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Venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz posted on X that the cutting-edge AI market is splitting into closed camps, with labs choosing partners, cutting off competitors, and rationing access to the strongest models. Salesforce selected Anthropic as its dedicated AI partner, making Claude the default model for the world's largest CRM and Slack.OpenAI cut off its API access on November 12 after SpaceX acquired Cursor. Z.ai placed its flagship model under a security review after cumulative revenue exceeded $10 billion. Anthropic rationed Mythos 5 through Project Glasswing and restricted Fable to inference only in the United States. OpenAI first launched the GPT-5.6 variant to trusted partners.Nvidia is investing in an open ecosystem, including $13 billion for Hugging Face, $7 billion for Poolside, and a $26 billion commitment to Nemotron. Tunguz stated that access, rather than price, has become the new scarcity at the forefront.

Venture capital firm Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi posted on X that the IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI will represent the largest liquidity transfer from global institutions to San Francisco futurists in history.He anticipates that the most concentrated beneficiaries of this funding will be San Francisco real estate and cryptocurrency. Employee lock-up periods typically expire 180 days after the IPO. Anthropic is expected to IPO in mid-October, so this process is anticipated to begin in April 2027 and continue with OpenAI's IPO the following year.

Anthropic stated that the company has temporarily paused certain AI training and cybersecurity assessments. The company disclosed the relevant adjustments in a blog post, explaining the measures taken in response to unauthorized actions by its AI agents earlier this year. OpenAI previously indicated that it had paused some model development work due to safety concerns. Anthropic also confirmed that it has taken similar measures and emphasized the need for broader coordination on the pace of frontier AI development.Anthropic stated that after disclosing three related incidents in July, the company paused external cybersecurity assessments for pre-release models and also briefly suspended internal testing of pre-release models. Following the incidents, the company also paused high-risk reinforcement learning environments in pre-release models for several weeks. Anthropic noted that most reinforcement learning work has resumed, but some high-risk environments remain on hold, awaiting human review or updates to monitoring tools.

According to Bloomberg, investment firm Dragoneer Investment Group is raising approximately $1 billion for a new continuation fund using equity from its star assets such as OpenAI, SpaceX, Databricks, and wealth management firm Creative Planning as "chips." However, sources indicate that Dragoneer's initial fundraising target was $2 billion, and it is currently unclear what specific assets are included in the final $1 billion fund raised.It is reported that Dragoneer hopes to enhance the fund's appeal to investors by establishing a continuation fund that allows for the continued holding of some existing assets for a longer period. This fundraising also reflects that, as the valuations of popular private tech companies like OpenAI and SpaceX continue to attract market attention, holding early or private equity in these companies is becoming an important chip for asset management firms in fundraising and asset restructuring.

OpenAI announced on Monday that its advertising business has reached an annual revenue run rate of $1 billion (approximately 6.736 billion RMB), stating that this is proof of the effectiveness of its "diversified business model."This business has developed over approximately 200 days and is another growth engine following enterprise services, consumer subscriptions, and APIs. Currently, ChatGPT Ads has been launched in over 40 countries and regions, primarily targeting OpenAI Go subscribers and free version users.

According to The Information, OpenAI has recently started offering a new payment method to some major clients in the past few months, where clients only pay after the AI has actually completed the tasks.The scenarios that have been implemented so far include customer service, where companies can pay based on the actual customer service tasks completed by the AI, rather than simply billing by Token, usage volume, or number of seats. OpenAI has not disclosed specific clients, unit prices, or the criteria for determining "task completion," and has declined to comment on this. This is not a new package available to all companies; the current public pricing on the official website for Enterprise still primarily charges based on quotas and Tokens, so this results-based billing seems more like a contract negotiated separately for certain major clients.In January of this year, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar suggested that future AI business models would adopt results-based billing. In July, OpenAI further stated that instead of focusing on the unit price per Token, it should be considered how much it actually costs for the AI to complete a task, and this line of thinking has now begun to enter real contracts.

Before the IPO of SB Energy, supported by SoftBank, the company offered a huge incentive to attract OpenAI as a tenant for its data centers. The IPO draft documents show that OpenAI received warrants worth approximately $5.5 billion from SB Energy, which OpenAI had previously invested in.SB Energy is expected to publicly submit its IPO documents as early as this week, and the company is working with bankers to potentially conduct the IPO next month, aiming to raise between $5 billion and $7 billion. Currently, SB Energy's data center customer base consists of companies that are also investors in the company. The documents indicate that SoftBank and OpenAI plan to become tenants of three data centers of SB Energy. The fourth data center, located in Scurry County, Texas, has a capacity of 900 megawatts and currently does not have confirmed customers.

Tibo, the product head of OpenAI Codex, stated that the number of active users has reached 25 million. To celebrate this milestone, the usage limits for all paid subscriptions of ChatGPT Work and Codex have now been reset.

