OpenAI Races to Raise $30B
OpenAI is moving fast to secure another massive funding round, this time before rival Anthropic reaches the public markets.
- OpenAI is reportedly trying to raise around $30 billion at a valuation above $1.4 trillion, though the deal has not been finalized yet.
- The company wants to close the round before Anthropic’s expected IPO in mid-November, as both companies are competing for many of the same large investors.
- Existing backers including SoftBank and Abu Dhabi’s MGX are reportedly in talks to participate in the new round.
- OpenAI is telling investors its annualized revenue reached around $50 billion after GPT-6 Astra, with the company projecting $70 billion by the end of 2026.
- The raise comes just months after OpenAI secured $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation, with the new cash expected to support its huge AI infrastructure commitments and planned 2027 IPO.
OpenAI and Anthropic are no longer competing only for the best AI models. They’re now racing for capital, investors, and trillion-dollar valuations.
If OpenAI secures a $1.4 trillion valuation before Anthropic goes public, it could set a major new benchmark for how investors value the world’s biggest AI companies.
Anthropic Commits 5% of Shares to AI Public Benefit Fund
Anthropic is preparing for a future where AI could create enormous wealth while also disrupting millions of jobs. The company is committing 5% of its shares to a new Public Benefit Fund designed to share some of that value with society.
- Anthropic will commit 5% of its shares to the new fund, subject to shareholder approval. At current expected valuations, that stake could eventually be worth $75B–$100B.
- The fund can grow further: Anthropic’s board may add another 2% of shares every time the company’s value rises by 50% above a set baseline.
- The money could support nonprofits or direct payments to specific groups, including people and communities affected by AI-driven job disruption.
- The fund will be a separate entity owned by Anthropic, giving the company more flexibility to fund public-benefit projects as AI’s economic impact grows.
- The announcement comes as Anthropic prepares for a possible IPO and repeatedly warns that advanced AI could bring both huge economic gains and major disruption to the labor market.
AI companies could become some of the most valuable businesses in history, while the technology may also replace or reshape many jobs.
Anthropic is now setting aside part of that potential wealth in advance, creating a fund that could eventually become one of the largest AI-related public benefit efforts ever.
U.S. Orders DeepSeek Off Federal Systems
DeepSeek’s rapid rise is hitting a major roadblock in the U.S., with Washington now treating the Chinese AI model as a potential government security risk.
- The ban also covers third-party tools and services that use DeepSeek models, not just DeepSeek’s own apps and products.
- U.S. officials raised concerns that government information could be transferred to China or used to gather intelligence on U.S. organizations.
- Officials also flagged possible malware, security flaws, and other vulnerabilities inside AI models connected to government networks.
- The move expands earlier DeepSeek restrictions already introduced by agencies including the Commerce Department and U.S. Navy, as well as several U.S. states.
- China criticized the ban as a discriminatory restriction and called on the U.S. to reverse the decision.
DeepSeek became one of the biggest challengers to U.S. AI companies by offering powerful, low-cost models.
Now its technology is being pushed out of U.S. government systems, showing how the AI race between the U.S. and China is increasingly becoming a national security battle too.
DeepSeek open-sources the engine behind its affordable AI
The Chinese AI lab just dropped DeepInfer, the software it uses to run V4.1-Flash. If you host the model on supported Nvidia or Huawei chips, you can now use DeepSeek’s production stack to run it faster and cheaper. Even if you use another model, you can still borrow ideas from the code for your setup. It’s not the full system, though, so you’ll need to build a few pieces yourself. Grab the repo.
Cua lets your agents run jobs across every machine
The computer-use startup just shipped its Spaces SDK, giving each of your AI agents a desktop with its own screen and apps. Unlike Grok Bot and Muse, you get to choose where they work, and moving a job to another machine takes just a one-word code change. Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode can all use the same space and tools, too. Try it here.
ElevenLabs and Mistral drop new models for voice agents
Your voice stack just got two new contenders. ElevenLabs’ new speech-to-speech models, Eleven Realtime, let you switch from OpenAI’s Realtime API by changing only the endpoint and model name. The cheaper Mini model handles natural chats, while Max reasons through complex tasks. Mistral’s Voxtral 3 gives you more room to tinker. Its LiveKit-based SDK lets you swap the LLM, voice, or language without rewriting your agent. With Mistral’s help, you can also run the whole stack on your own servers.
Why Uber’s “new” AI coding stack is actually a decade old
Ten years overnight. Uber’s AI coding tools might look like an overnight win, but building them took a decade. On a recent podcast with veteran engineer Gergely Orosz, Distinguished Engineer Uday Medisetty explained how all that preparation finally paid off. Today, Uber’s background coding agent, Minion, ships roughly 15% of the company’s production PRs. Keep in mind, engineers built much of that essential foundation long before LLMs even existed.
Old stack, new tricks. Minion runs on DevPods, the cloud dev boxes Uber started building in 2017. A DevPod spins up in seconds, with repos cloned, build caches warm, and AI tools installed. The MCP Gateway came together quickly for a similar reason. Uber already kept service API contracts in one registry, so it could automatically turn those contracts into agent tools.
