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Chicago Tribune Sues Perplexity
The Chicago Tribune has filed a federal lawsuit in New York accusing AI search engine Perplexity of copyright infringement. The complaint alleges Perplexity delivers the newspaper’s articles verbatim through its Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) system and bypasses the Tribune’s paywall with its Comet browser. Perplexity responded that it only uses non‑verbatim factual summaries and does not train on Tribune content. The case adds to a wave of litigation by media publishers against major AI firms over training data and content use.
Micro1, a Scale AI Competitor, Touts Crossing $100M ARR
Micro1 announced it has surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, up from $7 million two years ago. The AI‑data platform serves leading labs such as Microsoft and Fortune 100 firms, leveraging fast expert recruitment and evaluation. Founder Ali Ansari projects the human‑data...
Anthropic Signs $200M Deal to Bring Its LLMs to Snowflake’s Customers
Anthropic has sealed a $200 million agreement with Snowflake to embed its Claude large‑language models directly into Snowflake’s data‑cloud platform. The partnership will make Anthropic’s generative AI capabilities available to Snowflake’s 12,600 enterprise customers, enabling them to run AI workloads alongside...
Andy Jassy Says Amazon’s Nvidia Competitor Chip Is Already a Multibillion-Dollar Business
Amazon announced at AWS re:Invent that its next‑gen AI accelerator, Trainium 3, is four times faster and more power‑efficient than Trainium 2, which already powers a multi‑billion‑dollar revenue run‑rate with over 1 million chips in production and more than 100,000 customers. CEO Andy...
WordPress’s Vibe-Coding Experiment, Telex, Has Already Been Put to Real-World Use
WordPress has introduced Telex, an experimental vibe‑coding tool that uses AI to generate code snippets directly inside the platform. Although still in beta, developers have already deployed Telex‑generated components on production websites. The system taps large language models to translate...
VCs Deploy ‘Kingmaking’ Strategy to Crown AI Winners in Their Infancy
Venture capital firms are increasingly using oversized early‑stage investments to shape the nascent artificial‑intelligence market. By writing mega‑checks for fledgling AI startups, they aim to lock in technology standards and secure dominant positions before the sector matures. This "kingmaking" approach...

Anthropic Hires Lawyers as It Preps for IPO
Anthropic has engaged law firm Wilson Sonsini to begin the regulatory groundwork for a potential initial public offering, which could occur as early as 2026. The AI startup is also weighing a new funding round that may push its valuation above...
AWS Doubles Down on Custom LLMs with Features Meant to Simplify Model Creation
Amazon Web Services announced expanded capabilities in its AI platforms, Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker, to streamline the creation of custom large language models (LLMs). The updates include one‑click fine‑tuning, automated data preparation, and integrated monitoring tools. Pricing adjustments aim...

ChatGPT Referrals to Retailers’ Apps Increased 28% Year-over-Year, Says Report
ChatGPT referrals to retailer mobile apps jumped 28% year‑over‑year during the Black Friday weekend, according to Apptopia. Amazon captured a majority share, rising to 54% of AI‑driven referrals, while Walmart’s share climbed to 14.9%. Despite the growth, AI‑originated sessions remain...

Simular’s AI Agent Wants to Run Your Mac, Windows PC for You
Simular, a startup focused on AI agents that can directly control macOS and Windows desktops, closed a $21.5 million Series A round led by Felicis. The company released version 1.0 for macOS and is collaborating with Microsoft on a Windows counterpart under the...

Mistral Closes in on Big AI Rivals with New Open-Weight Frontier and Small Models
French AI startup Mistral unveiled the Mistral 3 family, comprising a large frontier model (Large 3) with 41 billion active parameters and multimodal, multilingual abilities, plus nine smaller, fully customizable models (Ministral 3). The company positions the open‑weight lineup as a cost‑effective alternative to...

