| |  | Sep 30, 2025 | | | | | Supported by |  | | | | | | Happy Tuesday! OpenAI generates $4.3 billion in revenue but burns $2.5 billion in the first half. An investor group is buying Electronic Arts for $55 billion. Anthropic releases its latest model, Claude Sonnet 4.5.
| | | | In the first half of 2025, OpenAI generated $4.3 billion in revenue, putting the company on track to meet its full-year revenue projection of $13 billion, The Information reported Tuesday. Meanwhile, the company burned $2.5 billion over the same time period, in large part due to its high research and development costs for developing its AI models. Other significant costs included $2 billion spent on sales and marketing, nearly doubling what OpenAI spent on sales and marketing in all of 2024. Though not a cash expense, OpenAI also spent nearly $2.5 billion on stock-based equity compensation in the first six months of 2025, nearly double what it spent in the same period a year earlier, reflecting an increasingly competitive market for talent. OpenAI posted an operating loss of $7.8 billion in the first half. The company is required to hand over 20% of its revenue to Microsoft, though it has projected that percentage will fall over time, helping it save $50 billion through 2030. As OpenAI closes out the first half of the year, it's looking to sell employee shares in a tender offer that would value its for-profit arm at about $500 billion, up from $260 billion around the start of this year. It's also beginning an effort to raise tens of billions of dollars from Nvidia and others for data centers it plans to operate. | | | | An investor group including Saudi Arabia's PIF, Silver Lake and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners is buying Electronic Arts for $55 billion in cash, or $210 a share, a significant premium to where the videogame giant has been trading in recent years. Electronic Arts is one of the most prominent makers of mass market video games, responsible for a variety of sports-related games including Madden NFL, as well as The Sims, Battlefield and Titanfall. But its sales growth in recent years has been anemic, as Netflix-like game services have emerged. The company throws off plenty of cash, however—its free cash flow last year was just over $2 billion—which makes it ideal for a private equity led takeover. The companies said this was the biggest all-cash take-private in history. They have lined up $20 billion in debt, while the equity contribution will total $36 billion. EA shares, which rose 15% on Friday on word of the deal, were trading up 5.5% in pre-market trading on Monday. | | | | Anthropic on Monday released its latest model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, according to a blog post. The model outperforms OpenAI's flagship GPT-5 model on a popular software engineering benchmark, and is able to work for more than 30 hours straight on complex, multi-step tasks, the blog post said. Claude Sonnet 4.5 also shows improved performance compared to older Anthropic models in specific domains like finance, law and medicine, the blog post said. Anthropic also said that its Claude chatbot will now be able to create and edit Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. These capabilities would be similar to ones OpenAI released earlier this year, and could make both companies' business customers less dependent on productivity apps from Microsoft. Additionally, Anthropic is releasing new software that will allow developers to build agents that can conduct research, handle customer support tickets or analyze investment opportunities. | | | | Travel management platform TravelPerk hired investment bankers for an upcoming U.S. initial public offering, the latest among a string of travel-themed IPOs, according to a person with direct knowledge of the deal. The Barcelona-based company has hired Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Jefferies, the person said. Representatives of the investment banks declined to comment. TravelPerk declined to comment. TravelPerk was last valued at $2.7 billion in January 2025. Its backers include General Catalyst, Softbank Vision Fund, Blackstone, EQT Growth and Sequoia Capital. It builds software to help businesses manage corporate travel and expenses. | | | | OpenAI is launching a new checkout feature for ChatGPT that will allow users to purchase products directly in the chatbot, according to a post on Monday from OpenAI's CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo. Initially, products available will come from small merchants who sell on Etsy, while "over a million Shopify merchants" including Glossier and Spanx, are "coming soon." When users ask ChatGPT for product recommendations, the chatbot will list out its suggestions, along with details like the product's price, availability and whether this new feature, called "Instant Checkout," is enabled. The company said that Instant Checkout items will not get a boost in product rankings. After the user orders a product, the merchant will handle the details, including sending out a confirmation email and handling any returns and support. The user can see the order in ChatGPT and track it on the merchant's site. However, Instant Checkout doesn't let merchants sign up customers for marketing emails for orders placed through ChatGPT. Instant Checkout is powered by an open standard built by OpenAI and Stripe called the "Agentic Commerce Protocol." | | | | The U.S. Department of Commerce is expanding