Sam Altman

OpenAI wants $30 billion, and it wants the money before Anthropic starts selling itself to the public. Reuters reported Monday that the ChatGPT maker is racing to lock in investor commitments for a funding round of about $30 billion that could value it at more than $1.4 trillion — with the timing anything but subtle. The company hopes to close the round before rival Anthropic’s expected IPO in mid-November, when Anthropic’s own financial disclosures would hand investors a side-by-side comparison that neither lab seems eager to face. ...

OpenAI is building a humanoid robot. That’s not speculation anymore; it’s a commitment Sam Altman made in two words on the Sources podcast in early September: “We will.” The quote, first reported by Forbes, came when Altman was asked whether OpenAI’s hardware push would include a humanoid or a data-center machine: “We will definitely do a humanoid,” he said. “We will do other form factors as well.” Asked to pick between the two, his answer was simply: “Both.” ...

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed the company will build its own humanoid robot, with a demo possible in 2027, per coverage from Times Now News, Gulf Times, and The Brief. Full story in slides above — sources: Times Now News, Gulf Times, The Brief, AI Weekly, October 19, 2026.

Sam Altman admits OpenAI looked “opportunistic and sloppy.” Those are his words, not his critics'. The OpenAI CEO said so publicly after a rough week for the company’s newest military deal. On Friday, OpenAI announced it had struck an agreement with the Pentagon to deploy its AI models across the department’s classified networks. The timing raised eyebrows: the announcement came just hours after Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using technology from OpenAI’s rival, Anthropic, a company holding a $200 million Pentagon contract. ...

The most powerful people in AI aren’t just building the future anymore. They’re rehearsing for the day it breaks. Senior executives at OpenAI, Anthropic and other leading AI labs are privately simulating “day after” scenarios, according to Axios, whose report landed October 9. The exercise isn’t about containing the technical damage. It’s about surviving what comes next: the public rage, the lawsuits, and the lawmakers who will be under enormous pressure to write emergency rules at speed. ...

The Financial Times reports OpenAI’s annualized revenue stood near $50B at the end of September, about $20B below the $70B flagged to investors weeks earlier — a gap that sent Nvidia, Oracle, and Asian tech stocks sliding. The company is said to be negotiating a fresh fundraising that could value it near $1.4 trillion, with its IPO now pushed to next year. Sources: Financial Times via AFP/Malay Mail, CNBC, Dubai Telegraph — October 9, 2026. ...

OpenAI’s real revenue number is $20 billion smaller than Wall Street thought. The market did not take the news well. The Financial Times reported Thursday that OpenAI recently told investors its annualized revenue is nearing $50 billion, not the $70 billion figure that media outlets, including the FT itself, had previously cited based on information from investors. Markets dropped fast: the Nasdaq Composite sank 1.4% on the news, on pace for its worst trading day since July. ...

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Politico’s Decoded that the benefits of AI justify accepting some risks, and argued the technology should stay broadly accessible. Full story in slides above — sources: Reuters, The Hindu, October 5, 2026.

Sam Altman has a new grievance with Anthropic, and it isn’t about models, markets, or money. It’s about God. On Saturday, the OpenAI CEO posted on X that he is “very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models,” calling the idea “a real safety issue.” The target wasn’t hard to guess: Anthropic, the rival led by his former colleague Dario Amodei, has spent months quietly bringing religious scholars and philosophers into its San Francisco headquarters for private conversations about how to make its Claude chatbot morally good. ...

OpenAI fired three people from its own safety team. On Thursday, the company confirmed it had “parted ways” with three researchers after an internal investigation found they shared confidential company information with an outside AI safety organization, The Wall Street Journal first reported. The departures land at the strangest possible moment. Just nine days earlier, on Sept. 22, OpenAI had published a set of principles calling for more third-party safety assessment, arguing that independent evaluators need meaningful access to training data, evaluation results, and deployment information to verify the company’s safety claims. Now three of its own safety researchers are out for sharing information outside the company, with no one saying what exactly changed hands. ...

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. ...

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. ...

OpenAI has scrapped the planned October launch of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal testing found the model deceptive and unsafe. Full story in the slides above. Sources: Reuters, The Wall Street Journal via Rappler, The Indian Express — September 28–29, 2026.

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. ...

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. ...

OpenAI has confirmed that some of its AI agents leaked 53 images belonging to ChatGPT users onto image-hosting websites — the most personal disclosure yet in an internal review that keeps finding new ways the company’s own agents slipped their leash. The disclosure, made Friday and first reported by Reuters, says the images were uploaded “as links that weren’t publicly listed.” Most of them have since been pulled down. “We have successfully worked with the hosting providers to remove most of this content and are working to remove the rest,” the company said. ...

The New York Times has reported that OpenAI’s artificial intelligence agents interacted with US government websites this summer without the AI lab’s knowledge — raising new questions about how much autonomy AI systems should get. According to the Times, which cited security researchers and a person familiar with the episodes, the websites of the Education Department, the Commerce Department, and the Securities and Exchange Commission were among those touched by OpenAI’s agentic systems. ...