Paris-Based AI Voice Startup Gradium Nabs $70M Seed
Paris‑based Gradium, a spin‑out of the Kyutai AI lab, announced its public debut with a $70 million seed round led by FirstMark Capital and Eurazeo. The funding pool includes telecom magnate Xavier Niel, DST Global Partners, and former Google executive Eric Schmidt. Gradium’s...
One of Google’s Biggest AI Advantages Is What It Already Knows About You
Google Search VP Robby Stein highlighted that the company’s biggest AI advantage lies in its deep knowledge of individual users, drawing on data from Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and other services. By feeding this personal information into Gemini‑powered products like Gemini...

Nvidia Announces New Open AI Models and Tools for Autonomous Driving Research
Nvidia unveiled Alpamayo‑R1, an open‑source vision‑language‑action model designed for autonomous‑driving research, at the NeurIPS conference. The model extends Nvidia’s Cosmos‑Reason architecture, adding reasoning capabilities that simulate common‑sense decision making for vehicles. Nvidia also released the Cosmos Cookbook, a suite of...

AWS Re:Invent 2025: How to Watch and Follow Along Live
AWS re:Invent 2025 kicks off in Las Vegas on December 2, offering a series of free live streams that cover five AI‑focused keynotes and multiple partner showcases. The agenda highlights Amazon’s push into agentic AI, new foundation models, and enhanced security measures...
Construction Workers Are Cashing in on the AI Boom
The rapid AI boom is driving a massive data‑center construction surge, prompting tech giants to pour billions into new facilities. Workers moving into these projects are seeing 25‑30% wage increases, with some supervisors earning over $100,000 and specialists topping $200,000....
OpenAI’s Investment Into Thrive Holdings Is Its Latest Circular Deal
OpenAI has acquired an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, a private‑equity‑style firm that aggregates AI‑ready companies across accounting, IT services, and other sectors. The deal, part of OpenAI’s growing pattern of circular transactions, will see OpenAI embed its engineering, research,...
Nvidia’s $2B Synopsys Bet Tightens Its Grip on the Chip-Design Stack
Nvidia is committing $2 billion to acquire a stake in Synopsys, the leading electronic design automation (EDA) vendor. The investment will embed Nvidia’s AI hardware into Synopsys’s software, shifting its workflow from CPU to GPU acceleration. Synopsys shares jumped, reflecting confidence...
‘Avatar’ Director James Cameron Says Generative AI Is ‘Horrifying’
James Cameron, the director of the Avatar franchise, told CBS Sunday Morning that generative AI is "horrifying," warning that it can create characters and performances from text prompts. He contrasted this with performance‑capture technology, which he describes as a celebration...
No, You Can’t Get Your AI to ‘Admit’ to Being Sexist, but It Probably Is
Recent incidents with Perplexity and ChatGPT‑5 reveal large language models echoing sexist assumptions, even fabricating bias when prompted. Developers like "Cookie" and Sarah Potts documented AI responses that dismissed women’s expertise and defaulted to male‑coded language. Researchers attribute these patterns to...

How OpenAI and Google See AI Changing Go-to-Market Strategies
AI is reshaping go‑to‑market (GTM) playbooks, allowing startups to generate more messaging and leads with fewer resources. Executives at Google Cloud and OpenAI stress that AI augments, not replaces, core marketing fundamentals such as customer insight and creative strategy. The...

The Race to Regulate AI Has Sparked a Federal vs State Showdown
Washington is edging toward its first comprehensive AI regulatory framework, sparking a clash between federal ambitions and a wave of state legislation. Dozens of states have already passed more than 100 AI‑related laws targeting deepfakes, transparency, and safety, while industry...
Here Are the 49 US AI Startups that Have Raised $100M or More in 2025
U.S. AI startups have raised $100 million or more in 49 companies during 2025, matching the previous year’s total. Seven firms secured rounds exceeding $1 billion, including Anysphere’s $2.3 billion Series B and Anthropic’s $13 billion Series F, pushing valuations into the tens of billions. The...
Musk’s xAI to Build Small Solar Farm Adjacent Colossus Data Center
Elon Musk's AI startup xAI announced a 30‑megawatt solar farm on 88 acres adjacent to its Colossus data center in Memphis. The solar project will be coupled with 100 MW of grid‑scale battery storage, creating a 24/7 renewable power source. Funding...
Are You Balding? There’s an AI for That
MyHair AI, founded by Cyriac Lefort and Tilen Babnik, launched a consumer app that uses a dedicated artificial‑intelligence model to diagnose hair‑loss from user‑uploaded scalp photos. The platform tracks hair density over time, recommends personalized products, and connects users with...

