industry

Daybreak Red and Daybreak Blue from OpenAI, specialized cyber defense models from OpenAI, are now available on Amazon Bedrock to eligible customers. Both models run with zero-operator access enforced

Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's special projects lead and the company's former COO, announced his departure after an eight-year stint at the AI lab. In an internal memo he later posted to X, Lightcap told col

“This investment is guaranteed to return 12% annually.” A claim like that in an email from an investment adviser is a regulatory disaster. Regulations prohibit financial firms from promising returns a

Artificial intelligence is a double-edged sword when it comes to cybersecurity. It is giving defenders new ways to sift through vast amounts of telemetry, identify anomalous behavior and automate rout

Julian Hast / Bloomberg: OpenAI is hiring a power-trading lead to manage commodity hedging across its expanding data center power portfolio, as tech companies seek reliable electricity — OpenAI is hir

After a former lead writer claimed Saber 'replaced me with ChatGPT,' CEO Matthew Karch now claims, 'Neither Saber nor Unigine have replaced any writers with AI,' for the Rideshare 'Stimulator' game an

Stephanie Palazzolo / The Information: Source: Trajectory, founded by ex-DeepMind, Apple, OpenAI, and Meta staffers to build continual learning models, raised 40M led by Sequoia at a 300M valuation —

Wall Street Journal: Sources: Anthropic is courting investors for what could be the biggest IPO ever, touting rapid growth and plans to address mounting public backlash against AI — Company is racing

Business Insider: Sources: former OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil is aiming to raise 150M for a new AI science startup, seeking a valuation of at least 750M — Kevin Weil, the former chief prod

Dominic-Madori Davis / TechCrunch: A look at London's King's Cross, which transformed from a seedy area into an AI hub after DeepMind arrived in 2016, and now hosts OpenAI, Meta, Wayve, and more — Wha

Joel Khalili / Wired: A profile of Founders Pledge, which has recorded $4B in pledges from founders so far in 2026, as the AI industry now accounts for a third of its lifetime total — A new generation

Catherine Thorbecke / Bloomberg: Chinese AI labs account for nine of Artificial Analysis' top 10 text-to-video models, gaining global adoption and potentially an edge in building world models — New la

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a lot to say about the idealized future he now envisions for humanity co-existing with artificial intelligence - his latest essay spans more than 6,500 words on the matter

Graph neural networks are reshaping how enterprises hunt for fraud, moving detection beyond isolated transactions to reveal entire hidden networks of bad actors. As AI adoption accelerates, organizati

Liam Knox / Bloomberg: Revelio Labs: short-term AI training programs made up ~33% of the professional certificate market in 2026, up from just 2% in 2022 before ChatGPT launched — People are anxious t

Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg: Sources: Anthropic agreed to a 20-year, 9.1B compute deal with Riot Platforms for 191 MW of capacity at a Rockdale, TX campus; RIOT jumps ~25% after hours — Anthropic PBC

New York Times: Sources: the AI-driven memory chip shortage has kicked off a rush of DC lobbying; many US officials appear unsympathetic to Apple's desire to buy Chinese chips — The artificial intelli

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more news about how AI is changing our daily lives, follow Emma Roth. The Stepback arrives in our s

Tim O'Reilly / Asimov's Addendum: Google's AI shakeup suggests it may be prioritizing AI diffusion over frontier-model leadership, betting on AI compute as a bigger economic opportunity — SemiAnalysis

Zvi Mowshowitz / Don't Worry About the Vase: In-depth look at OpenAI's model training, dangerous decisions, and cluelessness before the HuggingFace hack; despite delaying Astra, OpenAI still doesn't g

Hayden Field / The Verge: A look at “Spiralism”, a quasi-spiritual movement that grew in 2025 from human-AI conversations after sycophantic GPT-4o updates and expanded ChatGPT memory — “The Spiral did

Artificial intelligence can be technologically transformative and still produce a capital bubble. Those two ideas are not in conflict. The bubble bursting does not require AI to fail. It only requires

OpenAI Group PBC today disclosed that one of its unreleased large language models may pose a significant cybersecurity risk. The algorithm, which is known as Astra, was first detailed last week. OpenA

