Artificial Intelligence: News, Business, Science

Jan 30, 2026

AI search startup Perplexity has inked a $750 million contract with Microsoft to use its Azure cloud service. Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter, that the three-year deal gives Perplexity access to various AI models through Microsoft's Foundry program, including systems from OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI.

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Reuters that Perplexity has chosen Microsoft Foundry as its primary platform for AI models, with a Perplexity spokesperson telling Bloomberg the partnership provides access to leading models from X, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

Amazon Web Services remains the startup's main cloud provider, but last year may have strained that relationship: AWS parent company Amazon sued Perplexity over a shopping feature that automatically places orders for users.

Comment Source: Bloomberg | Reuters

Matthias Bastian

Jan 30, 2026

Short News

Anthropic has launched plugins for Cowork that turn Claude into a specialized assistant for sales, legal, finance, and other departments. Each plugin bundles skills, data connections, commands, and sub-agents. A sales plugin, for instance, hooks Claude into the company's CRM and knowledge base while adding commands for customer research and call follow-up.

The Cowork interface showing the plugin menu. | Image: Anthropic

Anthropic has open-sourced eleven plugins covering productivity, data analysis, marketing, and customer service. All components are stored as simple files, which the company says makes them easy to build and share via the Cowork interface or GitHub.

The plugin admin panel lets users organize skills, commands, agents, and connectors for different departments like sales or marketing. | Image: Anthropic

Plugin support is available as a research preview for paying Claude users. Plugins are stored locally for now, with company-wide management coming later. Cowork is Anthropic's desktop software for agentic knowledge work, though it still has fundamental cybersecurity issues.

Comment Source: Anthropic Blog

Maximilian Schreiner

Jan 30, 2026

AI in practice

Pentagon and Anthropic clash over AI weapons and surveillance safeguards

The Pentagon wants unrestricted access to AI technology. Anthropic is demanding guarantees against autonomous weapons control and domestic surveillance. A $200 million contract hangs in the balance.

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Maximilian Schreiner

Jan 30, 2026

Short News

OpenAI is preparing for an IPO in the fourth quarter of 2026, the Wall Street Journal reports. The startup, valued at $500 billion, is holding informal talks with Wall Street banks and building out its finance team. Recent hires include Ajmere Dale as Chief Accounting Officer and Cynthia Gaylor for investor relations.

According to the report, OpenAI executives are worried internally that competitor Anthropic might beat them to the public markets. Anthropic has told financial partners it's open to an IPO by the end of 2026 and is expanding its finance team with experts like Andrew Zloto and former Blackstone investor Kevin Chang.

CEO Sam Altman said in a December podcast that he's not exited about running a public company. Some of those responsibilities will fall to Fidji Simo, the former Instacart CEO who now leads OpenAI Applications.

OpenAI is trying to raise more than $100 billion. The deal would value the startup at $830 billion. SoftBank is considering investing around $30 billion, while Amazon is negotiating a stake of up to $50 billion. Both AI startups are still burning billions of dollars annually. Anthropic expects to break even in 2028, while OpenAI doesn't anticipate reaching that milestone until 2030.

Comment Source: WSJ

Maximilian Schreiner

Jan 30, 2026

Short News

SpaceX is negotiating a merger with Elon Musk's AI company xAI ahead of a planned IPO, Reuters reports. The deal would bring SpaceX, Starlink satellites, the social media platform X, and the Grok chatbot under one corporate roof.

According to Reuters, the merger would involve exchanging xAI shares for SpaceX stock. Two companies were reportedly incorporated in Nevada on January 21 to handle the transaction. One of them lists SpaceX and its CFO Bret Johnsen as managing partners. Some xAI executives may receive cash instead of shares.

No final agreement has been signed yet, and the timeline and structure remain undecided, Reuters says. SpaceX is currently the world's most valuable private company at $800 billion, while xAI was valued at $230 billion in November. According to Bloomberg, SpaceX is also exploring a merger with Tesla.

Comment Source: Reuters

Maximilian Schreiner

Jan 30, 2026

AI in practice

OpenAI develops six-layer context system to help employees navigate 600 petabytes of data

OpenAI has developed an internal AI data agent that lets employees run complex data analyses using natural language. A key technique called “Codex Enrichment” crawls the codebase to understand what tables actually contain.

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Matthias Bastian

Jan 29, 2026

AI in practice

ChatGPT Agent reportedly lost 75% of its users because nobody knew what it was actually for

OpenAI may shelve ChatGPT Agent just months after launch. Users dropped from four million to under one million, plagued by technical issues and unclear purpose: many didn’t know what to use it for or that it even existed. The branding didn’t help either, suggesting only this mode was agentic when ChatGPT already had agent capabilities.

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Matthias Bastian

Jan 29, 2026

Short News

Google Deepmind has made Project Genie publicly available. The experimental prototype, based on the Genie 3 world model shown in August, is now accessible to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US who are 18 or older.

The web app lets users create interactive worlds using text or images and explore them in real time. The system generates the environment as you move through it. Project Genie offers three main features: World Sketching for creating worlds with Nano Banana Pro and Gemini, World Exploration for moving through them, and World Remixing for changing existing worlds.

Google says the prototype still has issues: worlds don't always look realistic, characters sometimes respond slowly, and sessions are limited to 60 seconds. Some features announced in August, like promptable events, are still missing. Google plans to expand to other countries later.

The long-term goal of such world models is to serve as training environments for AI agents, allowing them to learn from simulated experiences instead of relying solely on pre-collected data.

Comment Source: Google Deepmind

Matthias Bastian

Jan 29, 2026

Short News

OpenAI researcher Kevin Weil pushes back on reports that the company plans to claim a share of discoveries made by individual users, entrepreneurs, or scientists. The clarification follows a blog post by CFO Sarah Friar outlining plans for IP licensing agreements and outcome-based pricing that would let OpenAI share in the value its tools help create.

Licensing, IP-based agreements, and outcome-based pricing will share in the value created.
Sarah Weil, via OpenAI

Weil clarified on X that Friar was referring to interest OpenAI has heard from large organizations in licensing or IP-based partnerships. The company is open to exploring creative ways to partner and align incentives, but "that's not something we're doing today." If it happens in the future, it would be a bespoke agreement with a company, "not something that would impact individual users," Weil says.

Comment Source: Weil via X

Matthias Bastian

Jan 29, 2026

AI in practice

Nearly half of Microsoft's commercial contract backlog is tied to OpenAI

Microsoft posts record cloud revenue but the stock is down double digits. Investors question whether billions in AI spending will pay off, especially with nearly half the cloud backlog coming from one customer: OpenAI.

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