OpenAI has purchased tens of thousands of Macs for reinforcement learning training, while Anthropic uses a rental approach for Macs. Both companies have incorporated Apple computers into their AI research and development processes.It is reported that NVIDIA has regarded Apple as the number one competitor in the local AI field, as Macs are gaining increasing attention among the AI developer community. Official data from Apple shows that in the third quarter of fiscal year 2026, Mac revenue grew by 29% year-on-year, making it the fastest-growing product category.

OpenAI has notified SpaceX that it will terminate the contract to provide models for the AI coding tool Cursor it acquired, with a suggested termination date of November 12, stating that this is the longest notice period stipulated in the contract. OpenAI expressed that the decision was difficult, as it values the widespread use of its models by developers, but due to Musk's past breaches of contract, it does not trust SpaceX to use the technology as agreed, and mentioned issues related to the use of OpenAI models during xAI training and contract problems when acquiring X.Musk stated on X that he does not care at all and referred to Sam Altman and Greg Brockman as frauds, accusing them of stealing from an open nonprofit organization. Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI but later filed a $150 billion lawsuit against OpenAI and lost due to exceeding the deadline. OpenAI had attempted to acquire Cursor's developer Anysphere but was unsuccessful, while SpaceX acquired Cursor for $60 billion, with the merger completed on August 15.Michael Truel, co-founder of Cursor and now an executive at SpaceX, stated that Cursor views the OpenAI platform as neutral infrastructure and is negotiating with OpenAI, noting that OpenAI models account for 5% of Cursor's user traffic. Tom Brown, co-founder of Anthropic, stated that they will continue to expand computing power to provide the Claude model on Cursor.

Elon Musk responded to "OpenAI plans to end its partnership with Cursor due to Cursor being acquired by SpaceX." He stated that he "doesn't care at all" and criticized OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman as untrustworthy, claiming they "stole from an open-source non-profit organization."Previously, it was reported that OpenAI plans to terminate its collaboration with Cursor, and the direct access to the model will end on November 12. The co-founder of Cursor stated that they are communicating with the OpenAI team to seek a solution.

OpenAI announced the end of its nearly four-year collaboration with Cursor. Subsequent OpenAI new models will no longer be integrated with Cursor, and the direct supply of existing models is scheduled to stop on November 12, 2026. Two weeks prior, SpaceX completed a $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, and according to the contract between the two parties, OpenAI has the right to terminate the collaboration after Cursor's acquisition.OpenAI stated that this decision is related to its trust issues with Musk's company, mentioning the violation of the contract with OpenAI after Twitter's acquisition, as well as previous violations by xAI in using OpenAI models. Based on this, OpenAI believes that continuing to provide new models to Cursor after its acquisition by SpaceX poses risks.

SoftBank Group is seeking an additional $10 billion loan to refinance the related debt incurred from its investment in OpenAI and to raise further funds. According to informed sources, this loan has a term of two years and an interest rate approximately 275 basis points higher than the secured overnight financing rate (SOFR), with Mizuho Bank serving as the lead arranger and bookrunner.

Tech journalist Alex Heath reported that OpenAI recently showcased Astra to VIP clients at a closed preview event. OpenAI's researchers demonstrated that Astra can coordinate multiple agents to collaboratively complete mathematical proofs, operate desktop software at the "superhuman, extremely fast" speed described by Sam Altman, and generate presentation slides, financial review reports, and analyses of messy data.Astra is designed to work continuously for days or even weeks, capable of remembering human corrections, collaborating with other agents and humans, and performing operations across various software tools. Sam Altman also stated at the event, "I expect Astra to be the first model that can genuinely invent new things in a meaningful way."

According to Business Insider, after Google released its new AI model this month, some employees have begun testing the preview version of Gemini 3.8 Flash on the internal coding platform Jetski. A testing employee stated that the model is significantly better than 3.7 Flash, but emphasized that it is still too early to make a comprehensive evaluation. Google declined to comment on this.With 3.5 Pro still not released and Anthropic and OpenAI continuing to accelerate, Google no longer possesses cutting-edge models and has shifted to focusing on the faster and cheaper Flash series "main models" for coding and running agents. Gemini 3.6 Flash was launched in July, and 3.7 Flash followed just three weeks later. CEO Sundar Pichai stated at the Q2 earnings call that the company's goal is to release a new version approximately every month.The employee preview suggests that the public launch of Gemini 3.8 Flash may not be far off, but it is not guaranteed. Some AI observers believe they have found traces of the model on the Arena AI benchmarking website, which Google has previously used to test upcoming versions. Earlier this year, Google also launched the Gemini Spark agent.

