OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman has donated $25 million to MAGA Inc., Donald Trump's super PAC, according to a Bloomberg report citing FEC filings. The donation is part of $102 million MAGA Inc. raised in the second half of 2025, bringing its war chest to $294 million by year's end. Three donors accounted for over half: Brockman, crypto exchange Crypto.com ($20 million), and private equity investor Konstantin Sokolov ($11 million).
For days, users have been flooding Grok with pictures of half-naked people, from young women to soccer stars. The problem stems from Grok's image editing feature, which lets users modify people in photos—including swapping their clothes for bikinis or lingerie. All it takes is a simple text command. Now, one user has discovered that Grok even generated such images of children.
X user "Xyless" discovered Grok would generate sexualized images of children. | via X
The discovery forced xAI to respond. The company acknowledged "lapses in safeguards" and said it was "urgently fixing them." Child sexual abuse material is "illegal and prohibited," xAI wrote.
The US Army is establishing a new career track for officers specializing in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Called "49B AI/ML Officer," the new specialization aims to transform the army into a data-driven, AI-capable fighting force.
The first selection round kicks off in January 2026, with retraining scheduled to wrap up by the end of fiscal year 2026. Applicants with advanced academic and technical backgrounds in AI-related fields will have the best shot at getting in. "Ultimately, it's about building a force that can outthink, outpace, and outmaneuver any adversary," says Lt. Col. Orlandon Howard, US Army spokesperson, calling it a "deliberate and crucial step in keeping pace with present and future operational requirements."
Once trained, these officers will focus on speeding up battlefield decision-making, improving logistics, and supporting robotics and autonomous systems. The army is also considering opening the program to warrant officers down the line.
Baidu's AI chip division, Kunlunxin, has confidentially filed for an IPO in Hong Kong. The company submitted its application on January 1, setting the stage for a spin-off while keeping Kunlunxin under Baidu's umbrella. According to Reuters, a recent financing round valued the company at around $3 billion. The final size of the offering hasn't been determined yet.
Kunlunxin started as an internal unit back in 2012 and has primarily supplied chips to Baidu. Over the past two years, though, the company has been expanding its customer base beyond its parent company.
OpenAI has reportedly shifted production of its first AI hardware device from Luxshare to Foxconn. The company wants to avoid manufacturing in China, according to Taiwanese business newspaper Economic Daily News, citing supply chain sources. Instead, production will happen in Vietnam or the US.
The device is still in the design phase and could turn out to be a smart pen or portable audio gadget. It's expected to have a microphone and camera, letting users transfer handwritten notes directly to ChatGPT. The company is aiming for a launch in 2026 or 2027, and according to the newspaper, Foxconn would handle all OpenAI orders, from cloud infrastructure to consumer devices. OpenAI is calling the project "Gumdrop" internally.
OpenAI is building its planned ChatGPT hardware around conversation. To make that work, the company is pouring resources into improving its audio AI models, according to The Information. Over the past two months, OpenAI has combined several internal teams to focus on audio.
Right now, OpenAI's audio models can't match the accuracy and response speed of their text-based counterparts, according to current and former employees. A new audio model architecture in development aims to sound more natural and emotional, deliver more accurate answers, and handle real-time back-and-forth conversation. OpenAI is targeting a release in the first quarter of 2026. Kundan Kumar, a researcher the company recruited from Character.AI, is leading the effort.
Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI, the company behind the Kimi chatbot, has closed a $500 million Series C funding round. The deal values the company at $4.3 billion, according to an exclusive report from LatePost. IDG led the round with $150 million, while existing investors including Alibaba, Tencent, and Wang Huiwen also participated.
CEO Yang Zhilin said in an internal letter that the company now holds more than $1.4 billion in cash. The funds will go toward expanding computing capacity and developing the K3 model. An insider says this cushion means Moonshot AI isn't rushing to go public, unlike Zhipu and MiniMax, two other Chinese AI startups pushing for IPOs. In September, Moonshot AI launched its "OK Computer" agent feature and a subscription model. According to Yang, paying users are growing 170 percent month over month.
This year, Moonshot AI made waves with its Kimi-K2-Thinking model, an open-source reasoning model that held its own against proprietary competitors.
