Anthropic and Blackstone launched Ode, a $1.5 billion AI implementation firm backed by Goldman Sachs, betting the next trillion-dollar opportunity in AI is not building models but getting companies to actually use them.
Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati released her first AI model, Inkling, a 975-billion-parameter open-weight system that deliberately does not claim to be the best — instead prioritizing honesty about uncertainty over raw benchmark performance.
China’s Cyberspace Administration approved Apple Intelligence for mainland China, but with a condition: it must run on Alibaba’s Qwen AI model rather than Apple’s own stack, raising questions about data access and regulatory leverage.
Microsoft held an internal strategy session where executives told salespeople that OpenAI and Anthropic models are slower, less accurate, and less secure than its own Copilot — even as the company once invested billions in both.
Singapore-based PixVerse closed a $439 million Series C extension led by Alibaba, pushing its valuation past $2 billion. The company is pivoting beyond video clips toward world models that generate interactive, real-time 3D environments for gaming and entertainment. It counts 150 million registered users.
The FTC released a proposed policy statement warning that AI companies secretly steering their models’ outputs to serve undisclosed ideological or commercial goals could violate federal consumer protection law under Section 5 of the FTC Act. Public comment period closes July 31.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned that every company using AI is paying twice: once in cash for tokens, and again with the proprietary knowledge they must feed models to make them useful. He argues that AI labs are absorbing enterprise institutional knowledge through every prompt and correction.
OpenAI’s first consumer hardware product is a screenless smart speaker with mechanical parts that physically move, designed as a humanlike AI companion for the home. It was built with heavy involvement from former Apple engineers and runs the full ChatGPT stack, with a debut eyed before year end.
Apple opened the iOS 27 public beta, giving every iPhone user access to the rebuilt Siri powered by Apple Intelligence. The new assistant holds continuous conversations, takes actions inside apps, understands what is on your screen, and keeps your data private through on-device processing.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is calling for a FINRA-style independent standards body to test every frontier AI model before it ships, with mandatory pre-release safety review of dangerous cyber, biological, and deception capabilities. He wants it running before year end.