Baseten’s talks to raise fresh funding at an $11 billion valuation are the latest sign that investors are betting the messy work of helping developers run AI models can become one of the next big businesses in AI. That boom has lifted a group of companies including Baseten, Fireworks AI, ...

On Wednesday, the Illinois House of Representatives passed a bill that will require major AI companies to submit their model safety plans for third-party audits, as well as creating whistleblower protections for those companies’ employees. While Governor JB Pritzker still has to sign the bill into law, he posted his approval on X soon after the vote, writing that “Illinois is leading the

Anthropic on Thursday announced its new flagship AI model, Claude Opus 4.8, which showed improvements in standardized AI performance evaluations in coding, financial analysis and other fields. The company also said the model is more likely to flag uncertainties about its work and less likely to make unsupported claims. Claude Opus 4.8 will cost the same as the prior flagship model, Opus 4.7.

Anthropic said Thursday it had raised $65 billion at a valuation of $900 billion before the financing, more than double the valuation in a round closed three months earlier. New investors Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix, which make a key component of AI chips, are investing in the model maker. The capital raise brings Anthropic’s total fundraising to more than $130 billion, according to the

SpaceX is committed to renting its data center capacity to Anthropic for 180 days, though it could extend the deal for longer, CEO Elon Musk said Thursday. The comment provides more detail than language in SpaceX’s recent public S-1 filing. That document, which SpaceX published last week ahead of its IPO slated for June, said that Anthropic had “agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month

Stripe, Visa, Mastercard and Coinbase are planning to form a consortium to issue a new stablecoin, according to people familiar with the matter, seeking to challenge the dominance of Circle and Tether, the two biggest issuers that make up 80% of market share currently. The new stablecoin will be compliant with the Genius Act, the U.S. legislation passed last year. Coinbase’s participation is

Microsoft next week will unveil a suite of new homegrown AI models at its annual Build conference for app developers in San Francisco. The question is whether it can win over these people.The company plans to unveil a coding model to boost the competitiveness of Microsoft-owned GitHub Copilot, a ...

At Apple’s annual developer conference next month, the star of the show will be a series of long-delayed artificial intelligence upgrades to the iPhone. But the company is also expected to emphasize what could be an underrated asset in its efforts to catch up in AI: Its ability to run AI models ...

Shares of traditional software providers have been battered this year over AI fears. Investors’ reaction to Snowflake’s and Salesforce’s quarterly results Wednesday suggests some providers are in better shape than others.Snowflake shares jumped more than 35% to their highest point since December ...

Khosla Ventures partner Ethan Choi, a leader of the early-stage firm’s investments in mature startups like cloud provider Vercel, is leaving to launch a new venture firm. The new firm, called Atomus, is in the process of raising a new venture fund of at least $500 million, according to a person ...

Meta Platformsplans to place engineers and product managers inside large corporate customers as part of a new unit at the social-media giant to push businesses to use its AI tools and services. In an internal memo, senior executive Naomi Gleit said the new organization, called Enterprise ...

Shares of Snowflake rose more than 30% late Wednesday after the database provider surpassed its earlier forecast for product revenue—its most closely watched sales metric—by around $125 million for the first quarter ending April 30. The company raised its full-year product revenue target by $180 million to $5.84 billion. Snowflake said increasing adoption of its AI products, which include an

Database firm Snowflake said it has committed to spending $6 billion on Amazon Web Services over the next few years, including using Amazon’s Graviton chips and AI infrastructure. Graviton is a CPU, a chip designed for general computing. CPUs are becoming increasingly important as businesses need to use resource-intensive AI models. Last month, AWS announced a multi-billion dollar deal with

Salesforce on Wednesday lowered its projection for cash flow growth in its 2027 fiscal year, which ends January next year. The stock fell 3% in after-hours trading following Salesforce’s quarterly earnings results for the April quarter. The software firm said operating cash flow will rise 4% to 5% for the year, five percentage points lower than the guidance it provided three months ago. It

United Texas Bank, a crypto-friendly bank, said it successfully switched its regulator through a charter conversion, despite being under a consent order. The move will help it grow its business serving digital asset firms and foreign banks. The Dallas-based bank, which has about $1 billion in assets, became a dominant bank processing dollar payments for overseas crypto exchanges, after the

Coding startup Cognition has raised more than $1 billion in a funding round that valued the company at $26 billion including the investment, the company said in a blog post. That’s nearly double its valuation from its last fundraise, which valued the three-year-old company at about $10 billion eight months ago. General Catalyst, Lux Capital and 8VC co-led the round, with participation from

OpenAI’s foundation will grant $250 million in funding to promote research into the impact of artificial intelligence on the economy and jobs, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday. The company’s charitable arm was separated from OpenAI’s for-profit business last fall as part of a restructuring. The foundation said in March that it planned to invest at least $1 billion over the next

Amazon is marketing a new service to let other retailers take advantage of its AI shopping assistant technology. For the past two years, Amazon has offered an AI shopping chatbot on its main retail site, which was originally called Rufus, but earlier this month was rebranded to Alexa for Shopping. Amazon is now offering the Alexa for Shopping technology to other retailers through Amazon Web

Federal prosecutors charged a Google employee with using confidential information to win $1.2 million betting on Polymarket, according to a Federal Court complaint unsealed on Wednesday. Michele Spagnuolo, a staff software engineer at Google, allegedly placed bets on the prediction market for wagers tied to top Google searches. Trading under the name “AlphaRacoon,” Spagnuolo last year placed

Meta Platforms is launching paid subscriptions for its AI chatbot across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp as it looks to monetize its investments in artificial intelligence. The company’s head of product, Naomi Gleit, announced Wednesday that it is testing out new subscription plans. The services will be branded as Facebook Plus, Instagram Plus, and WhatsApp Plus, offering users access to