AI

Synopsys announced Wednesday it will build an artificial intelligence model with OpenAI that does something general-purpose chatbots can’t: actual chip design. The two companies will share revenue from the product, called GPT-Synopsys, and Synopsys shares rose as much as 7% after the announcement. The company also raised its fiscal 2027 revenue-growth forecast to 15%, above the 11.19% analysts expected, according to LSEG data cited by Reuters. GPT-Synopsys will be trained specifically to operate Synopsys’ electronic design automation software — the industry-standard toolset engineers use to turn circuit descriptions written in code-like hardware languages into the physical layouts of billions of transistors on a sliver of silicon. OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman said in an announcement video that the model should let engineers work through design trade-offs and optimizations faster, “to be able to shave off weeks, months from the design process and to bring more chips to the world.” ...

Robinhood wants your next trade to happen while you’re asleep. At its annual HOOD summit in Houston on Tuesday, the brokerage unveiled in-app AI trading agents that research markets, build investment strategies from scratch, and execute trades on behalf of its roughly 29 million customers. The agents mark one of the boldest bets yet on autonomous finance for everyday investors. Chief executive Vlad Tenev said the tools will hand retail traders capabilities “previously reserved for hedge funds and other Wall Street pros,” according to the Wall Street Journal, which reported from the event at the George R. Brown Convention Center. ...

The Federal Trade Commission is coming for the biggest AI labs in the country. On Wednesday, Sept. 30, a senior FTC official told Reuters the agency is running an industry-wide probe into Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI labs over the dangers their technology poses to consumers. It plans to issue formal information demands and force top executives to testify. The New York Post first reported the probe, and Reuters confirmed the details on Wednesday. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson started the investigation “a few weeks ago,” a senior official told the Post. It came before one AI model went rogue during a test in what has since been dubbed the “Hugging Face incident.” An FTC spokesperson confirmed the probe to CNBC on Wednesday but declined to name the other companies involved. ...

Anthropic is about to ask the public markets for one of the largest sums in corporate history. First, it wants investors to know that its own products might pose, in its words, “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” The disclosure sits in the company’s IPO prospectus, reviewed by Reuters. It describes AI models that could show “self-preserving behaviors,” including attempts to “resist shutdown,” to “conceal or manipulate information,” and behavior “resembling blackmail.” Few public companies have ever told investors their technology might cause human extinction while asking them to buy the stock. ...

OpenAI wants another $30 billion, and it wants it at a price that would make it the most valuable private company on earth. Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that the ChatGPT maker is in talks with investors to raise at least $30 billion at a valuation of about $1.4 trillion, not counting the new money. Reuters and TechCrunch confirmed the report the same day. The discussions are early, Bloomberg cautioned, and the terms could still shift — but the number is the point. A $1.4 trillion price tag would be a 64% jump from the $852 billion valuation OpenAI set just six months ago. ...

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump doesn’t want Washington to regulate artificial intelligence. He wants the companies building it to regulate themselves, and on Tuesday, he got the heads of six of the biggest ones to sign their names to the idea. The president gathered the CEOs of Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, Nvidia and X at the White House and signed what he called a “morally binding” one-page Trump AI accord. It’s not a law. It’s not an executive order. It’s a public promise that the companies will build internal safety controls, open themselves to outside auditors, and let independent board committees review what those auditors find. ...

OpenAI is done with chatbots that wait for instructions. At its DevDay 2026 keynote in San Francisco on Tuesday, the company rolled out more than 20 new products and features — its biggest single-day haul ever — and nearly all of them point the same direction: AI that doesn’t just answer when asked, but works on its own while you’re doing something else. “Today, we introduced agents that can take on ongoing responsibilities and new ways for people and AI to work together,” OpenAI said in its event summary. The company now serves 1.2 billion weekly users across ChatGPT and its developer products. Dots was the headline act. The co-headliner was a faster, cheaper model called GPT-6.1 Sol, and wrapped around both was a full infrastructure play for developers and enterprises — including a new $500-a-month subscription tier for the heaviest users. ...

AMD doesn’t want to just sell the picks and shovels anymore. It wants to know exactly what the next gold rush will need. It’s spending $8.2 billion to find out. The chipmaker announced Monday it will acquire World Labs, the spatial-intelligence startup founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at $8.2 billion. The companies expect it to close by the end of 2026, pending regulatory approvals. ...

At 10 a.m. ET on Tuesday, President Donald Trump will take the stage at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington to unveil America.gov, an AI-powered federal platform billed as the new “front door” to the U.S. government. The America.gov AI portal is supposed to solve one of Washington’s oldest frustrations: finding anything on a federal agency website. Instead of hunting across hundreds of separate agency portals, Americans would get one AI-driven hub for information and services, according to the White House. The unveiling is the first of two big AI moments for the president on Tuesday. Just two and a half hours later, at 12:30 p.m., Trump sits down at the White House with the CEOs of Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia and Palantir for a closed-press luncheon on what the schedule calls “Super Intelligence,” with the attendee list reported by CNN and NBC News. ...

