| |  | Jan 26, 2026 | | | | | | Welcome back! OpenAI gets ready to lure businesses from Anthropic. The Justice Department opens a criminal probe into the Deel-Rippling spy claims. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang tours China.
| | | | OpenAI is getting ready to unveil a new offering that aims to help large business customers incorporate AI into a variety of operations, from customer service to rewriting older application code, The Information reported Saturday. The new product is part of the ChatGPT maker's broader push to get customers to sign multi-year contracts worth more than $100 million. OpenAI leaders recently teased upcoming upgrades to the startup's AI coding tool, Codex, which they said would soon surpass Claude Code's performance and features. OpenAI is aiming to counter the inroads rival Anthropic has made with large companies due to the surging popularity of its AI coding product, Claude Code. One question is whether OpenAI can gain the trust of large companies that see Anthropic as a safer path to adopting AI because it is primarily targeting business customers. | | | | The Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into allegations payroll startup Deel recruited and paid a spy inside a Rippling office in Ireland, according to The The Wall Street Journal. In recent weeks, prosecutors have distributed subpoenas for a grand jury, the Journal reported. Detectives from the Anti-Bribery and Corruption Unit of Ireland's Garda National Economic Crime Bureau recently searched the home of Keith O'Brien, the alleged spy, according to a report by The Irish Independent on Friday. Garda Headquarters said the search was "part of an ongoing criminal investigation into alleged corruption and money laundering involving an international software company," according to the report. A spokesperson for Deel said the company was not aware of any investigation. "We will always cooperate with the relevant authorities and provide any necessary information in response to valid inquiries," Deel said. Court filings that were unsealed in November, in a civil lawsuit Rippling launched against Deel, showed Deel labeled as an expense a $6,000 payment it made to the wife of the company's chief operating officer. That cash was immediately sent to O'Brien. Deel has denied Rippling's civil suit allegations and launched a separate defamation case against its rival. A Deel spokesperson said its lawsuit shows Rippling made misleading claims about Deel, including in a separate civil case in Florida that was recently dismissed. That lawsuit, backed by a Rippling investor and lawyer, alleged lapses in Deel's compliance controls. In November, Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz added Morrison Foerster partner William Frentzen, a former DOJ lawyer, to his legal team. Bouaziz also recently credited Andreessen Horowitz, which holds a multi-billion dollar stake in Deel, for helping to manage the fallout from Rippling's allegations. Bouaziz told substack publication Not Boring, that the venture firm was "figuring things out, helping me figure out how to manage it, getting the best people to help, getting their own hands dirty. When a lot of this bullshit came out, I couldn't have asked for a better partner." Andreessen Horowitz did not respond immediately to a request for comment. This story has been updated to include comments from Deel. | | | | Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang arrived in Beijing on Sunday after spending two days in Shanghai over the weekend, according to various Chinese media reports. He is expected to attend the company's Lunar New Year celebrations and meet Chinese clients, according to China Daily. It's unclear if Huang will be meeting senior Chinese officials during his trip. Huang's visit began in Shanghai on Jan. 23, where he drew crowds at the company's Saturday festivities. The trip comes as Beijing approved some purchases of Nvidia's H200 AI chip—the most powerful chip the company is permitted to sell to China, according to Bloomberg. But whether China will officially approve imports of the H200 remains uncertain. Huang is also planning to visit Shenzhen and then Taiwan, according to Reuters. | | | | Google has acquired Common Sense Machines, a Cambridge, Mass.,-based startup developing generative artificial intelligence models to create three-dimensional assets from two-dimensional images, a Google spokesperson confirmed. The deal closed this week, according to the spokesperson. The spokesperson declined to provide a price. The company had around a dozen employees, according to its LinkedIn page, and was last valued at $15 million after raising $10 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, according to PitchBook. One of Common Sense Machines' co-CEOs, Tejas Kulkarni, worked as a research scientist at Google DeepMind before cofounding the company in 2020. The deal suggests that Google is continuing to lean further into image generation and multimodal AI after the success of its Nano Banana model, which creates images from text prompts. DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis has also talked about the importance of "world models," which simulate the physical world. Common Sense Machines' former employees will work at Google DeepMind, the spokesperson said. | | | | Amazon will begin a round of layoffs next week, which could affect thousands of corporate employees, Reuters reported. In October, Amazon announced it was laying off 14,000 employees to help reduce management layers and bureaucracy. The upcoming layoffs will affect roughly the same number of employees as those in October, bringing the total number of laid off employees to as many as 30,000, Reuters reported. Affected units include Amazon Web Services, Prime Video, retail and human resources, the report said. