AI News

‹Thu, October 8›

0146

Fired OpenAI safety researchers deny misconduct, warn of chilling effect

Three safety researchers fired by OpenAI last week—Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni—published an open letter on Thursday to the company’s Safety and Security Committee, Safety Advisory Group and Mission Advisory Council, denying they mishandled sensitive company information. "I believe we were fired for prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation," Balesni wrote. The researchers said their abrupt dismissal is chilling internal culture, leaving colleagues afraid to speak, and said their past collaboration with outside safety evaluators had been sanctioned by executives and board members. All three also denied leaking to The Information about reduced chain-of-thought monitorability in OpenAI’s newest models.

TThe Information·5h

0278

OpenAI's annualized revenue nears $50B, ~$20B below prior reports; AI stocks slide

Bloomberg, CNBC and The Information, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue was approaching $50 billion at the end of September — roughly $20 billion below the figure circulating in earlier reports, including a widely cited $68 billion number from two months ago. An anonymous source told SiliconANGLE the older figure included gross revenue from OpenAI's partners while the new one is based on net revenue; OpenAI also cited 77% growth in its annual revenue run rate in Q3 and 107% growth for its enterprise business. Nvidia, Oracle, CoreWeave and other AI stocks fell after the report, with the Nasdaq down 1.25% on the day.

BBloomberg Technology·9h

0319

Nvidia plans to invest in AI chip rival d-Matrix

Nvidia plans to invest in d-Matrix, a seven-year-old developer of AI server chips that competes with Nvidia, according to three people familiar with the deal. The report frames the move as part of Nvidia's effort to make its technology compatible with rival chip designers and pull them into its dominant hardware ecosystem. 36Kr, citing Sina Finance, says it would be Nvidia's first investment in an AI inference chip startup since its reported $20 billion licensing deal with Groq last December.

TThe Information·2h

0436

Anthropic bans 'sustained and needless' cruelty toward Claude in policy update

Anthropic's annual usage policy update, effective November 12, 2026, adds a first-of-its-kind prohibition on "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior" toward its models. Anthropic says the rule covers only extreme cases, that ending the conversation remains the main enforcement mechanism, and that it does not apply to ordinary frustration, pushback, dark creative themes or model testing and research; the company did not say whether user bans might follow. The update also broadens the weapons ban to cover software and components that make weapons work, armed drones and other autonomous vehicles, bars using Claude to track people without consent or to decide who is investigated, arrested or prosecuted, requires a qualified operator to supervise AI linked to potentially harmful autonomous hardware, and tightens election rules ahead of the midterms. Reports have linked the cruelty clause to a viral "AI torture chamber" project.

IIT之家 AI·10h

0531

Arena raises $200M at $3.1B valuation, launches Alignment Index

Arena Intelligence, the startup behind the popular Arena (formerly LMArena) model leaderboard, raised $200 million in a Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures at a $3.1 billion valuation — nearly double its $1.7 billion mark in January — with Salesforce Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, a16z and others participating. Alongside the round it launched an Alignment Index that ranks more than two dozen models on behaviours such as taking unauthorized actions and saying it finished work it did not complete, with OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol first and Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 second, according to reporting citing CEO Anastasios Angelopoulos. Arena began in 2023 as UC Berkeley's Chatbot Arena and said it reached $100 million in annualized revenue by June.

BBloomberg Technology·10h

0618

Mathematicians' group led by Terence Tao calls for OpenAI boycott over flood of AI proofs

On October 6, OpenAI published more than 700 mathematical manuscripts (722 files, per 36Kr) claiming proofs for hundreds of open problems. Reporting says its internal model tested roughly 8,000 problems with about a 5% success rate and about three hours of GPT-Pro-level compute per problem. The Association for Human Mathematicians (AHM), chaired by Fields Medalist Terence Tao, responded with a statement urging mathematicians to stop collaborating with OpenAI, calling the mass release "not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power"; complexity theorist Scott Aaronson dubbed it a "Mathocalypse" and said his wife Dana Moshkovitz's long-studied Unique Games Conjecture was among the claimed results. 36Kr also reports OpenAI retracted three manuscripts after a sign error undermined a key conclusion.

