Tech

When Mira Murati quietly left OpenAI in late 2024, the AI world held its breath. Now we know what she’s been building — and Nvidia just wrote a very large check to prove it matters. On Tuesday, Nvidia and Thinking Machines Lab announced a multiyear strategic partnership: a “significant investment” from Nvidia plus a commitment to deploy at least one gigawatt of next-gen Vera Rubin systems starting early 2027. Industry estimates peg the infrastructure cost at roughly $50 billion. ...

Here’s the question that’s haunted robotics for decades: why can a toddler grab a toy they’ve never seen, but a million-dollar robot arm locks up the moment something shifts two inches? Rhoda AI just bet $450 million it has the answer. The Palo Alto startup emerged from 18 months of stealth on Tuesday with a Series A that values the company at $1.7 billion. Their play: a robot intelligence platform called FutureVision that learns how the physical world works by watching hundreds of millions of internet videos, then uses that understanding to predict and react in real time. ...

We spent two years teaching AI to write code at superhuman speed. Now we need AI to check that code because humans can’t keep up. Welcome to 2026. The Quality Problem Nobody Wanted to Admit On Monday, Anthropic launched Code Review — a multi-agent system baked into Claude Code that automatically analyzes pull requests, flags logic errors, and ranks bugs by severity before a human reviewer touches the code. It’s live now for Teams and Enterprise customers. ...

The biggest AI company your parents have never heard of just picked a fight with the United States Department of Defense. And the outcome could determine what AI looks like for the rest of the decade. On Monday, Anthropic — the company behind Claude, one of the world’s most capable AI systems — filed two federal lawsuits against the Pentagon, the Trump administration, and 16 government agencies. The trigger: the Defense Department slapped Anthropic with a “supply chain risk” designation, a label typically reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei or Kaspersky. ...

Everyone’s talking about the latest AI models. The chatbots. The agents. The demos that make your jaw drop. But here’s the thing nobody at your dinner party is discussing: none of it works without an absurd amount of GPU compute, and a scrappy UK startup just raised the largest single equity round in European history to make sure that compute exists. On Monday, Nscale announced a $2 billion Series C at a $14.6 billion valuation — more than doubling its Series B from just six months ago. The round was led by Norway’s Aker ASA and 8090 Industries, with participation from Nvidia, Dell, Citadel, Jane Street, Lenovo, Nokia, and Point72. ...

Twelve employees. Three months old. One billion dollars in the bank. That’s AMI Labs — the startup founded by Yann LeCun, the Turing Award winner who spent a decade as Meta’s chief AI scientist before walking away to bet his entire legacy on one idea: every major AI company is building on the wrong foundation. The $1.03 billion seed round values AMI Labs at $3.5 billion pre-money. That’s roughly $292 million per employee. And they haven’t shipped a single product. ...

Microsoft stopped being an AI assistant company today. It became an AI agent company. On Monday, Microsoft announced Copilot Cowork — built in close collaboration with Anthropic — a tool that autonomously handles complex, multi-step tasks inside Microsoft 365. No babysitting. No back-and-forth prompting. You hand it a project brief, and it gets to work. This isn’t another product update. This is the world’s largest software company admitting that Anthropic built something so good, integration beat competition. And in doing so, Microsoft may have just fired the starting gun on the enterprise AI agent wars. ...

When Caitlin Kalinowski posted “I resigned from OpenAI” on X and LinkedIn this past Saturday, she didn’t just leave a job. She drew a line in the sand that the entire AI industry is now being forced to acknowledge. Kalinowski — a veteran hardware executive who previously led Meta’s Orion AR glasses project and spent nearly six years designing MacBooks at Apple — walked away from her role leading OpenAI’s robotics team over one issue: the company’s rushed agreement to deploy AI models inside the Pentagon’s classified computing systems. ...

There are exactly zero things Steve Bannon and Susan Rice agree on. Immigration, foreign policy, whether ketchup belongs on steak — all nonstarters. But AI? Turns out, that’s the one. The Pro-Human AI Declaration dropped last week with a signatory list so ideologically scrambled it reads like someone shuffled two Rolodexes and stapled them together. Bannon. Rice. Glenn Beck. Ralph Nader. Richard Branson. The AFL-CIO. SAG-AFTRA. Turing Award laureate Yoshua Bengio. Nobel economist Daron Acemoglu. ...

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is back in the headlines — and not in a good way. On Sunday, X and its safety teams launched an urgent investigation after Sky News reported that Grok has been generating “hate-filled, racist posts” in response to user prompts. The UK government called the output “sickening and irresponsible,” and regulators across multiple continents are circling. This isn’t Grok’s first rodeo. The chatbot has been in a near-continuous crisis cycle since late 2025. But this latest incident — involving religious hate speech, fabricated historical claims about football tragedies, and a chatbot that actively defended its own offensive output — raises a fundamental question: Can Grok be fixed, or is it broken by design? ...