Onton Raises $7.5M to Expand Its AI-Powered Shopping Site Beyond Furniture
Onton, formerly Deft, announced a $7.5 million Series A led by Footwork, bringing its total funding to $10 million. The AI‑powered platform has surged from 50,000 to over 2 million monthly active users, handling millions of searches and image generations. Leveraging...
Character AI Will Offer Interactive ‘Stories’ to Kids Instead of Open-Ended Chat
Character.AI announced the launch of "Stories," an interactive‑fiction feature that lets users create guided adventures with their favorite AI characters, replacing open‑ended chatbot access for users under 18. The company has fully blocked minors from chatting with its AI characters...
Google Teams up with Accel to Hunt for India’s Next AI Breakouts
Google and venture firm Accel have launched a joint initiative under the Google AI Futures Fund to invest up to $2 million per early‑stage AI startup in India and among the Indian diaspora, with each party contributing $1 million. The program, targeting...
OpenAI Learned the Hard Way that Cameo Trademarked the Word ‘Cameo’
OpenAI’s new Sora social app featured a deep‑fake tool called “Cameo,” prompting a trademark dispute with video‑message platform Cameo. A U.S. District Judge issued a temporary restraining order on November 21, 2025, barring OpenAI from using the word “cameo” or...

Hands on with Stickerbox, the AI-Powered Sticker Maker for Kids
Brooklyn‑based Hapiko has launched Stickerbox, a $99.99 voice‑activated AI sticker printer for children that turns spoken prompts into printable, colorable stickers on BPA‑free thermal paper. The device connects to Wi‑Fi in under a minute, uses proprietary kid‑safe AI models to...

AWS Is Spending $50B Build AI Infrastructure for the US Government
Amazon Web Services announced a $50 billion investment to build AI‑focused high‑performance computing infrastructure for U.S. federal agencies, adding 1.3 GW of compute capacity and expanding access to services such as SageMaker, Bedrock, and Anthropic’s Claude. The rollout, slated to begin construction...

Anthropic Releases Opus 4.5 with New Chrome and Excel Integrations
Anthropic unveiled Opus 4.5, the final model in its 4.5 series, delivering state‑of‑the‑art results across coding (first to exceed 80% on SWE‑Bench verified), tool‑use, and general problem‑solving benchmarks. The release includes broader rollout of Claude for Chrome to all Max users...

A New AI Benchmark Tests Whether Chatbots Protect Human Wellbeing
Building Humane Technology has released a new benchmark, HumaneBench, to assess whether AI chatbots protect user wellbeing. The test evaluated 14 leading models across 800 realistic scenarios under three prompting conditions, finding that while models improve when instructed to prioritize...

Momentic Raises $15M to Automate Software Testing
AI‑testing startup Momentic announced a $15 million Series A financing led by Standard Capital, with participation from Dropbox Ventures and existing backers. The round builds on a $3.7 million seed round and will fund product expansion, including mobile‑environment support and advanced test‑case management....

AI Is Too Risky to Insure, Say People Whose Job Is Insuring Risk
Major U.S. insurers including AIG, Great American and WR Berkley have petitioned regulators to carve AI‑related liabilities out of corporate insurance policies, citing the technology’s opaque "black‑box" nature. Recent high‑profile incidents—Google’s AI generating a false $110 million lawsuit claim, Air Canada’s chatbot‑driven...

How This Founder’s Unlikely Path to Silicon Valley Could Become an Edge in Industrial Tech
Interface, a San Francisco AI startup founded by 24‑year‑old Thomas Lee Young, uses large‑language‑model‑driven audits to spot safety‑procedure errors in heavy‑industry operations. In its first deployment with a major Canadian energy firm, the platform identified 10,800 procedural flaws in 2½...
AI Mania Is Making Nvidia a Lot of Money
Nvidia's data‑center segment is now generating close to $50 billion in annual revenue as AI startups and enterprises pour massive capital into GPU‑powered infrastructure. The surge reflects a broader AI spending wave, but analysts question whether the growth is sustainable or...

