Silicon Valley Daily
Gemini 4 Argon can now write up to 1 million tokens in one answer, up from 64,000, but on launch day only vetted cyber defenders can use it. Independent tests put it level with GPT-6 Astra and behind Claude Opus 5.5. OpenAI said people tied to China's Moonshot AI ran the core of a campaign to extract its models' hidden reasoning, while the FTC confirmed it is investigating OpenAI and Anthropic over safety and Sam Altman declined to testify before the Senate. Reports on the White House AI accord say Mark Zuckerberg drafted it and Jensen Huang challenged Dario Amodei over his warnings. Micron's $54.2 billion quarter showed where the AI money is landing, and California became the first state to bar firing by algorithm alone.
Google unveils Gemini 4 Argon, opening it first to vetted cyber defenders
Google on Wednesday announced Gemini 4 Argon, its first new flagship model in months, and is rolling it out only to vetted cyber defenders in its Fairwind program; developers, enterprises and consumers have no date yet. Google says Argon targets long-horizon software engineering, legal and finance work, raises the output limit from 64K to 1 million tokens and scores 77.9% on DeepSWE v1.1. Introductory API pricing is set at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. Google says it is taking part in the US government's voluntary pre-release review; the Gemini 3.5 Pro it promised for June never shipped.
OpenAI ties a reasoning-extraction campaign to people linked to Moonshot AI
OpenAI said it disrupted a coordinated campaign, starting July 1, to extract its models' protected reasoning, with a spike of 16,000 attempted requests from more than 4,000 users on July 24-25. It tied a wider cluster of more than 15,000 users to the activity and shut it down by July 28. OpenAI attributes a core cluster to individuals associated with Moonshot AI, the developer of Kimi, while saying it is unclear whether all operators came from one actor. The operators did not break encryption or access stored conversations; they manipulated model interactions so hidden reasoning was reproduced in visible form.
Micron posts $54.2 billion quarter as data center sales jump 11-fold
Micron reported fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $54.23 billion for the period ended September 3, above the $51.07 billion analysts expected, and GAAP net income of $37.7 billion. CNBC says data center revenue grew elevenfold from a year earlier. Micron guided next-quarter revenue to $61.5 billion, plus or minus $1.5 billion. The company is spending $250 billion on two new campuses to make high-bandwidth memory.
FTC probes OpenAI and Anthropic as Altman skips a Senate rogue-AI hearing
An FTC spokesperson told Axios the agency is investigating OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies over potential safety risks from their products. The New York Post reported that FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson is preparing civil investigative demands that would compel executives to hand over documents and testify; the probe predates OpenAI's disclosure of the Hugging Face breach. On the same day, Sen. Josh Hawley said Sam Altman turned down an invitation to a Senate subcommittee hearing on rogue AI. OpenAI said Altman received the invitation five days before the hearing.
Accord backstory: Zuckerberg drafted it, and Huang pressed Amodei on risk talk
Semafor, citing sources, reports that the voluntary AI accord Trump signed Tuesday grew out of a conversation between Mark Zuckerberg and House Speaker Mike Johnson; Zuckerberg circulated a draft and Jensen Huang helped build support. The Wall Street Journal reports that Huang and other executives asked Anthropic's Dario Amodei at the White House why he was so extreme in public about AI risks, and Amodei replied that it is important to be honest. The accord asks signers to use outside auditors and internal controls; Trump called it morally binding, and it carries no legal penalty. The signed copy Trump posted misspells the country as "Unites States."
Outside tests put Gemini 4 level with GPT-6 Astra, behind Claude Opus 5.5
The Decoder's roundup of independent benchmarks finds Gemini 4 Argon roughly level with OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra but behind Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5. Its per-token price is low, yet it uses more than twice as many tokens per task as Astra. Bloomberg reports that some Google employees say the model does well on benchmarks but struggles with some real-world coding tasks; Google disputes that characterization.
Altman ties OpenAI IPO timing to safety as it moves compute to monitoring
Sam Altman told reporters at DevDay that OpenAI will not go public until it can make confident safety decisions; the Financial Times, syndicated by Ars Technica, says the IPO has already slipped to next year. A person familiar with its finances put annualized revenue at about $70 billion, up more than 70% since July. Chief research officer Mark Chen told MIT Technology Review that OpenAI has shifted 5% to 10% of its compute from training new models to safety work and now runs monitors on every training run.
