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OpenAI Closes Record $122 Billion Round at $852 Billion Valuation, Opens Stock to Retail Investors

OpenAI closed the largest private funding round in history — $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation. Amazon led with a $35 billion tranche contingent on an IPO milestone, while Nvidia contributed compute credits rather than cash. For the first time, individual investors bought shares through ARK ETFs and bank-structured products, signaling that OpenAI is building a retail shareholder base months before an expected S-1 filing. At this valuation, only Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Alphabet are worth more.

Source: Implicator.ai

Anthropic Accidentally Leaks "Mythos" — Its Most Powerful AI Model Ever — Then Ships Claude Code Source to npm

Anthropic had a rough week. First, Fortune revealed that nearly 3,000 internal files were left in a publicly accessible data store, including a draft blog post describing Claude Mythos — a new model tier called "Capybara" that the company says represents a "step change" in capabilities beyond Opus. Then, for the second time in thirteen months, Anthropic accidentally shipped Claude Code's full source code to npm. The company confirmed Mythos is real and being tested with early access customers, but the back-to-back security lapses undercut its careful-AI-company brand.

Source: Fortune / TechCrunch

Microsoft Launches 3 In-House AI Models in Direct Shot at OpenAI and Google

Microsoft's MAI division shipped three foundational models built entirely in-house: MAI-Transcribe-1 (speech-to-text beating OpenAI's Whisper on all 25 benchmarked languages), MAI-Voice-1 (60 seconds of audio generated in one second), and MAI-Image-2 (top-3 on Arena.ai). Each was built by teams of fewer than 10 engineers and runs on half the GPU footprint of competitors. The launch marks the first concrete output from Mustafa Suleyman's superintelligence team and signals Microsoft's intent to reduce its dependence on OpenAI.

Source: VentureBeat

Salesforce Gives Slack Its Biggest AI Makeover Since the $27.7B Acquisition

Salesforce unveiled 30 new AI features for Slack, transforming Slackbot from a basic assistant into an agentic teammate powered by Anthropic's Claude. Key additions include reusable AI-skills that automate multi-step workflows, MCP client support for connecting to external services including Agentforce, meeting transcription with auto-generated action items, and desktop awareness that lets Slackbot monitor your screen and proactively suggest next steps. CEO Marc Benioff noted the platform now serves a million businesses with 2.5x revenue growth since the 2021 acquisition.

Source: TechCrunch

Alibaba Ships Three Closed-Source AI Models in Three Days, Abandoning Its Open-Weight Strategy

Alibaba released Qwen3.6-Plus, its third proprietary model in three days, breaking from the open-weight Apache 2.0 strategy that built Qwen into the most downloaded AI ecosystem on Hugging Face with 300+ million downloads. The pivot follows the departure of technical lead Lin Junyang, who was reportedly pushed out and replaced by a Google DeepMind veteran. Alibaba is targeting $100 billion in cloud revenue within five years while hiking API prices up to 34% — a clear signal that profit now trumps community.

Source: Implicator.ai

North Korean Hackers Compromise Axios npm Package in Major Supply Chain Attack

The Axios JavaScript library — with 100 million weekly downloads — was compromised after a North Korean threat actor hijacked a maintainer's account and published backdoored versions containing a cross-platform RAT. The malicious code executed automatically on install with no user interaction, targeting macOS, Windows, and Linux. Google attributed the attack to UNC1069, a financially motivated North Korean group. The packages were live for roughly two hours before removal, but the blast radius was enormous given Axios's ubiquity in enterprise and CI/CD pipelines.

Source: Microsoft Security

Yahoo Bets on Anthropic-Powered "Scout" to Revive Its Search Business

Yahoo launched Scout, an AI-powered answer engine licensed from Anthropic, to its 250 million U.S. users. CEO Jim Lanzone is betting that Scout — which integrates with Yahoo's finance, sports, news, and email services — can become a flywheel that keeps users inside the Yahoo ecosystem. Unlike ChatGPT or Gemini, Scout deliberately avoids simulating personal relationships and focuses on utility. Lanzone hinted that a successful AI pivot could lead Yahoo back to the stock market, 30 years after its original 1996 IPO.

Source: Fortune