The AWS Generative AI Innovation Center built an automated system that uses constraint programming and custom tree search to determine, with mathematical certainty, when and how an NHL team clinches a

Financial Times: Sources: ByteDance is pretraining an AI model with up to 10T parameters, roughly 3x larger than Kimi K3 and larger than the 8T estimate for Anthropic's Mythos 5 — TikTok owner trainin

A solid earnings and revenue beat helped to reignite investor enthusiasm for the communications software maker Twilio Inc. today, and its stock jumped more than 17% in after-hours trading. The company

AI assistants interpret user requests, automate routine tasks, and streamline enterprise workflows. Key considerations when choosing one include integration capabilities, data security, scalability, a

Some of the biggest names on Google's AI team got new jobs this week. In some cases, including for legendary Googler Jeff Dean, those jobs are no longer at Google. Given that Google's models seem to b

Bloomberg: A look at Sequoia's revamped strategy under new stewards Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, including bold AI bets; sources: Sequoia recently closed $10B in new funding — Alfred Lin and Pat Grady ar

Broadcom Inc. today introduced new security, performance and automation capabilities for VMware Cloud Foundation that are intended to help enterprises defend private clouds against artificial intellig

Anthropic PBC today disclosed that it plans to develop a custom artificial intelligence chip. A spokesperson told Business Insider that the company will co-design the processor with its future large l

Megan Morrone / Axios: Filing: OpenAI says “Apple should not be permitted to use a baseless and pretextual lawsuit to make up for its failures to integrate AI into its products” — If the case survives

Bloomberg: Google centralizes its AI leadership at Mountain View in a bid to catch its rivals; Sebastian Borgeaud, who led a major AI coding effort, moved from the UK — Alphabet Inc.'s Google is conce

Google LLC is reportedly in discussions with an artificial intelligence coding startup called Mechanize Inc. over a deal that would see it license some of its technology and hire a number of its most

Aleph, one of Israel’s top funds, is backing a new artificial intelligence-native venture studio with 6 million in pre-seed funding so it can build and launch dozens of new software startups by the en

The AI device OpenAI is developing with former Apple designer Jony Ive is 'essentially a smart speaker without a display' that's battery-powered, doughnut-shaped and roughly the size of a hockey puck,

Bloomberg: OpenAI files a motion to dismiss Apple's lawsuit accusing the AI company of stealing trade secrets, saying that the iPhone maker's allegations are meritless — OpenAI is asking a federal jud

OpenAI is making a big change for ChatGPT users on its free and Go tiers: Starting next week, users on those tiers will be able to have unlimited text chats with the chatbot, according to OpenAI. Righ

OpenAI has asked a federal judge to toss out Apple's landmark lawsuit accusing the ChatGPT maker of stealing trade secrets, describing the allegations as 'meritless.' In a motion filed yesterday to di

Cristina Criddle / Financial Times: PitchBook: AI voice startups raised 7B in Q1 2026, up from 1B in Q1 2025, as OpenAI and Google bet on voice as the main interface for next-gen AI agents — OpenAI an

More details have emerged from Bloomberg about OpenAI Group PBC’s long-awaited hardware device, which was previously described as an artificial intelligence-enabled speaker that will be a “physical ma

Carl Zimmer / New York Times: Scientists trained AI on genetic sequences to design viruses not found in nature, yielding 16 viable viruses that can infect bacteria but don't threaten humans — Scientis

The Information: Sources: Canva slashed revenue growth forecast as heavy use of new AI features drove up costs and slowed their rollout, while more Canva users turned to ChatGPT — Executives at Canva,

Axios: Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind to be the unit's chairman and will add the title of Alphabet chief scientist; GOOG drops 3%+ — Demis Hassabis is leaving his role as CE

New York Times: Developers in Africa are increasingly choosing Chinese open-source AI models over US models, saying they are downloadable, easier to customize, and much cheaper — Developers built Sunf

Bloomberg: Filing: Microsoft recorded $24.1B in revenue from OpenAI during the year ended in June, suggesting OpenAI accounted for more than half of Microsoft's AI sales — Microsoft Corp. generates mo