Pentagon names Musk, Luckey and Gingrich to lead a 120-day warfare study
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth launched Project Meridian on Wednesday, a study co-led by Elon Musk, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich under Pentagon CTO Emil Michael. The group has 120 days to report on future battlefields and propose ways to develop, test and field new weapons and technology. Hegseth also announced an Autonomous Warfare Command. SpaceX and Anduril both hold large Pentagon contracts, and Axios notes it is Musk's first official advisory role since he left DOGE.
California bars employers from firing or disciplining workers by AI alone
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed SB 947, the No Robo Bosses Act, which bars California employers from relying solely on automated decision systems to fire or discipline workers. When AI output is the primary basis for such a decision, a human must corroborate it with other information such as manager evaluations or personnel files, and the worker must get written notice and a human contact. Newsom vetoed an earlier version last October. CNBC says California is the first state with such a law.
Reddit ends RSS in November and closes its public API in March
Reddit said RSS feeds will stop on November 13 and its public API will close in March 2027, calling both a common route for large-scale scraping and automated abuse. After that, AI assistants and other tools will need commercial deals to use Reddit data. Old Reddit will also be restricted in the coming months to logged-in users who have used it in the past six months. Reddit's non-advertising revenue rose 24% to $43 million in the second quarter.
Muse passes 3 million weekly users as Meta stock posts best month since 2022
Internal data reviewed by The Information shows more than 3 million people prompt Meta's Muse agent at least once a week, and more than 1 million do so daily. Meta shares closed September at $725.18, up 27% from $572.34 at the end of August, the stock's best month since November 2022. Muse launched on September 8 and topped ChatGPT in Apple iOS downloads.
ElevenLabs doubles valuation to $22 billion in a $300 million employee tender
Voice AI company ElevenLabs is letting employees sell part of their vested shares at a $22 billion valuation, double the $11 billion it reached when it raised $500 million in February. The $300 million tender was co-led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price. It is the company's second employee tender, after a $100 million sale at a $6.6 billion valuation in September 2025.
Huawei's Eric Xu says Ascend has passed Nvidia in China
Huawei rotating chairman Eric Xu said in a company Q&A that, based on data Huawei collected, its Ascend AI chips have surpassed Nvidia's share in China, while acknowledging Nvidia's China figures are hard to gather. Xu said Ascend is less advanced but its supply is assured, and that Huawei cannot yet meet domestic demand and supplies only a few customers abroad. Nvidia said on its second-quarter call that H200 shipments to China were under 1% of data center revenue.
Factory accuses an ex-adviser of leaking to Cognition; he denies it
Factory CEO Matan Grinberg said on X that he removed VC Chris Degnan as a board adviser, alleging Degnan confided in executives at rival Cognition while advising Factory. Two hours later Degnan announced he had joined Cognition as chief revenue officer; he says he resigned rather than being fired and shared no confidential information. Factory raised $200 million at a $5 billion valuation this month; Cognition raised $2 billion at $48 billion. Khosla Ventures backs both, and Vinod Khosla publicly sided against Grinberg.
Blue Origin's first outside round is oversubscribed but not yet closed
Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said the company's first-ever outside funding round is oversubscribed and has not closed. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that it had raised $10 billion at a $140 billion valuation; Limp did not confirm those figures. He said New Glenn still aims to fly again before year-end after a May launch-pad explosion, with 1,000 people working on pad repairs in two shifts.
Pentagon breach exposed records of about 2.8 million service members
The Defense Manpower Data Center is notifying current and former military personnel that attackers exploited a flaw in a file-sharing system between October 2025 and mid-July 2026 and stole unencrypted records including Social Security numbers. A Pentagon official told CNN and Federal News Network the breach affects about 2.8 million living people and nearly 300,000 who have died. The Defense Department says it has no indication the data has been misused.
OUSD stablecoin launches with Visa, Stripe, Mastercard and Coinbase as partners
Open Standard, a company backed by more than 100 corporations including Visa, Stripe and Mastercard, launched its OUSD stablecoin. Founding partners Visa, Stripe, Mastercard and Coinbase will offer initial access to businesses and developers.
OpenAI and Synopsys build GPT-Synopsys to run chip design tools
OpenAI and Synopsys signed a multi-year partnership to build GPT-Synopsys, a model meant to reason about chip design and verification and operate Synopsys' EDA tools directly. Engineers set design goals and approve the output. The model runs on OpenAI infrastructure, customer data is not used for training, and early tests with semiconductor customers are under way. The companies will sell it jointly and share revenue.
