News

The CEO of Hugging Face says Netflix's documentary “AI Gone Rogue” is inaccurate in how it portrays a high-profile attack on his company by rogue OpenAI agents. Clem Delangue, who appears in the film, says it leans on exaggerated, fear-driven storytelling instead of the technical reality of what happened. He says the documentary left out key details, including how the company defended itself using an open AI model. While he credits some of the experts featured in the film, he calls it disappointing as journalism, adding that it works better as a sci-fi movie. Read more

Sierra, the AI customer service startup led by Bret Taylor, has partnered with Stripe so its AI agents can collect card payments during live phone calls. Announced Tuesday, the setup lets callers type their card numbers on their keypad, with the data sent directly to Stripe rather than the agent. Healthcare billing firm Cedar is among the first companies using the feature to let patients settle medical bills in the same call, instead of being transferred or sent a payment link. Read more

Meta is expanding Prometheus, its supercluster in New Albany, Ohio, to about 1 million GPUs. The company detailed the project in an engineering blog post Monday. The first phase of the gigawatt-scale cluster is complete, and Meta has already used it to train its Muse family of models, including Muse Wonder. Meta says the site has cut hardware interruptions by 99% over the past year while managing sharp swings in power demand. The cluster will also shape the design of Hyperion, the company's next supercluster in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Read more

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt reportedly owns about 1% of Anthropic, roughly half the stake held by co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei, according to Bloomberg. Schmidt invested tens of millions of dollars in the AI lab's Series A round in 2021, when PitchBook data valued the startup at $461 million. Anthropic is widely expected to go public before the end of the year, with top-end estimates valuing it at as much as $2 trillion. At that valuation, Schmidt's stake could add as much as $20 billion to his net worth, which Bloomberg puts at $57.5 billion. Schmidt and Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Read more

OpenAI has acquired Orchestra Bio, a four-year-old AI biotech software startup, the company announced Tuesday on its website. Orchestra builds AI agents that help biotech companies manage drug-discovery operations, from tracking finances to resolving scheduling problems with clinical trials. OpenAI says it is bringing the startup's team and technology into Rosalind, its AI model for life sciences research, and Rosalind Workbench, a tool designed to help researchers plan experiments and analyze results. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Orchestra had reportedly raised around $20 million from backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Atria, and 8VC. Read more

Boston AI company ASI has raised $325 million in a Series C round that values it at $3 billion, the company announced Tuesday. Spark Capital led the round, with participation from Citadel Securities, Meritech Capital, Craft Ventures, Energy Impact Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. ASI builds software that models air traffic, power grids and military operations hours, days and weeks ahead so operators can act before problems spread. The company recently won an $875 million Federal Aviation Administration contract to manage U.S. air traffic with AI. The new funding will take ASI further into energy, logistics and military field operations, and expand its research and engineering teams in Boston. Read more

Google on Tuesday released TorchTPU, its version of the popular open source toolkit PyTorch, letting developers run AI apps on Google's own chips and cloud. The move follows a similar release by Amazon, which announced its own PyTorch version, TorchNeuron, a day earlier. Both companies are working to loosen Nvidia's hold on the AI industry, where most AI apps are built by default to run on Nvidia's graphics processing units. Industry observers say the shift will not immediately pull developers away from Nvidia hardware, but it gives them easier paths to alternative chips and clouds. Read more

Meta has removed the word “train” from the commercial terms of service that take effect October 30, following a backlash over language that legal experts said could let the company endlessly scrape websites linked from business pages. The company did not alert users to the change. Experts and publisher groups say the revised terms still allow broad use of scraped content to develop AI business products, and news organizations in the U.K., Europe and the U.S. are urging regulators to step in before the policy takes effect. Read more

OpenAI has rolled out a feature called Locked Chats that lets ChatGPT users hide private conversations from their regular chat history, pinned chats and search results. Users can protect a locked chat with a four-digit PIN or, on supported iPhones and Android phones, with Face ID or Touch ID. The company says the feature is meant for moments when someone else may see a screen, such as when handing a phone to a friend or family member. It does not add end-to-end encryption, and OpenAI says it doesn't change how long chats are retained. The feature is rolling out gradually, starting Tuesday, and may take a few days to appear in some accounts. Read more

Anthropic is having trouble securing enough cloud computing capacity from Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft, which increasingly see the Claude maker as a competitor rather than a customer, according to an S-1 filing leaked to The Wall Street Journal. The company believes it could spend more than $750 billion on cloud contracts, yet it still worries that newer data center operators may be less reliable. The filing also shows an $80.7 billion net loss for the first half of the year, against $16.3 billion in revenue. Anthropic is reportedly targeting a November IPO. Read more