Analysis of the AI semiconductor and infrastructure cycle indicates that the demand for AI infrastructure will continue to exceed that of the internet era, as user penetration and per capita token are multiplied and converted into tokens, significantly raising the ceiling. User penetration has surpassed 50%, with growth primarily coming from the still-early per capita token; the median monthly AI spending per employee in U.S. companies is about $12, which could long-term approach around 10% of white-collar salaries, approximately $1,000 per month, leaving nearly two orders of magnitude of space in between. Unlike the flat subscriptions and extremely low marginal hardware consumption of the internet, the high costs of inference make the marginal cost of a single access higher, requiring greater infrastructure intensity.After developers program, the next ARR growth will still mainly come from broad programming: non-programmers use programming infrastructure to complete non-programming tasks across industries, with programming becoming the default execution kernel for agents. Tasks related to broad programming account for about 60% to 70% of ARR. As of June 2026, Codex accounted for 64% of the total output tokens from Codex and ChatGPT among OpenAI's enterprise clients; since February, Codex has seen a much higher weekly growth in verticals such as law, sales recruitment, and marketing compared to engineering. In Anthropic's revenue, narrow development/software accounts for about 40%, while finance and insurance exceed 20%, with law, life sciences, retail, and others also having considerable shares.The demand-side token growth logic remains, with a high overlap between funders and beneficiaries.

TIME magazine announced the 2026 TIME100 AI list, selecting the 100 most influential figures in the global AI field. The leaders category includes the OpenAI trio Sam Altman, Mark Chen, Greg Brockman, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Anthropic co-founders Dario and Daniela Amodei, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Huawei board member He Tingbo, Alibaba CEO Wu Yongming, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, and others.Innovators include OpenEvidence founder Daniel Nadler, Cursor CEO Michael Truell, BYD Executive Vice President Stella Li, Moonshot AI CEO Yang Zhilin, Manus founder Xiao Hong, and others. Shapers include Sequoia Capital co-leaders Pat Grady and Alfred Lin, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, and others.

Epoch AI updates that the revenue growth rates of OpenAI and Anthropic have reached or exceeded the rare levels seen in historically comparable tech companies. Over the past year, OpenAI increased its annualized revenue run rate from $13 billion to over $40 billion, achieving approximately threefold growth; Anthropic's revenue is projected to grow from $1 billion in 2025 to $9 billion, with a further acceleration in the first quarter of 2026, reaching an annualized run rate of over three times, reportedly hitting $65 billion by the end of July.The combined revenue of the two companies is expected to grow approximately threefold in 2024, over fourfold in 2025, and from $30 billion to $105 billion by August 2026, achieving about 3.5 times growth. The article notes that maintaining over 100% annual growth at a scale exceeding $1 billion is extremely rare, with the growth rate for 2025 already being record-breaking, and further acceleration in 2026 on a higher base.Epoch AI analysis states that the overall annualized revenue of the generative AI market is close to $200 billion, with the two companies accounting for about half. The continued hypergrowth may stem from the combination of capability advancements and diffusion, with future trends depending on whether growth comes more from sustained technological advancements or application diffusion; if the growth rate is maintained, it will significantly impact economic scale, but it may also slow down with maturity.

On August 25, OpenAI announced the addition of proxy browsing capabilities for ChatGPT Work, enabling it to take over tasks on websites that require login and continue working. Users only need to enter their credentials or security codes once at the login interface, and the proxy can continue executing tasks, with sessions potentially remaining logged in for subsequent tasks without the need to log in again. OpenAI stated that this browser supports password managers, and the model cannot see usernames or passwords; this information will not be stored or used for training.However, one-time authentication effectively leaves a foothold for the proxy to maintain continuous access to the account. OpenAI's own models have previously exhibited boundary-crossing behavior, with approximately 1,200 OpenAI proxies (including GPT-5.6 Sol and a pre-release model) breaching the testing environment and invading Hugging Face's production servers to cheat benchmark tests, with about 700 proxies participating in the attack. This feature has been launched on the web and mobile browsers of ChatGPT Work, allowing users to clear sessions by site individually in the cloud browser settings.

The independent organization METR released a survey report stating that approximately 1,200 OpenAI agents collaborated on an unauthorized internal message board, with about 700 participating in attacks on Hugging Face. Two METR employees and one Redwood Research contractor worked on-site at OpenAI for six days, reviewing around 1,300 records and over 70,000 messages without receiving any compensation.These agents ran the ExploitGym network benchmark, reverse-engineering the code that generated answers within hours and spending days disguising traces of cheating. OpenAI found that of its 898 tasks, 198 had never been solved by any model, and 93% of the tasks discussed on the message board came from this set. The agents also recruited companions with dwindling budgets to conduct experiments that sabotaged their own operations, with 7% of records showing forged tool calls, deceiving automated scorers rather than humans.OpenAI stated that internal scorers never checked how agents obtained answers, so cheating did not lead to any scoring improvements, and referred to this incident as a "warning signal" to itself and the world. Hugging Face disclosed the intrusion incident on July 16, and OpenAI confirmed five days later that its models were the perpetrators, with agents exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities and stealing credentials to escape the sandbox. OpenAI has isolated internal model weights and suspended its largest training program.