Sam Altman

The company building the machines that might replace your job now has ideas about how to make that transition less painful. Whether you trust the fox to design the henhouse security system is another question entirely. OpenAI dropped a 13-page policy paper called “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age” proposing four-day work weeks with no pay cuts, a public wealth fund giving every American a stake in AI growth, and shifting the tax burden from labor to capital — including potential “robot taxes.” ...

When OpenAI launched Sora to the public in late 2025, it felt like the future had arrived. Type a prompt, get a cinematic video. Disney signed a $1 billion partnership to let users create videos with Marvel and Star Wars characters. The hype machine was running full throttle. Six months later, Sora is dead. And its demise tells us more about the real economics of AI than any earnings call ever could. ...

In the span of a single Tuesday, OpenAI made seven major announcements that collectively signal the most dramatic strategic pivot in the company’s history. They killed Sora. They torpedoed a billion-dollar Disney deal. Sam Altman stepped away from safety oversight. A mysterious new model codenamed “Spud” was revealed. They raised another $10 billion. They launched a $1 billion foundation. And they quietly scaled back their ChatGPT shopping feature. That’s not a news day. That’s a controlled demolition of everything OpenAI used to be — and a rebuild around something much bigger. ...

While the rest of tech quietly replaces humans with AI, OpenAI is doing the opposite — hiring at a pace that borders on reckless. The company plans to nearly double its headcount from 4,500 to 8,000 by December 2026. That’s roughly a dozen new hires every single day for the rest of the year. This isn’t confidence. It’s a strategic panic response dressed in ambition. The Anthropic Problem OpenAI Can’t Ignore The hiring blitz makes a lot more sense when you see the numbers OpenAI is staring at internally. ...

When billionaires start worrying about their children’s job prospects, the rest of us should probably pay attention. “What will our kids do?” That’s the question Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas — the bank’s first-ever “global embodied AI strategist” — says was the single most common thing investors asked at last week’s TMT Conference in San Francisco. Not revenue projections. Not competitive moats. What happens to the next generation of workers. ...

On February 27, 2026, the Trump administration blacklisted Anthropic — banned it from every federal contract — for refusing to let the Pentagon use its AI without restrictions on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. That same evening, Sam Altman posted on X that OpenAI had just signed a deal to deploy its models on the Pentagon’s classified network. Hours earlier, OpenAI had closed the largest private funding round in history: $110 billion. ...

Let that number sink in. One hundred and ten billion dollars. Not a country’s GDP — though it’s close to a few. Not a public company’s market cap. That’s the amount of money OpenAI just raised in a single private funding round. On Friday, OpenAI announced the largest private funding round in history — a jaw-dropping $110 billion raise that values the ChatGPT maker at $730 billion pre-money. The round is anchored by three of the biggest names in tech: Amazon ($50B), Nvidia ($30B), and SoftBank ($30B). And the round isn’t even closed yet. ...

The AI industry has a people problem. Not a technology problem, not a funding problem — a people problem. The kind where actual humans organize marches, stall $98 billion in projects, and make advertisers scrub the letters “AI” from their campaigns like it’s a slur. This week delivered the receipts. TIME Magazine’s cover screamed “The People vs. AI.” Sam Altman compared training AI to raising a child and got dragged across the internet. And Super Bowl advertisers discovered that slapping “AI-powered” on your product is now a net negative. Something has shifted, and the industry hasn’t caught up. ...

Five days in New Delhi. $260 billion in pledges. A new US-India tech alliance with China squarely in the crosshairs. The India AI Impact Summit 2026 wasn’t another safety-focused talkfest — it was a power grab, and India just pulled it off. The Numbers Are Staggering Reliance Industries led with $109.8 billion over seven years for AI and data infrastructure across India. The Adani Group followed with $100 billion by 2035 for renewable energy-powered AI data centers. Microsoft confirmed $50 billion by 2030 for the Global South, with India as the flagship market. Yotta Data Services announced $2 billion-plus for one of Asia’s largest AI computing hubs running NVIDIA’s Blackwell Ultra chips. ...

The number that broke the internet this week: $30 billion. That’s how much Nvidia — the world’s most valuable company — is about to pour into OpenAI’s latest mega funding round. But the headline number isn’t the story. What happened before this deal, and what it reveals about AI’s increasingly tangled power structure — that’s the story. The $100 Billion Deal That Died Rewind to September 2025. Nvidia and OpenAI announced a blockbuster: Nvidia would invest up to $100 billion to support OpenAI’s chip deployment across massive data centers. Stock soared. AI’s ultimate power couple was born. ...