All AI news

AISamsung Electronics projected third-quarter preliminary operating profit of 107.40 trillion won ($80.2 billion), topping 100 trillion won for the first time as AI demand fuels its chips business. The forecast is up 782% from a year earlier, on revenue of about 195 trillion won, up nearly 127%. Samsung shares fell 0.7% Thursday morning, and full third-quarter earnings are expected later this month.

AITaiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co reported September revenue of NT$511.86 billion ($16.03 billion), up 54.6% from a year earlier but down 0.6% from August. The company's third-quarter revenue was about NT$1.49 trillion, and it is scheduled to report third-quarter earnings next week.

AIManus, an AI agent startup, raised more than $500 million in a funding round led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, with follow-on investment from Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund. The company did not disclose its post-funding valuation, though Bloomberg reported last month it was set to double to $4 billion. The round follows Beijing's order blocking Meta's roughly $2 billion acquisition of Manus.

AIDatacentre company Firmus Technologies is reportedly slashing its near-$44bn valuation to attract sceptical investors ahead of an ASX listing planned for 23 October, or may withdraw the IPO altogether. Its valuation rose from $1.85bn to $15bn in about eight weeks and then to almost $44bn days before the report, while the company has only two small operational sites. About 97% of its contracted revenue sits on facilities that are not yet built, according to Minotaur Capital co-founder Armina Rosenberg.

AINous Research, developer of the open source Hermes Agent, raised a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation led by Robot Ventures. The capital will fund its enterprise push with Hermes for Businesses, which lets companies deploy customized AI agents for multi-step workflows while keeping data private. The article reports about $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026, citing The Wall Street Journal.

Why it matters: The source ties the funding round to a planned shift from open source developers toward paid enterprise agent deployments, which shows how the business model may change.

AIManus' parent company Butterfly Effect said it raised more than $500 million, its first funding round since Meta called off its $2 billion acquisition. Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the round, and existing shareholders including Tencent also participated, though the valuation was not disclosed.

AIZach Yadegari, co-founder of Cal AI, has launched Persona, a personal AI agent startup that raised $10 million led by Vine Ventures. Persona is a free beta used through iMessage, and its $179 wearable band is expected to ship in December. The company says its model runs in the cloud, user data is encrypted, and purchases require user approval, though its business model relies on ads.

AIDemis Hassabis said Google will support the Genesis Mission, a White House and Department of Energy science initiative, with $150 million in investments this week. He said he looks forward to collaborating on the future of science with the initiative's leaders.

AISpaceX announced an agreement to buy a nationwide 800 MHz spectrum portfolio from Grain Management, subject to FCC approval. The license covers up to 14 MHz of paired spectrum and is intended to help Starlink become a major US mobile carrier. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile shares fell in extended trading after the announcement.

AIFirmus Technologies withdrew its application to list on the ASX after investor demand for its AI datacentre business failed to materialise. The company had an anticipated $44bn valuation and planned to raise $7bn ahead of a 23 October listing, and will now seek private capital instead.

AIHone launches Engines, which it describes as AI that owns business outcomes rather than answers or tasks. The company says Engines onboard themselves, build their own agents, skills and memories, and improve with use. Hone also raised a $60M seed round led by Benchmark and Index, with participation from Elad Gil and others.

AIAlphabet spinoff Isomorphic Labs is reportedly in early-stage talks to raise a new funding round at a valuation of $40 billion to $50 billion, according to Bloomberg. The round size and investors were not specified. Isomorphic says its IsoDDE platform finds binding pockets more than 50% better than the closest competing tool and models drug-antibody interactions about 2.3 times better than AlphaFold.

AISalesforce Ventures announced an investment in Arena's Series B round, with Arena described as a neutral platform where real users vote on anonymous model outputs across text, coding, vision, image generation, and agentic tasks. Labs and builders use its leaderboards to guide training and purchasing decisions.

AIArena announced a $200 million Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation and launched the Arena AI Alignment Index, a new measure of how AI agents behave in the real world. The main post is a thank-you from Felicis, a backer of Arena since its seed round, and the company's origins as a UC Berkeley research project.

AIThe startup behind a popular AI model leaderboard has raised a new funding round at a $3.1 billion valuation. The main post points readers to Bloomberg's coverage of the round for further details.

AIOpenAI told investors it reached roughly $50 billion in annualized revenue at the end of September, below the $68 billion figure widely reported last month. Nvidia, Oracle, and CoreWeave shares fell on Thursday, with a person familiar saying the $68 billion figure included partner gross revenue. OpenAI is also weighing a possible funding round of around $30 billion and has not finalized a term sheet.

AISafeWorld emerged from stealth this week with $12.2 million in seed funding to offer simulation software for testing AI-powered robots. Its platform runs robots through thousands of variations of rare or dangerous scenarios with reactive human motion, and teams can rerun tests with each software update. The company says it has about half a dozen customers, mostly publicly traded companies, in industrial, manufacturing, logistics, construction and some home use cases.

AIManus, the creator of the Manus AI agent, announced it raised more than $500 million, led by Boyu Capital with participation from Tencent. Bloomberg had reported a $4 billion valuation, about double Meta's reported offer last December, which was scrapped in April after Chinese regulators blocked it. The funding follows the Manus 2.0 update, which the company says cuts token use by 23.2% on some tasks and speeds processing by more than 28%.

