#Industry news

AIFirmus Grid Ltd. is exploring a private funding round to raise as much as $3 billion after its planned initial public offering collapsed. The data center operator is seeking alternative financing options following the failed IPO.

AITom Watson, now a senior vice-president at Palantir, warned UK ministers against letting "mob rule" dictate public procurement, saying they could get "in a lot of trouble" if they do. The former Labour deputy leader's comments come as Prime Minister Andy Burnham faces pressure to drop Palantir from government contracts, including a £330m NHS software deal.

AIAustralian cloud-computing firm Firmus Grid scrapped its IPO, which had sought a $30 billion valuation. The company had only two operational data centers at the time.

AIOpenAI defended its decision to fire three safety researchers, Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni, saying they committed a "significant breach of trust." The company said the dismissals were not about the researchers raising safety concerns, though it agreed with the letter they sent to board members and safety committees about preserving the monitorability of frontier models.

AIOpenAI says it parted ways with researchers Jasmine, Mikita, and Tomek after an internal investigation found they violated policies on handling sensitive information. The company says the decisions were not about raising safety concerns, which it says it encourages, and that it has not terminated any employee for raising concerns. OpenAI also says it is finalizing contracts with third-party safety assessors and will announce details in the coming weeks.

AIGeekPark reports that Krinwave, a Shenzhen company, has completed a new 400 million yuan round with XVC and Sequoia China as new investors. The company says its low-frequency ultrasound captures brain structures through the skull, which conventional high-frequency devices cannot, and it aims to supply hardware and its kOS software platform to brain-computer interface and NeuroAI groups.

AIChina's tech hardware shares are falling rapidly after strong gains earlier this year, as doubts over the global AI trade make high-valuation names especially vulnerable. The selloff reflects growing valuation concerns in the sector.

AIJeremy Howard posted a sardonic remark that he was not allowed to say he is quite unhappy with much of what OpenAI does. The post quotes Tomek Korbak's similar statement and his relief at being permitted to say it.

AIMusician Grimes has announced a new album titled Psy Opera, described as AI-inspired. The announcement was shared via a Pitchfork article linking to the first song from the record.

AIAsia's largest software outsourcing provider said new US curbs on visa-based immigration will not affect its hiring or business strategy. The company did not name itself in the source text, and the summary avoids adding details beyond that statement.

AISoftBank Group Corp. is seeking to raise as much as $100 billion from Gulf investors to expand its AI investments, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The report did not specify the timing or terms of the proposed fundraising.

AIIn a podcast, former ByteDance engineer Guo Yu says that in 2015 he first saw a company whose products were driven by neural networks that even engineers could not fully explain. He also argues that after AI took over coding, one person now carries the decision load of an entire former team, which has driven him to burnout.

AIXPENG has named its robotaxi business XPENG YOYO and launched a ride-hailing mini program that lets invited members of the public test the service. The company says its first production robotaxi, based on the flagship GX model, rolled off the line in May 2026, and it has completed more than 2,000 internal test rides in Guangzhou. XPENG says YOYO uses four in-house Turing AI chips delivering 3,000 TOPS, a second-generation VLA model, and a vision-based approach without high-definition maps or LiDAR.

AIAdo Kukic posted a salute emoji reacting to Anthropic's launch of OSS Scanner, which uses frontier models to periodically scan opted-in open-source projects for vulnerabilities at no cost. The reports include a proof-of-concept, explanation, and suggested fix.

AIAnthropic has paused the Claude Team plan and $1,000 API credit offers for its Claude Startups program after underestimating demand, with hundreds of thousands of applicants. Claimed offers will remain in accounts, but some approved applicants who had not yet claimed their offers will lose access as applications are re-reviewed. Startup Stack and Applied AI office hours remain available to accepted members.

AIOpenAI's most senior Asia-Pacific public policy executive is leaving after six months in the role, according to a person familiar with the matter. The departure comes as the ChatGPT maker faces regulatory scrutiny in the region.

AIThreatBook has acquired CyberStrikeAI, an open-source AI pentesting agent, after reports that attackers had used it in real intrusions. The company says it added guardrails to limit misuse but will put new capability enhancements into its commercial edition, and it argues defenders should control such tools. It also corrects an earlier threat intelligence report that linked the developer, a security engineer at Alipay, to government agencies, calling that attribution a false positive.

