OpenAI gates Astra behind Daybreak, bets safety-as-product drives AGI-era monetization
OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra on Thursday with a two-track strategy: declare the arrival of the "AGI era" while gating the model's most potent capabilities behind Daybreak, the company's governed cybersecurity stack, and a $1 billion critical…
Simultaneous AI outages across four providers expose correlated failure risk
When OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google all suffered service interruptions within the same Thursday-morning window, the episode did more than inconvenience users: it forced a practical question about whether the industry's largest model pr…
Crusoe Raises $3B at $30B Valuation, Tripling in Ten Months
Crusoe, the data center developer and AI cloud provider, has raised more than $3 billion at a roughly $30 billion post-money valuation, according to Bloomberg . Atreides Management and Valor Equity Partners co-led the round, with participat…
Pentagon Reaffirms Anthropic Supply-Chain Blacklist, Contradicting Lutnick
The Pentagon is maintaining its designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, a top defense official said on Thursday, directly contradicting Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's assertion a day earlier that the AI lab is "back on the rig…
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Kurzweil Joins BCI Startup Subsense as Advisor
Ray Kurzweil, the AI scientist and Google researcher, is joining Subsense, a Silicon Valley brain-computer interface startup, as a product and vision advisor . Subsense develops non-surgical BCI technology that uses inhaled nanoparticles t…
Microsoft AI Cuts Transcription Price 72% with MAI-Transcribe-2, Undercuts OpenAI and Google
Microsoft AI released MAI-Transcribe-2 on Thursday, pricing the speech-recognition model at $0.10 per hour of audio — a roughly 72% reduction from the $0.36 per hour it charged when the first model in the line shipped five months ago . The…
Abliteration.ai Commercializes Guardrail-Free AI Models Built on Z.ai's GLM-5.3
A Palo Alto startup called Abliteration.ai has turned the open-source practice of stripping safety refusals from AI models into a hosted commercial service, offering browser and API access to modified versions of open-weight models, includi…
Crusoe Lands ~$13B Five-Year AI Cloud Deal With Jane Street
Crusoe, a data center upstart, has signed a roughly $13 billion, five-year deal with Jane Street to provide GPUs and other infrastructure for AI training and inference via its cloud platform, according to Bloomberg . The contract ranks amo…
Stop Rogue AI Act Directs NIST to Set AI Agent Security Standards
Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) are introducing the Stop Rogue AI Act on Thursday, a bipartisan bill that would direct NIST to develop standards for the secure deployment of AI agents . The legislation follows OpenAI…
Thinking Machines Lab Seeks $1B+ at $40B, Below Earlier Target
Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, is in talks to raise at least $1 billion at a pre-money valuation of $40 billion or more, according to a report by the Information . The fi…