| |  | Feb 06, 2026 | | | | | Supported by |  | | | | | | TGIF! Anthropic releases its new flagship model, Claude Opus 4.6. OpenAI unveils Frontier, an AI agent platform for business customers. Amazon plans to spend $200 billion on capital expenditures this year.
| | | | Anthropic on Thursday released its latest flagship model, Claude Opus 4.6, which the company said is better at longer-duration tasks, according to a blog post. That means the model will be better for tasks like financial analysis, doing research and creating spreadsheets and presentations, the blog post said. The progress Anthropic's AI has made in finance could prove worrying for firms that sell financial services-related software and data. In the hours after Anthropic's release, shares of S&P Global fell 3%, while shares of Factset fell 7%. Anthropic also released a "preview" version of Claude, its competitor to ChatGPT, that acts as an assistant that can draft and edit PowerPoint presentations. The company made new updates to its AI assistant for Excel, which helps with building debugging spreadsheets. Claude Opus 4.6 beat out models from OpenAI and Google on the Finance Agent benchmark, which evaluates how well AI performs on core financial analyst tasks, according to data Anthropic published in its blog post. | | | | OpenAI on Thursday unveiled a new platform for business customers to develop, run and manage AI agents that can take actions on behalf of employees, confirming The Information's reporting last month. OpenAI lists HP, Intuit and Uber, among others, as customers of its Frontier platform. The company says Frontier should help businesses overcome some of the key hurdles of implementing AI, such as helping agents get access to the right tools, managing identity and permissioning and incorporating feedback to improve them. OpenAI is also hiring hundreds of AI consultants, also known as forward-deployed engineers, to support businesses' adoption of AI, The Information reported on Wednesday. These engineers can help large companies develop custom AI applications and agents to automate tasks based on the clients' own data. OpenAI's success with businesses could help pave the path for an eventual initial public offering. It expects to increase revenue from business customers to 50% by the end of the year from roughly 40% of OpenAI's revenue, as of last month. | | | | Amazon said on Thursday it expects capital expenditures to rise to $200 billion this year as it pours more money into artificial intelligence efforts. The company's shares fell more than 7% in after hours trading. That would mark a jump from Amazon's 2025 spending of $131.8 billion. It's also higher than cloud and AI competitor Google's planned spending of between $175 billion and $185 billion this year. Amazon said the 2026 spending would focus on areas including AI and chips as well as robotics and its Leo satellite internet service. Revenue in the Amazon Web Services cloud unit rose by 24% to $35.6 billion in the fourth quarter, up from 20% growth the previous quarter and AWS' fastest revenue growth since 2022. Amazon's overall net sales rose 14% to $213.4 billion in the fourth quarter, compared to 13% growth in the second and third quarters of 2025. | | | | Apple CEO Tim Cook acknowledged at an all-hands staff meeting on Thursday that some company employees were upset about the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. He voiced his support for both immigrants and law enforcement and said he was saddened by the feelings people were experiencing around recent events, according to a person who was present at the meeting. The meeting was called after dozens of current and former Apple employees signed a pledge condemning the U.S.'s Immigration and Customs Enforcement recent enforcement actions in cities like Minneapolis and the killing of Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti last month. On the same day Pretti died, Cook attended a White House screening of Melania, a documentary about the First Lady. Separately, in answer to a question about recent leadership departures, Cooke said he spends a lot of time thinking about who will do his job 10 years from now, and that everyone in leadership should be thinking that way. | | | | Alibaba Group, the Chinese e-commerce giant, is offering hundreds of millions of dollars in shopping vouchers and other promotions to users of its Qwen AI chatbot app during the Lunar New Year holiday. Alibaba's effort to boost Qwen's usage is part of an intensifying battle among Chinese tech giants to build the biggest consumer AI platform in the country. Tencent Holdings, which is behind the Yuanbao AI chatbot app, is also offering giveaways during the holiday, while ByteDance operates Doubao, China's largest AI app by users. Alibaba is offering a free shopping voucher worth 25 yuan ($3.60) to every user of its Qwen app, whose AI shopping function lets consumers make online purchases of food, drinks and groceries. Next week, it will start gifting digital red envelopes containing random amounts of money to users, allowing them to win up to 2,888 yuan in cash. Alibaba plans to spend around 3 billion yuan ($432 million) on Qwen's overall holiday giveaway campaign. Tencent's Yuanbao, meanwhile, started offering red envelopes to users earlier this month. As Alibaba competes with ByteDance and Tencent over China's 1.4 billion people, the company is betting on the success of its Qwen app, which was launched in November. Since then, it has connected the app to its e-commerce, online travel, mapping and payments business to enable the chatbot to act as an AI agent to help them with tasks such as ordering snacks and booking trips. | | | | | Popular articles
By Michael Roddan and Yueqi Yang
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