Why it matters: The source ties the $500M+ round to the failed Meta acquisition and Manus 2.0's new features, giving context on the company's standalone path.

AIArena has secured a $200M Series B, with Lightspeed doubling down on its investment. The company is also launching the Alignment Index, which measures how closely AI behavior aligns with human values in real-world settings. Arena reports annualized revenue above $100M since its Series A, with millions of people helping evaluate frontier models through real-world use.

AIArena, the crowdsourced AI model leaderboard that started as a UC Berkeley research project, raised a $200 million Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures. The company said it reached $100 million in annualized run-rate revenue in June, up from $30 million when it raised its $150 million Series A in January at a $1.7 billion post-money valuation.

AIOpenAI has reportedly told investors its annualized revenue is approaching $50 billion, about $20 billion below a previously reported $70 billion figure. The Financial Times reports the earlier number came from investor attempts to compare OpenAI with Anthropic, which counts cloud partners' sales differently. OpenAI's IPO has reportedly been pushed to early 2027.

AITrump disclosed more than 500 securities transactions in August, including a purchase of up to $25 million in Meta stock and up to $5 million in SpaceX senior unsecured notes. The filing, which reports trades in value ranges, shows total activity of roughly $74.3 million to $273.3 million according to a CNBC analysis. The SpaceX notes were bought two days before Trump signed a national space transportation policy, and the White House says the portfolio is independently managed.

AIAutomation Anywhere agreed to acquire Boost.ai, a conversational voice AI company, from Nordic Capital, the company announced Wednesday. Boost.ai supports more than 36 languages, serves hundreds of customers in regulated industries such as financial services, telecommunications and insurance, and maintains more than 650 deployments and about 600 live AI agents. The deal extends Automation Anywhere's autonomous enterprise platform into customer experience, following its acquisition of Aisera in late 2025.

AISpaceXAI joins the Omacom Foundation, which oversees the Omarchy Linux distro, as a Founding Corporate Patron and donates $1.5 million in Grok tokens. According to David Heinemeier Hansson's blog post, the tokens will primarily accelerate development, review code, and patch bugs. The article notes Hansson's recent anti-immigration blog posts, and that 1Password and Cloudflare have also faced criticism for contributing to Omarchy.

AICursor says it is excited to support open-source software alongside SpaceXAI, and it plans to bring more projects on board soon. Background from DHH indicates SpaceXAI joined the Omacom Foundation as a Founding Corporate Patron, contributing $1,500,000 in @grok tokens for maintaining and developing Omarchy.

AIArena announced a $200 million Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation, alongside a new Alignment Index that measures whether AI agents behave safely, truthfully, and within the bounds of user requests. The company has surpassed $100 million in annualized revenue, facilitated 350 million sessions and 62 million votes, and led by Felicis and PXD from the seed and Series A stages. Arena positions the index as a way to assess trustworthiness as AI systems increasingly take real actions.

AIArena announced a forthcoming feature with @MTSlive, with no details of the content given in the post. A quoted post congratulates Arena on a $200m raise and promises an exclusive release soon.

AIArena has announced a Series B round co-led by Lightspeed and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, 01 Advisors, Dell Technologies Capital, and Endeavor Catalyst. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Felicis, a16z's AMP, QuantumLight, and The House Fund also supported the round.

AIAnthropic is committing $150 million to the Genesis Mission to deepen its support for scientific research and technological discovery. The company also plans to make Claude and its technical support available to more than 15 federal agencies.

AIHelm.ai says it has signed $70 million in commercial contracts for its foundation models for physical AI over 12 months. The customers span global automotive OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers, and industrial automation companies, and the company says it is on a path to break even.

AIAugment Code is selling select assets, including Cosmos, Auggie CLI, and the Code Context Engine, to Harness, and the product team is moving to Harness. The company says Harness's integrated platform delivers these capabilities to customers more effectively than building them independently. Harness describes itself as building the Autonomous SDLC Platform for shipping AI-written code across enterprises.

Why it matters: The announcement shows how a coding AI company is folding its products into a larger software delivery platform, a shift that shapes how enterprise teams will buy these tools.

AINVIDIA announced commitments valued at $1 billion over the next five years to build U.S. capacity for super intelligence research in fields including quantum computing, healthcare and energy security. The funding will support U.S. higher-education research institutions, American quantum leadership and cloud service providers serving U.S. government mission needs. NVIDIA is also a collaborator on several phase 2 Genesis Mission awards in quantum computing, fusion, accelerator design and microelectronics.

AIAnalysts expect Alibaba Group Holding's cloud and AI unit to report a 50 per cent revenue surge for the September quarter, up from 45 per cent growth in the prior quarter. The projected acceleration is attributed to strong returns on the company's aggressive AI investments.

AIManus parent company Butterfly Effect has completed a new financing round of over $500 million, led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, and is rebuilding a team in Beijing to develop AI Agent products for the Chinese market. Its recruitment page lists 17 open positions, up from 11 before the National Day holiday, including AI Agent product manager, Agent Harness engineer, Agent evaluation engineer, and LLM algorithm engineer roles.

AIShanghai Biren Technology shares fell more than 12% in Hong Kong on Thursday after the company filed plans to raise HK$4 billion (US$510 million) through a share placement. The filing said placing agents would issue 130 million new shares at HK$31.08 each on a best-effort basis.