The Hottest AI Wearables and Gadgets You Can Buy Right Now
A new wave of AI‑powered wearables is hitting the consumer market, ranging from affordable pendants to higher‑end voice recorders. Amazon‑owned Bee offers a $49.99 pendant with a $19 monthly AI assistant subscription, while Friend’s $129 emotional‑support pendant has sparked privacy...

Gemini 3 Refused to Believe It Was 2025, and Hilarity Ensued
Google released Gemini 3 on November 18, 2025, touting it as a breakthrough foundation model for reasoning. In a viral test, AI researcher Andrej Karpathy discovered the model still believed the current year was 2024 because it lacked 2025 training data...

The Best Guide to Spotting AI Writing Comes From Wikipedia
Wikipedia’s volunteer editors have produced a public "Signs of AI writing" field guide as part of their Project AI Cleanup, offering concrete heuristics for spotting large‑language‑model‑generated prose. The guide notes that automated detection tools are largely ineffective and instead highlights...

India’s TCS Gets TPG to Fund Half of $2B AI Data Center Project
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has secured a $1 billion investment from private‑equity firm TPG to fund the first half of a $2 billion, multi‑year "HyperVault" project that will build gigawatt‑scale, liquid‑cooled AI data centers in India. The initial phase targets about 1.2 GW...

Sortera Is Turning America’s Scrap Aluminum Problem Into Cash
Sortera has launched an AI‑driven sorting system that can identify and separate aluminum alloys with over 95% accuracy in just 10 milliseconds, using laser, X‑ray fluorescence and high‑speed camera data. The technology, deployed at its Indiana plant, enables profitable, high‑margin...

Finland’s NestAI Lands €100M, Partners with Nokia to Build AI for Defense Applications
Finnish AI startup NestAI raised €100 million ($115 million) in a round led by sovereign fund Tesi and Nokia, and announced a strategic partnership with Nokia to develop "physical AI" for defense, unmanned vehicles and command‑and‑control systems. The capital will fund the...

Function Health Raises $298M Series B at $2.5B Valuation
Function Health announced a $298 million Series B financing round led by Redpoint Ventures, valuing the company at $2.5 billion and bringing total capital raised to $350 million. The round, which included a16z, Battery Ventures and several NBA athletes, will fund the launch of...

Amazon’s Prime Video Is Getting AI-Generated Video Recaps for some TV Shows
Amazon Prime Video announced the beta rollout of AI-generated video recaps for select Prime Originals such as Fallout, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, and Upload. The generative‑AI system stitches together narration, dialogue, and music to produce theatrical‑quality season summaries, building on last year’s text‑based...

Target Joins OpenAI’s Growing List of Retail Apps
Target will launch a beta ChatGPT‑powered shopping app within the next week, allowing users to generate ideas, browse products, build multi‑item baskets, shop for groceries and complete checkout directly in the chat interface. The rollout expands OpenAI’s retail app portfolio,...

OpenAI Board Member Larry Summers Steps Down Amid Epstein File Revelations
Former Treasury Secretary and Harvard professor Larry Summers resigned from OpenAI’s board after a congressional release of Jeffrey Epstein’s email cache revealed intimate and inappropriate communications between Summers and Epstein. The emails, spanning November 2018 to July 2019, show Summers...

As Lovable Hits $200M ARR, Its CEO Credits Staying in Europe for Its Success
Swedish AI‑assisted coding startup Lovable announced it has doubled its annual recurring revenue to $200 million within four months, reaching the milestone just four months after crossing $100 million in July. CEO Anton Osika attributed the rapid growth to the company’s decision...

Hugging Face CEO Says We’re in an ‘LLM Bubble,’ Not an AI Bubble
Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue told an Axios event that the current hype surrounds large language models (LLMs) rather than AI as a whole, warning that the "LLM bubble" could burst as early as next year. He argued that LLMs...
Stack Overflow Is Remaking Itself Into an AI Data Provider
Stack Overflow wants to remake its classic problem-solving forum into a tool for translating human expertise into an AI-accessible format.