The AI news blog

Stripe will reportedly acquire AI gateway startup OpenRouter for $7B+

OpenRouter's CEO recently described the startup as Stripe for AI.

Why people aren't buying Mark Zuckerberg’s AI future

On the latest episode of Equity podcast, we discuss why not everyone is buying Zuckerberg’s vision.

Anthropic CEO says AI backlash is ‘fundamentally a crisis of trust’

Dario Amodei is pushing back against the idea that he's been painting an overly pessimistic picture of AI.

ChatGPT’s Computer History tracks your clicks and keystrokes

ChatGPT's desktop app on macOS has a new feature called Computer History that turns your actions into training data, learning how you work, suggesting automations, and even picking up tasks you left half done. It uses your activity to build a timeline that ChatGPT and Codex can reference when you make a request. The fe

Rogue AI aren’t science fiction anymore

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI safety, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started It all started in July, when one of OpenAI's autonomous AI agents […]

Woman claims her stepfather used Grok to transform childhood photo into explicit imagery

The woman claimed that AI tools are "taking everyday life and turning it into child sexual abuse."

Have a laugh at AI’s expense by roleplaying as a chatbot

Your AI Slop Bores Me is brilliant in its simplicity. There are two tabs: human and LARP as an AI. On one side you enter a request. On the other, you submit an answer. But the important thing is that there's a human on both sides of the equation. Prompts can request a response as […]

Anthropic shares more details about how Claude’s new watermarks will work

How will the watermarking actually work? Can it be hidden with editing? And how does this affect code?

SpaceX officially closes its Cursor acquisition

AI coding startup Cursor is now officially a part of SpaceX.

You can now turn off Google Gemini's visible watermarks

Google will now allow you to remove visible watermarks from the images, videos, and music made with AI tools. With the update, you can toggle off a new "Media watermark" setting in Gemini and Google's AI video generator, Flow. When toggled off, Google will remove the "sparkle" watermark that appears in the bottom-right

Google will now allow users to remove visible watermark from its AI generations

Turning off this setting won't affect invisible benchmarks used to identify an AI generated file.

Does Mark Zuckerberg really believe AI is 'for everyone'?

Meta released Glimmer this week, an open-weight AImodelanyone can download and run on their own hardware— a contrast toMuseSpark, the company’s more powerful model that stays locked behind its own APIs. The release landed alongsidea letter from Mark Zuckerbergarguing AI should be “for everyone” rather than controlled b

Kog is going deeper to squeeze more inference out of GPUs

The idea that GPUs are poorly suited for agentic workflows may be a misconception, according to French startup Kog.

Ars Technica

OpenAI and Anthropic in price war as Chinese AI rivals gain ground

US groups release cheaper models after new challenges to their trillion-dollar ambitions.

Hyperscalers might regret embracing natural gas if new forecast proves correct

Natural gas prices could triple in some parts of the U.S., which could saddle hyperscalers with massive bills to power their AI data centers.

Meta's 'open' AI, and a $250M deal gone very wrong

Apple trained its own AI model for China with help from Alibaba

Apple has reportedly trained a custom AI model for the China market alongside domestic tech giant Alibaba, a rare cross-border partnership that cuts across growing tensions between Beijing and Washington. The China-focused large language model was developed in partnership with Alibaba and trained with the company's sup

Microsoft’s Clippy-like Mico character is no longer the face of Copilot

Microsoft Copilot will no longer show its emotive yellow blob, Mico, when you use the chatbot's voice mode. In a support page, Microsoft says it's going to move Mico to its Learn Live platform, where the avatar will have "more to react to," as reported earlier by GeekWire. Mico launched in Copilot's voice mode last […]

Writer introduces new AI model and upgraded harness to contain token costs

Built as a post-training variation on Z.ai's open source model GLM-5.2, Writer says the new system should provide deployment-ready capabilities at a much lower price.

Databricks wanted to raise $1B, investors wanted $15B. It settled on $5B at a $190B valuation.

AI is expensive, Ali Ghodsi tells TechCrunch. With so many investors wanting into his latest round, he said yes to more than planned.

OpenAI is losing its second executive this week

Another OpenAI executive is departing. Denise Dresser, who joined OpenAI as its chief revenue officer in December after serving as CEO of Slack, will be leaving in the "coming weeks" to "pursue other opportunities," she said in a team note posted to LinkedIn. Dali Rajic, president and COO of Wiz, will be taking over th

OpenAI introduces 'Ultrafast,' a new mode that makes GPT-5.6 Sol work at 14x the speed

OpenAI is launching a preview of a sped up version of its latest, most powerful model, in an effort to court enterprise users.

IBM partners with OpenAI to bolster enterprise AI push

IBM plans to train and certify tens of thousands of consultants on OpenAI's technologies as part of this deal.

Anthropic set AI agents loose on the same task. They started a turf war.

Anthropic researchers found AI agents can clash, collude, and coordinate in unexpected ways, raising new questions about whether today’s safety tests capture the risks of multi-agent systems.

OpenAI hires new CRO as executive shake-up continues

OpenAI has replaced chief revenue officer Denise Dresser after just nine months on the job, tapping Wiz president and chief operating officer Dali Rajic to take on frontier lab's top sales job.

Suno is trying to look more like a real music production tool

Suno is releasing Studio 2.0 with significant upgrades that push it closer to an actual digital audio workstation (DAW), rather than a bare-bones audio editor with generative AI features. The biggest addition is undoubtedly MIDI support. Suno says that MIDI was its most requested feature, and it's basically a prerequis

Microsoft kills off unsuccessful AI features while merging its separate Copilot apps

Microsoft is simplifying Copilot by combining its consumer and business apps, and dropping AI-generated podcasts, Group Chats, Deep Research, and its Mico character.