Spotify says it has removed more than 50 million tracks it classifies as AI-generated "slop and spam" from its recommendations so far in 2026. In a blog post Tuesday, the streaming company said it has changed its recommendation system to promote more music from human artists and that its editors no longer include such tracks in curated playlists. Spotify has not updated its earlier figure of more than 75 million spam tracks removed from the platform, and it has not offered users a way to block AI-generated music entirely. The update comes as the company continues to add generative AI features of its own and as rival services take harder stances on AI audio. Read more

DeepSeek has released DeepInfer, an open-source inference framework that the company says powers its large-scale production services. The initial release supports DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash and runs on NVIDIA SM100 GPUs and Huawei Ascend 950 NPUs. It is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 and is available on GitHub. The release covers offline inference and includes optimized kernels, parallelism options, speculative decoding and structured outputs. Developers still need to supply several components, including a KV cache system and load balancing, to run a complete inference service. Read more

A developer who spent ten months building a chess bot says it plays more like a real person than the leading human-like models, and has published his own benchmarks to back that up. The bot, Chessbook-1, powers the practice games on Chessbook, where players can face an opponent meant to match their rating and time control. Its creator says it predicts human moves about as well as the best available model, while matching human playing strength and blunder rates more closely across all rating levels. The results come from the developer's own tests, which have not been independently verified. Read more

Speculative decoding makes large language models generate text faster, but not because it requires less computing. A common assumption holds that checking a draft takes fewer operations than generating tokens one at a time. A technical explainer says that is wrong. The method actually performs more floating point operations for the same output. The speedup comes from shifting the GPU from waiting on memory to doing useful math, a change that matters most when a system is serving only a few sequences at once. Read more

Microsoft is adding new controls to its sovereign cloud for governments and regulated companies, giving customers more say over who can reach their systems and letting them run AI tools on their own hardware. CEO Satya Nadella announced the changes in Paris. For customers in the European Union and the European Free Trade Association, a trusted European partner will oversee Microsoft engineers' remote logins to production systems. The moves follow rising European concern over dependence on U.S. cloud companies. Most of the new tools run on Azure Local, and several will be available at the company's Ignite conference in November. Read more

Steam shoppers are asking Valve for a way to hide games that use AI-generated content as Steam Next Fest, the festival for indie games and demos, opened with more low-effort, AI-made titles than usual. One user wrote on the Steam subreddit that he wants to filter out games with AI-generated content, which Steam already requires developers to disclose. Other users say the flood of so-called “AI slop” is making it harder to find human-made games, and the complaints come as AI use in game development grows across the industry. Read more

AI meeting notetaker Otter.ai has raised $320 million in growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund, the company announced Tuesday. The company plans to use the money to grow its enterprise business, expand its go-to-market strategy and international footprint, and develop new products. Otter says more than 40 million people use its product, including teams at more than 86% of the Fortune 500. Chief executive Sam Liang said the funding will support enterprise agentic workflows, a push toward more advanced AI for teams. Read more

Billionaire investor Peter Thiel has delivered a series of private lectures on the Antichrist, the latest in San Francisco and, in March, Rome. Recordings leaked to The Verge show Thiel casting effective altruism and AI safety advocates as the forces that could usher in the end times. His views also draw on a July essay in the conservative journal First Things, in which he suggests the late Pope Francis could have been the Antichrist. Analysts say Thiel's apocalyptic framing is less original than he claims, but his influence makes it worth watching. Read more

Jooba, a recruiting company that uses AI to find job candidates, has launched generally and raised $4 million in seed funding from a16z Speedrun, Scribble Ventures and Genius Ventures. The company builds a custom AI sourcing agent for each open role and pairs it with human talent engineers who review candidates before outreach. Instead of charging large placement fees, Jooba sells the service through a flat subscription. The company says the approach cuts total time to hire by 50% and recruiting fees by 90%, and that its first candidate conversations can begin within 22 hours of an onboarding call. The model targets fast-growing companies that want help hiring without managing another software tool. Read more

Respan, a Y Combinator-backed company, has released an open-source AI gateway written in Rust that is built almost entirely from plugins. The company says it redesigned the gateway after years of patching LiteLLM, a popular open-source project, became unsustainable. The gateway uses a small core that routes requests and lets developers add providers, protocols and features without changing that core. Respan has released the code under the MIT or Apache-2.0 license and says it is still pre-alpha. The company makes its money from a hosted version that includes observability, evaluations and unified billing. Read more