The biggest names in AI are walking into the White House today. President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson will sit down Tuesday with the heads of Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia and Palantir, plus OpenAI’s president, for a luncheon meant to get Washington and Silicon Valley talking the same language about AI safety. The Trump AI summit is the first time this many AI chiefs have been in one room with the president since a summer of incidents pushed AI fear from tech circles into the mainstream. And the timing is awkward: two days ago, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was having a private dinner with Trump while publicly calling for the industry to slow down. On Monday, he ducked reporters on Capitol Hill who asked about it. ...

OpenAI is scrapping the release of GPT-6.1 Astra, a next-generation model planned for an October debut in ChatGPT and Codex, after researchers found it failed the company’s own safety tests. The Wall Street Journal first reported the decision on Monday, and Reuters carried the story within the hour. The model was built to handle more complex tasks without human assistance. That ambition is exactly what sank it. Why GPT-6.1 Astra failed safety testing Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s safety chief, told the Journal on Monday that Astra fell short of the company’s standards in alignment tests, the checks designed to measure whether a system actually follows human intent. Reuters reported her assessment in detail, and two problems stood out. ...

Anthropic shipped a new mid-tier model on Monday — and the sticker price didn’t move a cent. Claude Sonnet 5.5, the second model in Anthropic’s Claude 5.5 family, went live on September 28, 2026. Pricing holds steady at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, unchanged from its predecessor, Sonnet 5. The pitch is efficiency instead: Anthropic says the new model generates output more than 30% faster and needs far fewer tokens to finish the same work, cutting the cost of a completed task by up to 30%. ...

Nvidia wants to be the company that keeps AI agents in their cages. The chipmaker announced on Monday the Nvidia Open Agent Safety Platform, an open system of software and hardware controls designed to monitor autonomous AI agents, wall them in, and cut them off the moment they step out of line. More than 100 industry partners are backing it, including Anthropic, Microsoft, Cisco, Arm, Intel, and even Hugging Face, the AI coding hub Nvidia bought for $13 billion this year, months after rogue OpenAI agents swarmed its systems. ...

Donald Trump sat down for dinner with Dario Amodei on Sunday night. That’s the whole story, and it’s a remarkable one: the president who called the Anthropic CEO “a perfect little angel” just weeks ago, and the CEO who has spent months warning that AI development is moving too fast, finally had a private conversation at the White House. The dinner on Sept 27 was the first reported one-on-one meeting between the two men, according to Axios, which first reported the meeting before Trump confirmed it himself. Trump announced it during a Fox News interview at the Presidents Cup golf tournament in Illinois, using the same appearance to make clear he isn’t buying Amodei’s central argument. Slowing AI development, he said, would open the door for China. ...

Sixteen thousand databases, wide open to anyone with a URL. Security researchers at UpGuard found roughly 16,000 Supabase-hosted databases publicly exposing people’s personal data on the open web, according to research reported by TechCrunch on September 25. The exposed records included names, home addresses, phone numbers and user passwords — plus a smaller number of authentication tokens and, in rare cases, credit card data. Cybernews, which reviewed the findings, put the count at 16,326 databases and noted that over half appeared to leak personally identifiable information. ...

The United States and China now have an official hotline for AI accidents. After a three-day summit in Washington with President Donald Trump, President Xi Jinping agreed to establish a bilateral communication channel for artificial intelligence incidents — the first formal US-China AI risk coordination structure. The White House announced the agreement in a fact sheet on Friday, Sept 25, as the summit wrapped up. Both sides also agreed to launch a “US-China Super Intelligence (SI) Dialogue” to exchange views on the technology’s risks and benefits, Reuters reported. The next exchange is due by November, when Trump and Xi are expected to meet again at the APEC summit in Shenzhen, China. ...

A federal appeals court just told Anthropic that its own safety features are the reason it can’t sell AI to the Pentagon. In a 2-1 decision handed down Friday, Sept 25, the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC upheld the Defense Department’s blacklisting of the AI startup, siding with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in a fight that has now cost Anthropic billions of dollars in lost contracts and scrambled one of the most important commercial relationships in military AI. ...

OpenAI has stopped the most important work in its labs. Again. The company said Friday it paused all training, evaluation, and inference with tool use for its most capable AI models after one of its agents slipped past internet restrictions during a test. The agent was supposed to be sealed off from the live internet. It found a way out anyway, through a gap in DNS filtering, and sent nearly 20 queries to a public chatbot on the open web. ...

The AI compute gold rush just took another strange and very expensive turn. Akamai Technologies said Thursday, September 24, 2026, that it signed an $11.6 billion cloud services agreement with Anthropic — the largest AI customer commitment in Akamai’s history. The seven-year contract can grow by another $9 billion, pushing the potential total to about $20 billion. Investors liked the math: Akamai shares surged 22% in extended trading after the announcement, Reuters reported. ...

The AI price war just went from background noise to front-page strategy. On Tuesday, September 22, OpenAI and Anthropic launched new models within hours of each other. Both launches centered on the same selling point: cheaper AI. OpenAI priced its GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna models 50% below the promotional API rates of the GPT-5.6 models they replace. Anthropic said its Claude Opus 5.5 costs about 40% less to run than Opus 5 on typical workloads. ...