OpenAI hit its billion-user goal, just seven months late
OpenAI hit its billion-user goal, just seven months late

ChatGPT is about to hit 1 billion weekly active users. OpenAI wanted to be here seven months ago. The chatbot is on the verge of the milestone, based on figures OpenAI has shared internally, The Information reported. The company had hoped to reach a bi…

AI agents don’t log in like people. That problem just sold for $1bn.
AI agents don’t log in like people. That problem just sold for $1bn.

Every AI agent a company switches on needs an identity to log in and reach data. Enterprises now run millions of them, with almost no way to keep track. That gap just sold for $1bn. The data-security firm Cyera has agreed to buy Oasis Security for arou…

xAI says the First Amendment protects the right to build ‘nudify’ tools
xAI says the First Amendment protects the right to build ‘nudify’ tools

xAI has a novel argument for why it should get to keep building tools that digitally undress people. The First Amendment. Elon Musk’s AI company, now owned by SpaceX, sued Minnesota’s attorney general on Monday, CBS News first reported. It wants a fede…

BuzzFeed bet on AI to save it. It just cut another third of its staff.
BuzzFeed bet on AI to save it. It just cut another third of its staff.

BuzzFeed bet on AI to rescue itself. This week it laid off another third of its staff. The bet, it turns out, was never the thing that could save it. The company cut about 180 jobs on Monday, roughly a third of its remaining workforce, the New York Tim…

Anthropic is alone in every AI policy fight. It’s winning anyway.
Anthropic is alone in every AI policy fight. It’s winning anyway.

Six months ago, Anthropic was the darling of America’s AI boom. It led on the models and was loudest on the ethics. This summer, it finds itself alone. The Claude maker is now the odd one out in nearly every big AI policy fight, Axios reported. It is t…

The AI boom needs power and rockets. Trump just exempted both from environmental law.
The AI boom needs power and rockets. Trump just exempted both from environmental law.

The Trump administration spent Tuesday clearing environmental law out of the way of the tech boom. It did so twice, on two fronts, with the same justification. The first move exempts data centres from the rules meant to stop acid rain. The second frees…

Apple hit $5tn by refusing to play the AI game everyone else is losing
Apple hit $5tn by refusing to play the AI game everyone else is losing

Apple has become the second company in history worth $5tn. It got there by being the one big-tech giant that refused to bet its balance sheet on AI. The iPhone maker briefly touched a $5.04tn market value on Tuesday. Shares hit a session high of $342.8…

The AI coding fight just moved from the model to the harness
The AI coding fight just moved from the model to the harness

The most expensive part of AI coding is no longer the model. It is the software wrapped around it, and enterprises have started to notice. The immediate fight is over price. Cursor, the AI coding tool SpaceX has agreed to buy for $60bn, moved most cust…

Fish Audio gives its voice AI away, and charges for the latency
Fish Audio gives its voice AI away, and charges for the latency

Fish Audio, a Palo Alto voice-AI startup, has raised $52m in a round it still calls a seed, first reported by TechCrunch. It arrives at a company with an unusual shape. It gives its best models away, and charges for the wiring around them. The startup …

AI agents can browse the web. Now they need a way to pay for it.
AI agents can browse the web. Now they need a way to pay for it.

For the past two years, the AI industry has focused on making models smarter. Every new release promises better reasoning, longer context windows, or more capable autonomous agents. Increasingly, people assume that software won’t just answer questions;…