OpenRouter raised $113 million at a $1.3 billion valuation in a round led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s venture arm, as weekly token volume on the AI model routing platform exploded from 5 trillion to 25 trillion in six months.
After Google’s AI-first search overhaul at I/O 2026, DuckDuckGo reported a 30 percent spike in U.S. app installs over six consecutive days, with iOS growth peaking at nearly 70 percent as users seek an escape from forced AI search results.
Critterz, an AI-generated animated feature produced by AGC Studios using OpenAI’s Sora, was set to premiere at Cannes. Then OpenAI shut Sora down in March without warning. The lesson for anyone building on AI infrastructure they do not own is now painfully clear.
OpenAI has embedded ChatGPT directly inside Microsoft PowerPoint as a sidebar that builds presentations from prompts. It is available now in beta across almost every plan tier — and it marks a fundamental shift in what office software is actually for.
Google’s Gemini Omni is a natively multimodal model that accepts any combination of text, images, audio, and video and generates high-quality video output with synchronized audio. It is already rolling out to Gemini Ultra subscribers and YouTube Shorts creators.
Aleksander Madry, who ran OpenAI’s preparedness team before being reassigned to AI reasoning, is leaving the company. His exit comes days after co-founder Andrej Karpathy announced he was joining Anthropic. The pattern of safety talent walking out is no longer deniable.
ClickUp cut 22 percent of its workforce and deployed 3,000 AI agents to replace them. CEO Zeb Evans calls it a 100x transformation. Critics see a preview of what is coming for white-collar workers everywhere.
Spotify and Universal Music Group struck a landmark licensing deal letting Premium subscribers create AI-generated covers and remixes from UMG’s catalog, with artists getting paid every time their music is used.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed the first major criminal charges under the Take It Down Act. Two men face prosecution for AI deepfake pornography that accumulated nearly 3 million views targeting celebrities, politicians, and private citizens.
The CIA and NSA have been locked out of the newest AI models for months. The White House just approved $9 billion in emergency funding for Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips — and Congress still has to sign off on most of it.