German synthetic data startup simmetry.ai raised €330,000 from NBank to expand its platform that generates photorealistic, annotated synthetic data for training computer vision models in agriculture, food production, and industrial applications.
OpenAI disbanded its mission alignment team, which communicated the company's mission to employees and the public, and reassigned its leader Josh Achiam to a new "chief futurist" role. Achiam described the new role as involving "studying how the world will change in response to AI".
Benchmark Capital raised $225 million through two special vehicles to invest in AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems' $1 billion Series H. backing the company's massive wafer-scale chips that compete with Nvidia.
Reddit is positioning AI-powered search as its next major growth opportunity. The company saw its Reddit Answers feature surging from 1 million to 15 million weekly users in 2025. Although Reddit's AI search is not yet monetized, the company called it "an enormous market and opportunity".
ElevenLabs raised $500 million at an $11 billion valuation, tripling its valuation from a year ago. The startup also reported $330 million in ARR from enterprise voice AI adoption, and ambitious plans to expand its presence in global markets as it builds momentum towards an eventual IPO.
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6 with "agent teams" that enable multiple agents to work in parallel on complex tasks, a 1 million token context window, and direct PowerPoint integration, expanding the model's appeal beyond software developers to knowledge workers across industries.
China's Moonshot AI released Kimi K2.5, an open source multimodal model with agent swarm technology that enables up to 100 sub-agents to work in parallel, alongside Kimi Code, a coding tool that rivals Anthropic's Claude Code.
Arcee AI, a 30-person US startup, released Trinity Large, a 400B-parameter open source model that rivals Meta's Llama 4 Maverick, addressing concerns about China's dominance in open-weight models and uncertainty around US companies' commitment to open source AI.
A new benchmark called APEX-Agents reveals that leading AI models still cannot reliably perform complex tasks requiring context-switching and multi-domain reasoning. APEX-Agents tests performance on tasks simulating real-world scenarios, with no tested model surpassing 24% accuracy in the benchmark.
Meta is pausing teen access to AI characters globally across its apps while developing a safer version with parental controls, amid mounting legal pressure over child safety concerns.
Symbolic.ai has partnered with News Corp to deploy its AI publishing platform in newsrooms, starting with Dow Jones Newswires, where early testing showed up to 90% productivity gains for complex research tasks.
BioticsAI, a 2023 TechCrunch Disrupt winner, has received FDA clearance for its AI software that detects fetal abnormalities in ultrasound imaging. The startup plans to expand its presence across healthcare systems in the U.S.