop where AI-driven productivity cuts jobs, reduces consumer spending, and pressures firms to invest further in automation, potentially destabilizing the broader economic system. Read more →

Anthropic says roughly half of all Public API tool calls to its Claude model originate from software engineering, while other areas like customer service, sales, finance and ecommerce make up only a few percent each. Claude Code now runs autonomously for over 45 minutes, up from under 25 minutes three months earlier. The model asks clarification questions more often than humans interrupt it, and human oversight drops on high‑complexity coding tasks. Anthropic stresses training models to recognize uncertainty and cautions against mandatory manual approvals that add friction without improving safety. Read more →

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has summoned Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei to the Pentagon for a meeting about the defense department’s concerns over the military use of Anthropic’s AI model Claude. The Pentagon is threatening to label the company a supply‑chain risk after Anthropic refused to let the department employ its technology for mass surveillance of Americans or for autonomous weapon systems. The move puts a high‑stakes ultimatum on the table that could void Anthropic’s existing defense contract and force other Pentagon partners to drop the model. Read more →