OpenAI announced a contract with the U.S. Defense Department to place its artificial‑intelligence models within the agency’s network. The agreement includes two core safety principles—prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and a requirement for human responsibility over the use of force, including autonomous weapon systems. OpenAI will provide technical safeguards, assign engineers to work with the department, and run the models on cloud infrastructure, with a pending partnership to use Amazon Web Services for enterprise customers. The deal comes as rival Anthropic declined a similar government offer, citing concerns over surveillance and weaponization. Read more →

OpenAI announced a $110 billion private funding round, the largest ever, with Amazon contributing $50 billion, and Nvidia and SoftBank each adding $30 billion. The round values the company at a $730 billion pre‑money valuation and includes extensive cloud‑computing partnerships, notably a new stateful runtime environment on Amazon’s Bedrock platform and massive compute commitments from both Amazon and Nvidia. Part of Amazon’s investment is contingent on OpenAI achieving artificial general intelligence or completing an IPO, underscoring the high stakes of the deal. Read more →

Perplexity introduced Computer, an AI agent that can assign tasks to other AI agents. Operating primarily in the cloud, the service runs within a controlled environment that limits integrations to vetted plugins. Users can supply context through files such as USER.MD, MEMORY.MD, SOUL.MD, and HEARTBEAT.MD, allowing the agent to create, modify, or delete files on the user’s system. While the design aims to temper the wild capabilities seen in tools like OpenClaw, Perplexity acknowledges that large‑language‑model errors and security concerns remain, especially when the agent works with unbacked‑up data. Read more →