Bytedance has released its new Seed2.0 AI model series. The story is a familiar one by now: the models match Western AI models on benchmarks while costing a fraction of the price.
Google and OpenAI are complaining about data theft—yes, you read that right. According to Google, Gemini was hit with a massive cloning attempt through distillation, with a single campaign firing over 100,000 requests at the model, NBC News reports. Google calls it intellectual property theft, pointing to companies and researchers chasing a competitive edge.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has sent a memo to the US Congress accusing DeepSeek of using disguised methods to copy American AI models. The memo also flags China's energy buildout, ten times the new electricity capacity the US added by 2025, and confirms ChatGPT is growing at around ten percent per month.
Distillation floods a model with targeted prompts to extract its internal logic, especially its "reasoning steps," then uses that knowledge to build a cheaper clone, potentially skipping billions in training costs. Google security head John Hultquist warns smaller companies running their own AI models face the same risk, particularly if those models were trained on sensitive business data.
Anthropic’s revenue has grown 10x year over year, and CEO Dario Amodei believes Nobel Prize-level AI is maybe just a year or two away. So why isn’t he going all in on compute? Because being off by even one year could mean bankruptcy, and he’s not sure his competitors have done the math.
In the future, AI agents won’t just search the web; they’ll browse it, shop on it, and complete tasks on their own. At least that’s Big AI’s vision, and Google’s WebMCP wants to turn websites into standardized interfaces for these agents. For website operators who depend on human visitors, that could be a serious problem.
xAI has lost half of its founders in recent weeks and months. Elon Musk said on X that some departures were part of a restructuring where "unfortunately we had to part with some people" to "improve speed of execution."
But former employees tell a different story. One ex-employee told The Verge that many people at the company had grown disillusioned with Grok's focus on NSFW content and its lack of safety standards. A second former employee backed that up: "There is zero safety whatsoever in the company." According to the source, Musk deliberately pushed to make the model less restricted, viewing safety measures as censorship. Among other things, Grok had generated sexualized images of children.
You survive by shutting up and doing what Elon wants.
Another common complaint is that xAI is "stuck in the catch-up phase" without shipping anything fundamentally new compared to OpenAI or Anthropic, even though they're all trying to do the same thing anyway. Several people who left are now using money from the SpaceX merger to start their own companies, including AI infrastructure startup Nuraline.
Anthropic has closed a $30 billion Series G funding round, bringing the AI company's post-money valuation to $380 billion.
The round was led by GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, and U.S. investment firm Coatue. D. E. Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ, and MGX, an Abu Dhabi-based technology investment fund, joined as co-leads. Microsoft and Nvidia also participated, building on previously announced strategic partnerships. Anthropic says it will use the capital for research, product development, and infrastructure expansion.
Anthropic reports annualized revenue of $14 billion, having grown more than tenfold in each of the past three years. Claude Code, the company's coding tool, now accounts for over $2.5 billion in annualized revenue on its own.
One notable detail about how companies are using AI: more than 500 customers spend over $1 million per year on Claude, according to Anthropic, and eight of the ten largest Fortune companies are among its users.
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicts the end of traditional white-collar work in 18 months.
"I think that we're going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks," Suleyman says in an interview with the Financial Times. "So white-collar work, where you're sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months."
Suleyman leads Microsoft's AI division, which has invested billions in OpenAI and Anthropic and operates Copilot, one of the most widely used AI work tools. He describes the shift as already underway: In software engineering, developers are already using "AI-assisted coding for the vast majority of their code production."
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei even predicted that half of entry-level office jobs could disappear within one to five years. He is already observing that fewer junior and mid-level employees are needed. AI could be better than humans in many areas within one to two years, while the labor market adapts with a delay.
Suleyman's boss, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, on the other hand, sees more of a shift where existing cognitive tasks might be automated, but new, more demanding tasks would emerge.
OpenAI’s new GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark is a smaller coding model that runs on Cerebras chips and pushes over 1,000 tokens per second. It’s the company’s first model built specifically for real-time programming.