Brockman calls AI super PAC a "distraction," halts further donations
In an internal Slack message reported by The New York Times, OpenAI president Greg Brockman said the super PAC Leading the Future had become a "distraction" for the company. He has no plans to donate beyond his initial $25 million.
SpaceXAI weighs one Grok-and-X subscription, from free to $100 a month
A document seen by Bloomberg shows SpaceXAI, the AI unit of Elon Musk's SpaceX, is considering folding Grok and X into one subscription with four tiers, including a $100-a-month Ultra plan, an $8-a-month Lite plan and a free offering. The plan is under consideration.
Optical interconnect startup CScale emerges with a $145 million Series C
CScale, which is developing optical interconnect for AI accelerators, came out of stealth with a $145 million Series C led by Atreides, Valor Equity and Premji Invest. The company says the money will fund development and commercialization of interconnect for gigawatt-scale AI, and its total funding now stands at $188 million.
Bain: AI needs $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031 to fund its build-out
Bain's 2026 Global Technology Report estimates the AI industry must generate $6 trillion a year by 2031 to fund the infrastructure it is building. Bain says capital spending by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Oracle could reach $780 billion in 2026, nearly five times the level three years earlier, and AI infrastructure spending could hit $1.5 trillion a year by 2031. It expects existing AI uses to bring in $1.2 trillion to $1.8 trillion, leaving about $4.2 trillion to come from new sources.
Personal agents multiply, but only 2.2% of consumers pay for AI
OpenAI's Dots launched this week against Meta's Muse; Dots requires the Pro plan, which starts at $100 a month, while Muse is free. TechCrunch, citing PNC data in an a16z report, says 2.2% of consumers paid for AI as of May, spending an average of $31 a month. On hardware, Meta plans a pendant-style Muse Charm before the holidays, and OpenAI's Jony Ive device will ship no earlier than February 2027, according to a public filing cited by The Verge. Jason Calacanis, on All-In, predicted mainstream users will adopt these assistants by year-end.
Google's AI payments to publishers come to about 0.1% of their ad revenue
The Information reports that Google has admitted about 100 publishers to a pilot that pays sites whose content contributes to AI answers such as AI Overviews. Several small and mid-sized publishers say payments equal roughly one-tenth of one percent of their ad revenue, and some larger publishers have declined to join. One early participant is on track to earn more than $1 million a year, while several small sites have received under $1,000 over several months.
Flow Engineering raises $50 million at a $750 million valuation
Flow Engineering, which builds AI agents for hardware design, raised a $50 million Series B at a $750 million valuation. The round was co-led by Antonio Gracias and Atreides Management's Gavin Baker; Sequoia participated, and former Sequoia partner Roelof Botha invested personally and joined the board. Flow's agents align CAD drawings with product requirements and test results, and it lists Anduril, Rivian, Joby Aviation and Stoke Space as customers.
Grindr buys telehealth firm PurposeMed for $250 million
Grindr agreed to buy PurposeMed, parent of HIV-prevention telehealth provider Freddie, for $190 million in cash and $60 million in stock. Up to $70 million more in cash depends on Freddie's 2027 performance and would be paid in 2028. The deal, Grindr's first major acquisition, is expected to close in the fourth quarter. Freddie has served more than 55,000 patients in the US and Canada.
Oura postpones its Nasdaq IPO, citing market uncertainty
Smart ring maker Oura delayed its Nasdaq listing a week after formally launching the IPO on September 21, when it planned to raise up to $2.2 billion by selling 50 million shares. The company says it is profitable and expects revenue to grow 90% in fiscal 2026. Holtec Nuclear withdrew its IPO earlier this month.
Microsoft: attackers exploited a Zimbra mail flaw before it was disclosed
Microsoft reports active exploitation of CVE-2026-73570, which lets a crafted email trigger command injection on internet-facing Zimbra servers without authentication, if the optional zimbra-snmp package is installed and SNMP notifications are on. Zimbra fixed it in version 10.1.20 on July 20; the flaw was disclosed August 13, and Microsoft saw scanning tools probing it between July 28 and August 7. Microsoft says the evidence does not confirm that data transfers succeeded.
