The latest reporting, explainers, and analysis in AI Models.
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Databricks has announced a new funding round valuing the company at $188 billion, underscoring investor appetite for enterprise AI platforms that combine data infrastructure, governance, and model deployment. The deal extends a rapid run of fundraising as Databricks shifts its identity from big data software provider to core AI infrastructure company.
xAI has filed a federal lawsuit against a Grok user accused of trying to generate child sexual abuse material and non-consensual deepfake pornography, marking a rare case of an AI company taking direct legal action against a user over alleged criminal misuse of its model.
Ahead of the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), Moonshot AI has launched its next-generation large language model, Kimi K3, featuring 2.8 trillion parameters and becoming the world's largest open-source model by parameter count. The model also supports native vision understanding and a 1 million-token long context window, marking a significant breakthrough for the open-source AI community in terms of model scale and complex task capabilities.
Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, and other plaintiffs have filed a class action lawsuit accusing Google of using copyrighted books to train Gemini without permission, adding to the growing legal fight over whether AI training qualifies as fair use.
Open-source AI tool Ollama has raised a $65 million Series B after rapid growth among developers using local and open-weight models. The funding highlights sustained demand for easier ways to run AI models on PCs and manage hybrid workflows that combine local inference with hosted capacity.
Elon Musk publicly defended Anthropic’s decision to rely on SpaceX infrastructure, praising the company’s models and saying he would not use hosting control to damage a rival, despite a multiyear compute deal reportedly worth roughly $40 billion.
Meta has publicly launched Muse Spark 1.1, a multimodal model aimed at agentic coding, bug fixing, workflow orchestration, and large-scale code migrations. The release puts Meta more directly into competition with OpenAI and Anthropic as enterprises increasingly look for AI systems that can automate complex software tasks at usable prices.
The New York Times and other publishers have asked the court to sanction OpenAI, alleging the company concealed internal tools and datasets that could show whether copyrighted journalism appeared in its training data and ChatGPT outputs. The dispute raises broader questions about discovery, transparency, and how AI companies track regurgitation of protected works.
OpenAI has introduced GPT-Live-1 and GPT-Live-1 mini, new voice models designed for more fluid real-time conversations. The models can listen and speak simultaneously, improve turn-taking, support interruption, and connect to newer GPT systems for tasks like search, reasoning, and live translation.
Microsoft is reportedly routing some Office AI tasks to its own MAI models instead of relying as heavily on OpenAI and Anthropic, reflecting a broader industry push to reduce the soaring cost of AI services.
Anthropic has expanded Claude Cowork to web and mobile, adding cross-device task continuity and background execution aimed at everyday knowledge work. The company says most usage now comes from non-programming tasks such as operations, document preparation, and administrative workflows, signaling a broader push into AI-powered workplace productivity.
As major AI labs prepare for public offerings, the industry faces a reckoning over soaring token costs. Shifting from flat-rate to usage-based pricing and the withdrawal of investor subsidies signal a new era of corporate budget constraints and evolving risk disclosures.