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.
OpenAI expanded ChatGPT Go to all markets at $8/month and announced plans to test advertisements for free and Go tier users in the coming weeks, with commitments that ads won't influence responses, user data won't be sold, and paid Pro/Business/Enterprise tiers will remain ad-free.
Anthropic launched Claude for Healthcare with HIPAA-compliant tools for healthcare tasks, expanded life sciences capabilities, plus personal health data integrations for individual users through Apple Health, Android Health Connect, and other platforms.
OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Health, a privacy-focused space within ChatGPT where users can have health-related conversations with the chatbot. The service aims to support users as they care for their health rather than replace healthcare professionals.
The CES 2026 Trends to Watch session showcased three megatrends—Intelligent Transformation, Longevity, and Engineering Tomorrow—expected to shape a future defined by interconnected, adaptive systems rather than discrete products.