Google DeepMind introduces SynthID Bio to watermark AI-designed proteins
Google DeepMind introduced SynthID Bio, watermarking methods that embed a detectable signal in AI-generated protein sequences and predicted structures. In wet-lab tests on three targets, including the SARS-CoV-2 spike RBD and PD-L1, watermarked binders matched the hit rate and binding affinity of unwatermarked designs. DeepMind says the work aims at biosecurity, since novel AI designs can slip past traditional DNA synthesis screening.
Google replaces Gems with Skills in Gemini
Google is rolling out Skills globally in the Gemini app: saved, reusable task prompts users call with a slash, which Gemini can also generate from past chats and run automatically. The format comes from an open standard Anthropic created. Gems shut down in November for personal accounts, March 2027 for enterprise and nonprofit Workspace customers and June 2027 for education, with existing Gems converted automatically.
CoreWeave brings Nvidia Vera Rubin into production, with Cognition first
CoreWeave announced availability of Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems with Spectrum-X Ethernet at its Fully Connected event in San Francisco. Nvidia says Cognition, maker of the Devin coding agent, is the first customer running production workloads on Vera Rubin. CoreWeave will also offer Nvidia's Vera CPU and launched CoreWeave Forge for training and evaluating models and agents.
ByteDance tests a standalone Doubao assistant app, tentatively named Xiaodou
ByteDance is testing a personal AI assistant tied to Doubao that it plans to release as a standalone app, tentatively named Xiaodou, according to IT Home as cited by TechNode. The project, known internally as Spell, has been in internal testing since April and is run by the team behind the Doubao phone assistant. ByteDance has not announced it, and the name and features may change.
FedEx orders 2,000 electric trucks from Harbinger for $300 million
FedEx is ordering 2,000 electric medium-duty trucks from Harbinger in a deal worth $300 million, the startup's largest order. Harbinger, founded in 2022, plans to deliver all of them by the end of next year and has already delivered 53 trucks to FedEx. FedEx led Harbinger's $160 million Series C last year, and Axios reported in May that the company is considering an IPO.
OpenAI opens a 32-partner marketplace and previews a Decisions API
OpenAI enterprise customers can now count spending with 32 launch partners, including open-model host Baseten, against their OpenAI spend commitments, a setup The Register likens to AWS Marketplace. Only a fixed share of spend up to a cap qualifies, and eligibility is set case by case. At DevDay, Altman also previewed a Decisions API that has the Luna model choose among predefined options quickly; TechCrunch says it resembles TypeSafe's Jev decision model, which open-source clones have also copied.
DoorDash launches a text-to-order agent and unveils its delivery drone
DoorDash launched a waitlist for an AI agent that takes food orders through Apple Messages, handling requests like "order my usual" and group orders with mixed dietary needs. At its Dash Forward event it also unveiled the six-propeller drone for its DoorDash Air service and said it will start testing drone deliveries with select restaurants in Northern California.
Teen researcher gained admin access to a Microsoft analytics service
A 16-year-old researcher known as Faav, aided by an AI hacking bot he built, found that Microsoft's internal Titan analytics service did not check the signature on login tokens, letting him run SQL as an administrator without valid credentials. He estimated from metadata that the databases held about 17.3 trillion rows. Microsoft locked down the API and paid a $5,000 bug bounty.
Meta disputes a report that Muse read a user's messages without permission
Inc. columnist Jason Aten wrote that Muse read his private messages on a Mac even though the required setting was off. Meta communications VP Andy Stone said the Messages integration is opt-in and requires both Full Disk Access and the Messages connector. Meta Superintelligence Labs executive David Singleton said access involves three separate app- and system-level permission steps that a bug in Muse could not bypass.
Amazon's driver smart glasses will snap thousands of photos per shift
Bloomberg reports that the smart glasses Amazon is giving delivery drivers could take several thousand captures in a typical shift, uploading them to Amazon's AI Wellspring platform. Asked whether customers could opt out, Amazon's Viraj Chatterjee said, "We haven't thought about that." Amazon says it will blur people and license plates before images go to human review.
Daniel Ek pitches Neko's $499 body scan on All-In
Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek discussed Neko Health on the All-In podcast, describing its $499 body scan as an attempt to move care from treatment to prevention, and also weighed in on open versus closed AI models and regulating compute. Neko, which has raised $700 million, has come to the US, and TechCrunch's Equity podcast notes rivals such as Function Health and a body scanner Midjourney is building.
Construction workforce platform Miter raises a $40 million Series B
Miter, which sells workforce management software to construction companies, raised a $40 million Series B led by Battery Ventures, CEO Connor Watumull told Axios. Total funding now stands at $78 million.