its export restrictions to cover the subsidiaries of blacklisted firms in a move that steps up Washington's effort to block Chinese companies' access to U.S. technology and suppliers. Under the new export rules the department announced on Monday, the blacklist, known as the Entity List, will include not only the blacklisted companies but also subsidiaries in which they own a stake of 50% or more. If a blacklisted company owns a significant minority stake in another entity, that entity will be subject to additional due diligence requirements, the department said. The move is aimed at preventing blacklisted firms from circumventing restrictions by using affiliated entities. "For too long, loopholes have enabled exports that undermine American national security and foreign policy interests," said Jeffrey Kessler, Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security, in the department's statement. The Trump administration's latest move comes amid an intense tech rivalry between the U.S. and China. Chinese tech companies that are on the Entity List include Huawei Technologies, drone maker DJI and artificial intelligence model developer Zhipu AI, among others. | | | | California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday signed an artificial intelligence safety bill that requires the largest AI companies to write, publish, and comply with their own safety policies for managing severe risks from their technology. Many AI companies have taken those steps voluntarily, but SB 53 allows the state's attorney general to issue penalties if companies violate their safety policies. It also requires AI companies to report to state officials if their models are involved in safety incidents, such as theft of a model that is then used to cause harm. State AI laws have been under scrutiny this year due to Congressional attempts to ban states from passing their own AI laws. Senator Ted Cruz's attempt to include such a ban in the 'Big Beautiful' budget bill failed, but efforts to reintroduce a ban are ongoing. SB 53 has been one of the most watched state AI bills of the year, in part because it follows an earlier AI safety bill from the same author, state senator Scott Wiener, which Newsom vetoed last year. In the wake of his veto, Newsom assembled a working group to issue policy recommendations, such as transparency measures and whistleblower protections, which SB 53 adopted. Newsom said last week that SB 53 "strikes the right balance" in terms of respecting the interests of the AI industry. The bill was endorsed by Anthropic, as well as former Y Combinator president Geoff Ralston and Mythos Ventures, and Elicit, a startup developing an AI research assistant. | | | | YouTube agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit from President Donald Trump over the suspension of his account after the Jan. 6 riots, according to a court filing on Monday. YouTube followed Meta and Elon Musk's X in settling similar cases with Trump. Meta agreed to pay $25 million and X agreed to pay $10 million. $22 million of YouTube's payment will go towards the nonprofit Trust for the National Mall for the construction of the "White House State Ballroom," with the remainder going to other plaintiffs in the case. The settlement notice filed Monday noted that the settlement "shall not constitute an admission of liability or fault on the part of the Defendants." YouTube said last week that it would reinstate accounts banned for violating its policies on Covid-19 and election integrity. | | | | Robo-advisory startup Wealthfront on Monday filed paperwork for an initial public offering that revealed its annual revenue jumped 43% to $309 million during the 12 months through January. The company recorded a profit of $194 million, more than double its net income a year earlier. The fintech company, which was an early leader in the market for automated investing, is the latest in a rush of fintech firms going public, following Chime and Klarna. Wealthfront was founded in 2008 and was nearly bought by UBS for $1.4 billion in 2022, but the deal collapsed at a time when fintech valuations crashed. Instead, UBS at the time invested in the startup at that valuation. Wealthfront has raised money from VC firms including Index Ventures, Tiger Global Management and Spark Capital. Wealthfront said it has 1.3 million customers as of July this year and more than $88 billion in assets on its platform. | | | | Travel software company Navan is planning to raise $750 million in its October public offering, though the actual size of the offering could still change, according to people with direct knowledge of the deal. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company showed in its IPO filings that revenue rose 30% to $329 million for the six months ended July 31 but showed a net loss of $100 million for the same period. A spokesperson for Navan declined to comment. Founded 10 years ago as TripActions, Navan was valued at $9.2 billion in 2022 and its backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Navan's listing is one of the latest travel-themed IPOs. Barcelona-based TravelPerk, which also makes software to manage corporate travel and expenses, hired investment banks for its US IPO, The Information reported earlier today. Klook, a Hong Kong-based online travel startup backed by SoftBank and HongShan Capital also hired investment banks for a US IPO, Reuters reported. | | | | | Popular articles
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