| |  | Mar 02, 2026 | | | | | Supported by |  | | | | | | Welcome back! The Pentagon declares Anthropic a supply chain risk, cutting it off from military contractors, and signs a deal with OpenAI. Amazon agrees to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI.
| | | | Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Friday declared Anthropic a supply chain risk, an extraordinary sanction against an American company that is usually reserved for foreign adversaries. "Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic," Hegseth wrote. The exact scope of Hegseth's decision was not immediately clear. Hegseth did not specify whether those contractors would only be banned from using Anthropic in their work with the military. Instead, Hegseth's statement appeared to bar Anthropic from "any commercial activity" with any company that works with the military. It's unclear, for example, whether Anthropic would no longer be able to work with its primary cloud providers, Google and Amazon, which both hold defense contracts. Anthropic, Google and Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Hegseth's statement follows an announcement from President Donald Trump earlier Friday that directed all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's technology. Hegseth said that Anthropic's relationship with the federal government and the United States armed forces had been "permanently altered," and that "this decision is final." | | | | OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said late Saturday that the company's recent agreement to supply the Pentagon with AI models would fall within the company's own "redlines" limiting how it's used in military situations, but he argued that it was appropriate the government—not the company—would have the final say in some situations. "Seems fine for us to decide how ChatGPT should respond to a controversial question," he wrote on X in response to a follower's question. "But I really don't want us to decide what to do if a nuke is coming towards the U.S." The discussion followed the company's announcement late Friday that it had reached an agreement with the Pentagon about using the company's models for classified work. The announcement, which Altman acknowledged was "rushed," followed a move by the Defense Department to sanction Anthropic after the AI company said it would not agree to have its AI be used for domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems. Altman said he expected the military to uphold the laws that prevent the activities, such as domestic mass surveillance, that OpenAI's corporate policy restricts. | | | | Amazon confirmed it would invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI, in two stages, as part of a broad agreement with the ChatGPT maker that will expand OpenAI's existing $38 billion agreement to rent servers on Amazon's cloud service AWS by $100 billion and will involve OpenAI using 2 gigawatts of Amazon's Trainium AI chips through AWS. Amazon's cloud service, AWS, also will be the "exclusive third party cloud distribution provider" for OpenAI's new enterprise focused AI management service, OpenAI Frontier, the companies said. The details in the agreement were in line with what The Information has previously reported. That includes Amazon investing $15 billion by the end of March and another $35 billion "in the coming months when certain conditions are met." A securities filing by Amazon said Amazon's obligations to buy the extra shares was based on the earlier of OpenAI "meeting specified milestones" and OpenAI going public. The Information previously reported the specified milestones related to OpenAI achieving artificial general intelligence, generally defined as AI on a par with human abilities. But the formal contract, included in Amazon's securities filing, doesn't make clear what the milestones are. | | | | Nvidia is expected to announce a new chip later this month using technology from startup Groq, The Wall Street Journal reported late Friday. The chip is aimed at speeding up inference computing, the term for running AI on servers after AI models have been fully developed, the newspaper said. The industry's demand for AI chips is gradually shifting from training AI models to operating the models for users. The chip is set to be revealed at Nvidia's GTC conference in San Jose in mid-March, the Journal reported. Nvidia last year agreed to pay $20 billion to license Groq's technology and hire its leadership team. The new chip would be a break from its normal strategy, which is to release chips that are more versatile to cater to the widest possible market. The company typically touts chips that are good at both training and inference, though companies like OpenAI have reportedly been looking for faster alternatives, believing that dedicated inference chips would be better for their operations. OpenAI has agreed to be one of the biggest customers for the new chip, the Journal added. | | | | President Donald Trump said on Friday afternoon that he was directing every U.S. federal agency to stop using Anthropic's technology, further escalating a feud between Anthropic and the Pentagon over Anthropic's refusal to drop its AI safeguards. Trump's statement came an hour before a deadline for Anthropic to agree to the Pentagon's demands to make its AI available for "any lawful use" or face consequences. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had previously threatened to declare Anthropic a supply chain risk, which would have cut Anthropic off from the military supply chain, or use the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to tailor its AI models for the Pentagon. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Trump said that there would be a six month phase out period for agencies using Anthropic's policies. "Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow," Trump wrote. Trump's statement raises questions about how his administration will deal with other AI companies, especially OpenAI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees on Thursday that OpenAI shares Anthropic's same red lines—refusing to let their AI be used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous lethal weapons—and was working to negotiate a deal with the Pentagon under those terms. An OpenAI spokesperson did not immediately have a comment. | | | | OpenAI said Friday it had secured $110 billion in new investment at a valuation of $730 billion before the new money, largely from three companies: existing investor SoftBank and two tech companies— Amazon and Nvidia—with which it announced commercial partnerships. SoftBank and Nvidia will each invest $30 billion, OpenAI said. Amazon initially will invest $15 billion and will invest another $35 billion "in the coming months when certain conditions are met," Amazon said. Amazon said it had agreed to invest the remainder by the time OpenAI goes public or meets "specified milestones." It didn't detail the milestones, but The Information, which previously reported the details of the fundraise, said they could be when OpenAI achieves artificial general intelligence, generally defined as AI with humanlike intelligence. Microsoft has not decided whether to invest in the funding round, which will take place across multiple installments, according to someone with knowledge of the company's thinking. Microsoft previously invested $13 billion in OpenAI and has a significant agreement with the startup to share revenue and resell its AI. OpenAI is also raising money in this round from financial investors. It plans to raise money in this round from United Arab Emirates' fund MGX, as well as a consortium of investors in the Middle East. OpenAI will use the new funding to expand distribution of its products and pay for the computing needed to power its models. It's been fighting to catch up to Anthropic's lead in coding. OpenAI said its Codex had reached 1.6 million users, triple what it was at the start of the year. | | | | OpenAI expects to raise an additional $10 billion from financial investors by the end of March, adding to the $110 billion it's secured from SoftBank, Amazon and Nvidia, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. That additional funding will bring OpenAI's post-investment valuation to $850 billion, including a $35 billion tranche of funding from Amazon conditional on the ChatGPT-maker either going public or achieving artificial general intelligence—a loosely defined term referring to AI that's on par with humans. OpenAI's nonprofit entity, which has a stake in the for-profit OpenAI that's now worth $180 billion, may sell several billions of dollars of its shares to the financial investors, depending on the level of investment demand the for-profit receives in its fundraise, the person said. That would help other OpenAI shareholders avoid additional dilution of the value of their shares following the large equity fundraise. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman currently doesn't have equity in the company and isn't receiving any as part of the latest transaction, the person with knowledge said. OpenAI is raising an unprecedented amount of capital to be able to overcome the $219 billion in cash burn it has projected between now and 2029. It has projected it would generate cash for the first time in 2030. | | | | OpenAI's agreement with Amazon, announced on Friday, means that it will now build applications that will be available on Amazon's cloud platform after previously offering most of its products on Microsoft's Azure cloud. OpenAI and Amazon will work together on new AI agent products, and OpenAI's new Frontier application that lets companies build and organize AI agents will be available on Amazon's cloud, the two companies announced on Friday. Microsoft previously had the exclusive rights to serve as OpenAI's cloud provider, but ceded those rights last year, after which OpenAI started renting servers from other clouds like Oracle and AWS. Microsoft said in October that it still has the exclusive rights to serve OpenAI's models on its cloud, but that OpenAI could work on products other than the models themselves with third parties and serve those on other cloud platforms. Microsoft also has the rights to reuse OpenAI's technology in its own products. That agreement with Microsoft means that OpenAI's Frontier product focused on business customers will be available on Amazon's cloud, which will serve so-called "stateful" versions of OpenAI's models. But if it needs to call on OpenAI's models for so-called "stateless" API calls, those will still be hosted on Azure. Microsoft and OpenAI said in a statement Friday that OpenAI's Frontier will also be available on Azure, and reiterated that all of OpenAI's stateless models run on Azure. The announcement comes as Amazon said it would invest $50 billion in OpenAI and sell more of its cloud servers to the AI lab. | | | | Crypto venture firm Paradigm is raising as much as $1.5 billion for a new fund that will invest in broader tech including artificial intelligence and robotics, The Wall Street Journal reported. The move comes as more crypto firms and investors are looking to artificial intelligence for growth, amid a crypto bear market. They are investing in AI businesses with links to crypto, such as products to support AI agents that use crypto for payments. Matt Huang, the co-founder of Paradigm, currently also leads Tempo, a new blockchain co-created by Stripe. Tempo counts OpenAI and Anthropic among its partners. Paradigm, founded in 2018, is one of the largest crypto venture firms. It previously raised a $2.5 billion fund in 2021 and a $850 million fund in 2024 and has invested in Kalshi, Coinbase, and defunct crypto exchange FTX. In 2023, it drew a backlash from the crypto industry when it briefly removed mentions of crypto from its website. It later reversed the changes and said it's not pivoting away from crypto. | | | | OpenAI earlier this year fired an employee for trading on prediction markets using confidential company information in violation of company policies after an investigation, according to a spokesperson for the company. CEO of Applications Fidji Simo announced the termination to employees earlier this year, the spokesperson said. Insider trading on prediction markets is on the rise as platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket, which allow users to place small bets on the outcome of events from AI model releases to sporting events, grow in popularity. Earlier this week, Kalshi announced that it has suspended and fined two accounts for insider trading. Wired first reported the news of the termination. | | | | | Popular articles
By Sri Muppidi, Anissa Gardizy and Aaron Holmes
By Stephanie Palazzolo and Rocket Drew
| | | | | Opportunities Empower your teams to stay ahead of market trends with the most trusted tech journalism.
Learn more
Reach The Information's influential audience with your message. Connect with our team | | | | | |
0 comentários:
Postar um comentário