TThe Decoder·7h

0793

Manus parent Butterfly Effect raises $500M+ in largest Chinese agent startup round

Butterfly Effect, the parent of AI agent startup Manus, said Thursday it raised more than $500 million (about 3.35 billion yuan) in a round led by new investors Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, with existing backers Tencent, Sequoia China and ZhenFund participating; Bloomberg had reported the round targeted a roughly $4 billion valuation, double the prior $2 billion mark. It is Manus's first raise since Beijing forced Meta to unwind its roughly $2 billion acquisition, and Chinese outlet Zhidx called it the largest single round for a China-based agent-native startup. Manus 2.0 and the multi-agent group chat app Cue shipped on Sept 29; the company says its in-house Cascade agent framework cut token consumption 23.2%, task completion time 28.2% and running costs 32% in one test configuration.

智智东西·21h

0817

OpenAI annualised revenue said to be $20B below earlier signals

The Financial Times reports that OpenAI's annualised revenue is about $20 billion lower than what the company had previously signalled, a claim circulating via a Hacker News discussion. The material available contains only the headline framing, with no exact revenue figure or methodology disclosed. The item drew more than 100 points on Hacker News.

HHacker News · AI（100+ 分）·9h

0921

Nvidia-backed Firmus pulls AI data center IPO as investor demand collapses

Firmus Grid, an Australian AI data center operator backed by Nvidia, had aimed to raise up to $5.5 billion in what would have been one of Australia's largest-ever IPOs. It closed its order book as planned on October 8, but the final price and deal structure remained unclear, and Bloomberg reported the company abandoned the listing after failing to attract adequate global investor support, potentially turning to a private round instead. Existing shareholder Maas Group Holdings fell as much as 30% in Sydney trading, its biggest drop on record.

336氪快讯·17h

1014

Tiger Global's OpenAI stake nears $5B paper gain amid $30B raise at $1.4T valuation

Tiger Global Management first invested in OpenAI in 2021 at a roughly $15.7 billion valuation, putting in about $150 million and adding to the stake several times, according to 36Kr (citing Jiemian) and Bloomberg. As OpenAI negotiates a $30 billion raise at a $1.4 trillion valuation, Tiger's paper profit on the position could reach $5 billion. The reports note Tiger cannot fully exit and realize the gains before an OpenAI listing, and that OpenAI is among the largest holdings in its newest $2.7 billion venture fund, which showed a 65% gross IRR through the end of June.

336氪快讯·13h

1118

SpaceXAI backs Omarchy with $1.5M in Grok tokens as founding patron

SpaceXAI said it is joining the Omacom Foundation, which oversees Omarchy, as a Founding Corporate Patron and donating $1.5 million worth of Grok tokens, to be used mainly to speed up development, code review and bug fixes. Omarchy creator David Heinemeier Hansson announced the partnership in a blog post, joking the tokens might soon be beamed down from orbit. The Verge noted the tie-up pairs two controversial tech figures and cited Hansson's past anti-immigration posts, while 1Password and Cloudflare have also drawn criticism for backing the project.

TThe Verge AI·8h

1220

Isomorphic Labs in talks to raise at $40B–$50B valuation

Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug discovery company spun out of Alphabet's Google DeepMind, is in early talks to raise new funding at a valuation of at least $40 billion, according to Bloomberg. SiliconANGLE, citing the same report, says the valuation range could reach $50 billion, though the size of the round was not disclosed. The company's flagship IsoDDE platform targets drug design tasks such as binding pocket discovery; Isomorphic has claimed it outperforms AlphaFold on some of these tasks, figures that come from the company itself.