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told The Information in an interview at Davos earlier this week that layoffs at Amazon aren't about AI replacing human workers, but about improving the company's culture after adding lots of employees in recent years. "Where we see layers stripping ownership, we're going to try and take those layers away and we're going to try and flatten it," he said. | | | | Anthropic had been in discussions with Apple to supply models to rebuild its Siri AI assistant and was seeking several billion dollars annually over multiple years, Bloomberg reported on Sunday. But negotiations with the AI startup stalled over the summer over the terms of a potential arrangement. Apple was also talking to OpenAI about the arrangement, which would have extended an earlier partnership with the ChatGPT maker. Apple ultimately chose Google's Gemini after it found the software had improved significantly and Google agreed to a financial structure Apple found reasonable, the report said. OpenAI will still provide answers to more complex queries that users ask Siri. | | | | The National Transportation Safety Board on Friday said it planned to open a safety investigation into the activity of Waymo vehicles around school buses in Austin, Tex. The investigation follows a report by the Austin Independent School District in November that Waymo vehicles had illegally passed school district buses that had stopped to load or unload students at least 19 times. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an early probe of Waymo's activity around stopped school buses last month. Waymo in November said it had made a software update to resolve the issue, but the Austin school district said some of the violations occurred after the software update. Mauricio Peña, chief safety officer of Waymo, said in a statement that "we see this as an opportunity to provide the NTSB with transparent insights into our safety-first approach," and noted that "there have been no collisions in the events in question." The Google-owned unit is in the midst of a rapid expansion across the U.S., including in Houston, San Antonio and Dallas. | | | | Fervo Energy, a startup developing geothermal power projects, filed confidential paperwork for an initial public offering, Axios reported. JPMorgan and Bank of America are working with Fervo on the potential offering, Axios reported. Fervo in December said it raised $462 million in funding led by venture firm B Capital to help build projects such as its Cape Station site in Utah, which the company said would begin delivering 100 megawatts of power to the grid this year. Google also made an investment in the company. Fervo is one of several power companies looking to go public as tech companies race to secure electricity for AI data centers. Renewable power developer Hecate Energy on Friday filed to go public by merging with a blank-check company in a deal valuing it at $1.2 billion. Representatives for Fervo and Bank of America did not respond to requests for comment. A JPMorgan spokesperson declined to comment. | | | | Google invested in Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based developer of AI models and applications, Sakana said Friday. Google invested at the same valuation as the Japanese company's recently announced funding round, which valued it at $2.5 billion without the newly raised capital, according to Sakana cofounder and CEO David Ha. He didn't disclose how much Google invested. Sakana, Japan's most highly valued AI startup, also announced a strategic partnership with Google that will allow it to use the U.S. tech giant's state-of-the-art AI models to build its technologies and products. "This partnership allows us to push the boundaries of automated scientific discovery and agentic AI even further," Sakana said. The partnership with Sakana could also help Google increase its presence in Japan's domestic AI model market, where OpenAI has so far been the frontrunner. Sakana, which means fish in Japanese, was founded in 2023 by former Google researchers Ha and Llion Jones, one of the co-authors of the original Google research paper that outlined the transformer model architecture that underlies today's most popular large language models like OpenAI's GPT and Google's Gemini. | | | | A federal judge on Thursday questioned whether a previously undisclosed $800 million sales deal between Epic Games and Google was contributing to the parties opting for an antitrust settlement, The Verge reported. As part of the transaction, Epic would help Google market device operating system Android, and Google would help Epic market its Fortnite game, California district judge James Donato said at the hearing. Epic would pay $800 million to Google over six years for services associated with the deal, which may be tied to the services agreement. Donato asked whether the deal could constitute a "quid pro quo" incentivizing Epic to soften its demands for terms favoring other Android developers, The Verge reported. The current settlement, which Epic supports, would require Google to reduce its app store fees and make it easier to download alternative app stores. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney pushed back on the judge's assessment, according to the Verge, noting that Epic was paying Google, not the other way around. | | | Popular articles
By Catherine Perloff and Sri Muppidi
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