Check yourself. An agent that writes code also needs a way to test it. At Uber, agents deploy their branches to Slate, a private staging setup that routes a test account through the changed code. Even that relies on older infrastructure, Jaeger tracing. Without Slate, Medisetty says, agents would have had a much harder time validating their work.
Boring pays off. You probably don’t need Uber’s entire platform, but you can borrow the groundwork:
- Give your agent one build-and-test command, documented in a top-level CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md.
- Set up cloud workspaces with repos cloned and caches warm.
- Keep API contracts in one registry so you can generate agent tools from them.
- Give agents a safe way to test a branch end to end before merging.
Fix the first layer that fails. Orosz’s key takeaway is that the companies benefiting the most from AI already had dedicated developer platform teams in place, which was certainly true for Uber. In addition, the episode post maps out each system alongside detailed timestamps.
SpaceX Revenue Soars 161% on AI
SpaceX reported $14.6B in Q3 revenue, up 161% year-over-year, crediting its Super Intelligence segment and accelerating Starlink connectivity growth. The SI business alone brought in $7.6B, while the core Space division posted a small operating loss. For investors, SpaceX now looks less like a launch company and more like an AI infrastructure giant.
Anthropic’s Draft IPO Filing Leaks Out
Anthropic’s draft IPO filing, per The Wall Street Journal, shows $16.3B in first-half 2026 revenue against an $80.7B net loss, driven largely by accounting charges. Compute spending hit nearly $9B in six months, with roughly $450B in cloud commitments over the next decade and up to $86B earmarked for renting Nvidia chips.
Musk Floats SpaceX-Tesla Merger
Elon Musk says SpaceX and Tesla have each formed special committees of independent directors to explore combining the two companies. Musk argued there is a lot of merit to a merger as the world enters what he calls the superintelligence singularity, but stressed that shareholders of both companies would ultimately have to support the deal.
Salesforce Agrees to Buy Braze for $5.66B
Salesforce agreed to acquire marketing automation provider Braze in an all-cash deal valued at $5.66B in enterprise value, or $47.50 per share, a steep premium that sent BRZE stock soaring 51%. The deal, expected to close in fiscal 2028, deepens Salesforce’s push into customer engagement and AI-driven marketing as it races to own more of the enterprise data stack.
China Orders $35B of Nvidia GPUs
Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance have reportedly ordered about $35B worth of Nvidia’s export-compliant RTX Pro 5500 workstation GPUs to fuel their AI ambitions. Demand far exceeds Nvidia’s planned production, with warnings that only a fraction of orders can be filled, showing how hungry China’s tech giants remain despite U.S. export controls.
Otter.ai Secures $320M in Growth Financing
Mountain View-based Otter.ai, maker of the popular AI meeting assistant, secured $320 million in growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund. The fund finances sales and marketing through revenue sharing rather than taking an equity stake, giving Otter fresh fuel to scale distribution as competition in AI note-taking and workplace agents intensifies.
Ex-OpenAI Exec Builds $1.5B Startup
Former OpenAI executive Bob McGrew has quietly built Arda, now launching at a $1.5 billion valuation. The startup is betting that AI can help revive U.S. manufacturing, joining a growing wave of OpenAI alumni spinning out well-funded companies that apply frontier models to physical industries rather than chatbots and software.
Altman Pitched Three AI Safety Endgames
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly laid out three paths to safe AI in an internal presentation: an IAEA-style international watchdog, a merger of the major labs into one entity, or a single company powerful enough to shut down everyone else’s compute. Altman called the last option terrible, but the reported remarks suggest how OpenAI leadership frames the race.
Inception Says Mercury 3 Beats Fast AI Rivals
Diffusion language model startup Inception released Mercury 3, its new flagship model. In the company’s own benchmarks, Mercury 3 beat OpenAI’s GPT-6 Luna and Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 5.5 on eight of 12 tests while running four to eight times faster, a direct challenge to the autoregressive architecture behind today’s leading LLMs.
Dream Labs Raises $90M Robot Seed
Dream Labs raised a $90 million seed round to build more capable, general-purpose robots trained on simple video feeds. Alongside the funding, the startup launched a public API offering access to its universal robot foundation model, betting that cheap video data, not costly teleoperation, will unlock embodied AI at scale.
Blackwall Hits $2.2B Valuation
Web infrastructure and cybersecurity company Blackwall raised $100 million in a Series C round at a $2.2 billion valuation. The Estonia-headquartered firm builds tools for web traffic management and optimization, and will use the capital to scale its platform as AI bots and agents reshape how traffic hits the open web.
Reliable Robotics Tops $1B Valuation
Mountain View autonomous flight startup Reliable Robotics has crossed a $1 billion valuation and is opening a new engineering hub in Bothell, Washington, focused on radar. The unicorn milestone underlines growing investor appetite for autonomy in aviation, a frontier where certification, not just software, decides the winners.
Intel Seeks FCC Waiver for Factory Robots
Intel has asked the FCC for a waiver from equipment authorization and modification restrictions affecting foreign-made advanced robotic devices, citing uncertainty over whether updates and hardware changes to its existing automated guided vehicles would remain compliant. The request shows how fast-moving robotics restrictions are now colliding with the factory automation that U.S. chipmakers depend on.