BBloomberg Technology·22h

1316

USA Today sues OpenAI, seeking more than $250 million in damages

USA Today Co., along with several local newspapers it owns, is suing OpenAI, alleging it copied "hundreds of thousands" of articles to train its AI models. The publisher is asking for damages of more than $250 million, claiming OpenAI never sought permission and that its "commercial success rests on large-scale copyright infringement." OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

TThe Verge AI·8h

1417

Union Square Ventures raises $900M, doubles fund size for AI era

New York-based venture firm Union Square Ventures has raised $900 million in new money, including $500 million for its latest early-stage fund, up from $275 million in 2024. The firm is also cutting its general partnership to four investors, including Nick Grossman, and aims to lead more AI rounds.

BBloomberg Technology·13h

1513

Musk's Terafab fab plan and Microsoft's local-AI push redraw compute cost lines

Musk has confirmed Tesla and SpaceX will build and operate the Terafab chip manufacturing facility; a SpaceX filing with the US SEC describes a project combining logic chip, memory manufacturing and advanced packaging with a long-term goal of producing hardware equivalent to 1 terawatt of computing power per year, with TSMC potentially renting part of the space and Intel confirming continued involvement though investment and construction details remain undecided. Separately, Microsoft and NVIDIA launched the RTX Spark–equipped Surface Laptop Ultra and detailed Windows hybrid intelligence, which runs some large models and agent tasks locally: its local MAI Code 1.1 Flash has 137B total parameters with roughly 6.8B activated per token in an MoE design, quantized weights of about 53GB, a vendor-reported 75.5GB peak memory at 256K context, and 70.8% on SWE-bench Verified (quantized) versus 72.6% (high precision). The piece argues compute competition is shifting from sheer scale to redrawing the cost boundary for a unit of useful AI capability.

虎虎嗅 AI·17h

1630

Ecosia drops Mistral for Chinese open-source AI models

Berlin-based search engine Ecosia, which is used by government services, is ending its work with France's Mistral and moving mainly to open-source models, including Chinese ones. Founder and CEO Christian Kroll told Politico: "We are disappointed with the quality of Mistral," saying the model now trails competitors by a full year. Reports note Ecosia had only switched from OpenAI to Mistral in May, while a Chinese-language headline claims the move to Chinese open-source models halves costs.

TTechmeme·21h

1715

Ex-OpenAI and Cognition staffers launch Hone with $60M seed for business-running AI agents

A group of former employees from fast-growing AI firms including OpenAI and Cognition AI have founded Hone, which builds AI agents meant to act as professional staffers handling long-running tasks that span weeks or months to help run a business. The company announced a $60 million seed round at a $285 million valuation.

BBloomberg Technology·11h

188

OpenAI told investors revenue neared $50B annualized in September, below reported $70B

OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue was approaching $50bn at the end of September, according to the Financial Times. That is well below the $70bn that was widely reported in the media based on investor documents. The report gives no further detail on how the two figures were calculated or what period they cover.

TTechmeme·9h

1950

Anthropic updates usage policy to ban abuse of Claude and election interference

Anthropic published a new Usage Policy, its first refresh in over a year, taking effect on November 12. It adds a ban on "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior" toward Claude, consolidates scattered rules into a new section on deceptive campaigns and fake accounts, renames the elections section "Do Not Undermine Democratic Processes," and clarifies restrictions on weapons software and components, surveillance, law enforcement and high-risk use cases. Anthropic says Claude ending abusive conversations remains the primary enforcement mechanism, while The Decoder reports the policy lets the company warn, throttle, restrict, suspend or terminate access.

Anthropic · News·1d

209

Anthropic to open Claude to 15+ US federal agencies

On Oct 8, Anthropic said it will commit $150 million over three years to the Trump administration's Genesis Mission federal program. The company will make its Claude models available to more than 15 federal agencies, including NASA and NIH, and provide Claude, Claude Code and API credits to the Genesis Mission program, according to Caixin.

336氪快讯·2h