AI funding rounds, acquisitions, partnerships and leadership changes, plus regulation, copyright lawsuits and big compute deals.
xAI just hired Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, two senior product engineering leads from hot coding startup Cursor, reporting directly to Elon Musk. Musk admitted that Grok is currently lagging behind rivals in coding and said the startup is undergoing an all-hands rebuild to leapfrog the competition. Why it matters: Cursor built the gold standard for developer workflows, and xAI wants that applied product magic inside its models.
Rivian just revealed final pricing for its R2 midsize electric SUV at SXSW, launching a dual-motor Performance trim starting at $59,485 this spring. It packs 656 hp, 330 miles of range, and a 200 TOPS edge AI chip powering an offline voice assistant. The promised $45,000 base trim is delayed until late 2027.
Grammarly's parent company Superhuman just disabled its Expert Review feature after severe backlash and a class action lawsuit. The tool used LLMs to generate writing feedback under the names of famous living and dead authors without their consent. CEO Shishir Mehrotra confirmed the feature is now paused for reassessment.
Microsoft is in talks to lease a massive AI data center site in Abilene, Texas, after Oracle walked away from the deal. With Big Tech pouring hundreds of billions into compute, securing powered land has turned into a cutthroat land grab—and Microsoft isn't hesitating to pick up what rivals leave behind.
Meta just detailed an aggressive roadmap for its custom MTIA silicon, planning to launch four new chip generations over the next two years. MTIA 300 is already in production for recommendation training, while the 400, 450, and 500 series will focus heavily on GenAI inference through 2027. By taking an inference-first approach and a modular design that drops into existing racks, Meta aims to ship new chips roughly every six months.
Meta is deploying new AI-powered tools across WhatsApp, Facebook, and Messenger to stop scammers before they strike. WhatsApp now flags suspicious device-linking attempts, Facebook is testing warnings for fishy friend requests, and Messenger is expanding fraud reviews for chats like bogus job offers. Meta is also using AI to catch celebrity-bait and fake brand pages.
Anthropic just launched the Anthropic Institute, a new initiative headed by co-founder Jack Clark to study the societal, economic, and legal fallout of rapidly advancing AI. The institute merges its red teaming, societal impacts, and economics teams while recruiting top academic and legal minds. With models advancing faster than expected, Anthropic wants to actively bridge frontier lab insights with real-world governance before radical transformation hits.
Apple just opened sales for its latest hardware lineup, headlined by the $599 fanless MacBook Neo and the iPhone 17e. The new MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips offer up to 4x the AI performance of the previous generation, while MacBook Air gains M5 and iPad Air steps up to M4. Why it matters: Apple is aggressively pushing AI processing power upmarket while lowering the price floor for macOS.
A federal judge just blocked Perplexity's AI browser agents from placing orders on Amazon on users' behalf. The court found Amazon provided strong evidence of unauthorized access, backing claims that Perplexity's Comet browser even disguised itself as Chrome to hide its tracks. Perplexity must also destroy collected Amazon data, though it has seven days to appeal.
YouTube just expanded its likeness detection pilot to government officials, journalists, and political candidates. The tool scans for deepfakes and lets verified figures request removal when rules are violated, though parody and political satire remain protected. Crucially, YouTube says submitted verification data won't train Google's models.
NVIDIA just made a major investment in Thinking Machines Lab, the new frontier AI startup founded by Mira Murati. The multiyear deal plans to deploy at least one gigawatt of next-gen Vera Rubin AI systems targeted for early next year to power frontier model training and serving. The AI compute arms race is officially entering the gigawatt era.
Meta just acquired Moltbook, a viral network built specifically for autonomous AI agents, bringing creators Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr into its Superintelligence Labs. The deal equips Meta with tech to verify agent identities and coordinate tasks on their human owners' behalf. Why it matters: Meta wants to turn its classic human friend graph into an "agent graph" before bot-to-bot commerce takes off.
AMI Labs just raised $1.03B at a $3.5B pre-money valuation to build AI that learns from physical reality rather than language. Co-founded by Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, the startup plans to develop his JEPA architecture while open-sourcing research code. Its first real-world testing partner will be digital health firm Nabla.
Nearly 40 employees from OpenAI and Google, including Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, just filed an amicus brief supporting Anthropic’s lawsuit against the Department of Defense. Anthropic sued after being labeled a supply chain risk for refusing Pentagon demands on mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. Rival researchers argued that deploying frontier AI without guardrails poses profound risks to democracy and safety.
Anthropic just sued the US Department of Defense after the Trump administration designated the AI maker a supply-chain risk and ordered federal agencies to drop its tech within six months. Anthropic claims the move is unconstitutional retaliation for refusing to support mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. It sets up a high-stakes showdown over who dictates ethical boundaries in defense tech.
Security startup CodeWall just revealed that its autonomous offensive agent breached McKinsey’s internal AI platform, Lilli, in under two hours. The agent used a classic SQL injection on an exposed API endpoint to secure full read-write access to 46.5 million plaintext chats and confidential client files. McKinsey has since patched the flaw, but it exposes serious cracks in enterprise AI security.
The Trump administration is reportedly preparing an executive order to purge Anthropic's Claude from all federal operations as early as this week. The Treasury Department has already started offboarding the AI, as officials claim Anthropic's safety guardrails pose national security risks while Anthropic fights back in court.
OpenAI just announced plans to acquire AI security platform Promptfoo, trusted by over 25% of Fortune 500 companies. Once finalized, Promptfoo’s automated red-teaming, prompt injection detection, and jailbreak prevention tools will be baked directly into OpenAI Frontier, while its open-source CLI remains active. Why it matters: As AI coworkers gain access to sensitive enterprise workflows, proactive agent security is rapidly shifting from an optional plugin to essential platform infrastructure.
X just quietly rolled out a toggle in its post composer that lets users stop xAI's Grok from generating alternate versions of their uploaded media. The move follows regulatory probes and massive looming fines after Grok was abused to generate non-consensual deepfakes in early January. Why it matters: Giving users an opt-out control helps protect personal content while potentially saving X millions in penalties.
OpenAI robotics lead Caitlin Kalinowski just resigned from the company, sounding the alarm on government surveillance and autonomous weapons. While acknowledging AI's role in national security, she warned that domestic surveillance without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human sign-off are crossing dangerous ethical lines.