AIHuawei's OceanStor M900 and Nvidia's CMX move reusable inference KV cache into a shared storage tier, but no agreed SSD specification exists for it. A storage executive said endurance requirements for one design rose from 3 to 9 drive writes per day and could change again. Industry sources expect convergence to take 6 to 12 months, with another year for development and validation.

AIHuawei has opened its DevEco Studio for HarmonyOS PCs to public beta, alongside first public betas of the AI tool DevEco Code and the agent toolkit DevEco CLI. The beta requires HarmonyOS 7.0.0.107 or later, at least 16 GB of memory and 100 GB of storage, and runs on several MateBook models and the MatePad Edge. DevEco Code ships with Zhipu AI's GLM-5.3 and GLM-5.1 models and supports third-party model connections.

AICoreWeave is layering managed services over its infrastructure to address AI inference bottlenecks, including a preview capability called CoreWeave RL Rollouts that improved model reload latency by 15x versus a baseline configuration in testing. The capability is built on Nvidia's Dynamo framework, and the features are packaged into CoreWeave Forge, a platform that is free to start with paid tiers offering additional capabilities.

AIOpenAI expects to reach or exceed $70 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2026, according to people familiar with the matter. The growth is driven largely by its enterprise business.

AISeema Shah, Chief Global Strategist at Principal Global Investors, discusses the AI capex cycle and its impact on investor sentiment. She spoke with Avril Hong on the sidelines of the Milken Institute Asia Summit in Singapore.

AIPeter Thiel, Palantir and Founders Fund co-founder, argued in $100-per-ticket Nashville lectures that government attempts to regulate AI are evil, according to recordings obtained by Politico. He attacked former President Barack Obama and Pope Leo XIV over AI, and criticized effective altruism as a belief system that could form a one-world government to stop AI progress. The article notes Thiel's wealth is heavily invested in AI, including a $418 million AI-focused portfolio at Thiel Macro LLC.

AIOpenAI published 719 AI-generated math proofs covering 372 result families, after withdrawing 3 for a symbol error. Reports say the release falls short of the AGMAI advisory group's standards, since it uses proprietary models, includes reasoning chains for only 10 manuscripts, and leaves about 42% unformalized. Terence Tao argues that rapidly solving famous problems harms the mathematical community's understanding and collaboration.

AIGoogle Cloud unveiled Gemini Agent at its Gemini at Work 2026 event, a general-purpose work agent for enterprise customers that works across Gemini Enterprise and Workspace. Currently the agent supports Gemini and Claude models, with an API planned so developers can integrate it into third-party applications.

AIFactory has appointed Connor Maloney as Head of Federal to lead its expansion into the public sector. Maloney previously served as Vice President of Federal at Rubrik and began his career as a Program Manager at the Department of War. Factory also recently announced a partnership with Carahsoft and says it can run in managed, private cloud, on-premises, or fully air-gapped deployments.

AIJerry Liu is preparing for the Agent Economy Gala, which has reached its 400-guest capacity and is organized by @imaanxsultan. The source says attendees include 203 founders with over $1B raised combined, 67 founding operators, 58 investors, 23 creators, and 295 guests building agent applications or infrastructure.

AIJeremy Howard says Jasmine Wang accessed an executive's email that OpenAI had given her access to, despite her request that the access be removed and IT's failure to remove it. He implies she was fired because of that IT failure, not misconduct on her part.

AISnyk moved its internal support agent, Snyk Assist, into the core Snyk product in September 2026, giving every paying customer access. Built on LangChain and LangGraph with observability in LangSmith, the agent answers questions in plain language and can open support cases or log feature requests. It runs as a single agent behind Slack, web and API surfaces, with tools attached per user permissions.

AIBloomberg Intelligence's Mandeep Singh says booming token growth indicates solid AI infrastructure demand, despite questions over OpenAI's revenue accounting. The source provides no further figures on token volumes or revenue.

AIAnthropic has barred users from exhibiting "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior" toward its models, according to a policy change first reported by The Verge. The San Francisco-based company says the ban does not apply to common user frustrations, model testing, or "dark creative themes." The change follows an August feature that lets Claude end conversations when a user is persistently harmful, which Anthropic framed as a safeguard for AI welfare.