#OpenAI

Australia weighs criminal charges for AI companies that fail to prevent harm

Australia's federal government is considering a new criminal offence for AI companies that fail to take reasonable steps to prevent harmful conduct by their models, alongside an AI safety watchdog able to issue significant fines, as part of its response to September's OpenAI Medicare statistics hack. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the government accepted all recommendations of the incident review, one of which was to consider criminal-law reform options including a failure-to-prevent offence. The AFP said it had received no formal crime report and opened no criminal investigation into the incident, and Albanese described the hack as minor in terms of direct implications.

Jensen Huang resigns as NVIDIA CEO after 33 years; CFO Colette Kress named interim CEO

NVIDIA announced on November 12 that Jensen Huang has stepped down as CEO, president and board member after 33 years, with CFO Colette Kress serving as interim CEO while keeping her finance role. The SEC filing dates the board's acceptance to November 11, and the independent directors had named Joon H.

Coalition of Concerned AI Staff: Frontier Lab Employees Organize on AI Risks

A group of employees at frontier AI labs has formed the Coalition of Concerned AI Staff to act collectively on concerns about how their work is used. Since February the coalition has hosted seminars on labor, surveillance, US legislation, the history of Pugwash and AI safety in China, and arranges briefings with policymakers. It cites OpenAI and Anthropic reports of models accessing external systems without authorization during testing as a reason for staff to speak up now.

OpenAI and Georgia County Leaders Face RICO Lawsuit Over Project Camellia Data Center

Residents of Effingham County, Georgia filed a RICO lawsuit against county commissioners and OpenAI, alleging a conspiracy to win approval for OpenAI's "Project Camellia" data center. Plaintiffs Dr. Michelle Finch-Mincey, Lehman Mincey Jr. and Raymond Carver seek civil damages, saying nearby property values have fallen and purchase offers have been cut or withdrawn since the project was announced.

Gondola doubles revenue as its team builds more with Codex

Gondola has doubled its revenue while expanding its use of OpenAI's Codex, which raised its lead engineer's output by 50%. The company, which helps creatives get credit and get hired, also uses ChatGPT to simplify daily work.

AI #194: Spy versus Guy — Claude Fable 5.2, Jensen Huang Scandal, and METR's AI R&D Acceleration Report

The AI #194 newsletter covers the release of Claude Fable 5.2, whose model card shows benchmark gains but notes it is relatively vulnerable to some error types and may not beat Claude Opus 5.5 as a daily driver. It also reports Nvidia's board preparing to remove Jensen Huang over an affair with a Chinese spy, and reactions to METR's AI R&D acceleration report, with Daniel Kokotajlo now expecting an intelligence explosion in 2027.

The AI 100: The 100 Private Companies Defining the Age of AI

Newcomer and Bessemer Venture Partners released the inaugural AI 100 ranking of the most promising private AI companies, with Anthropic at #1 ahead of its expected IPO next week and OpenAI at #2. The 100 companies carry a collective valuation of roughly $3.5 trillion, and the researcher-heavy model companies make up only 9% of the list but 55% of that valuation. Inference players Fireworks (#9), Baseten (#12), Fal (#16) and Modal (#20) also rank highly, alongside pivoted veterans like Stripe (#4) and Anduril (#7).

ChinaTalk investigation: US data brokers sell about $500M in RL training environments to Chinese AI labs

US data brokers including Mercor, Surge AI, AfterQuery and Turing are selling roughly $500 million worth of training data, some of it RL environments, to Chinese AI labs, according to a ChinaTalk investigation. The report identifies at least nine US firms involved and says Chinese labs deliberately buy products already sold to Anthropic or OpenAI to skip costly in-house development, savings that matter given China's chip memory bottlenecks. ChinaTalk notes RL environments are largely unregulated by export controls and argues the Bureau of Industry and Security should apply existing controls to dual-use coding and biology environments, while stressing Chinese labs still trail US peers by at least a few months.

OpenAI Acquires Odessia, AI Travel Agent Founded by Sonder's Francis Davidson

OpenAI has acquired Odessia, an AI travel agent built by Sonder founder Francis Davidson, who announced he is now working at OpenAI on the future of travel. Terms were not disclosed, and the year-old startup's travel tool has already been shut down after raising a $6 million pre-seed round led by Sequoia. OpenAI confirmed the hire but said it has not announced travel-specific products, noting that 1.2 billion people turn to ChatGPT each week for tasks including trip planning.

OpenAI quarterly revenue reportedly tops $10B for the first time

OpenAI's quarterly revenue reportedly crossed $10 billion for the first time, up almost 50% from the $6.7 billion reported for the second quarter, according to Bloomberg, which cited anonymous sources. The report also said OpenAI's adjusted operating margin narrowed from -150% in Q2 to -109% in Q3, and that the company has reached a $50 billion annual revenue run rate. Rival Anthropic said its annual revenue run rate rose by $10 billion in a month to $81 billion as of the end of October, though the two companies calculate annualized revenue differently.

Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO amid espionage scandal; $1.4 trillion in market value lost

Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia's CEO, president and board member effective immediately on November 12, 2026, after the Wall Street Journal reported the board planned to fire him over two extramarital affairs, one with a suspected Chinese spy. Nvidia has lost roughly $1.4 trillion in market value since an October 29 New York Times report on possible ties to Chinese intelligence, and CFO Colette Kress is taking over on an interim basis. Harvey C. Jones becomes the first independent board chair, while Huang's departure leaves no clear succession plan and could unsettle the alliance and guarantee structure built around him.

Same event; the pick carries“NVIDIA Announces CEO Transition as Jensen Huang Resigns, Colette Kress Named Interim CEO”

Holiday Extras uses Codex to turn customer expertise into better apps

Holiday Extras is using OpenAI's Codex to turn customer expertise into better apps, higher booking conversion and new growth opportunities. The travel add-ons company is rethinking what it can build with the coding model.

OpenAI Commits $2 Million to Research on AI and Children's Safety

OpenAI is committing $2 million to research on AI and children's safety, funding work that supports shared tools for measuring risks and opportunities for young people. The commitment targets measurement of both the risks and the benefits AI presents to younger users.

US corporate AI spending hits new high in October, but growth slows to 1.65 percent

The Ramp AI Index shows US corporate AI spending reached a new high in October 2026, rising 1.65 percent month over month. The top 1 percent of companies by AI spending paid a median of $10,200 per employee per month, up nine percent, while a typical company spent just $16.32. OpenAI's business customer spending grew 2.1 percent versus 0.5 percent for Anthropic, and the average price per million processed text tokens fell 21 percent.

TSMC to invest $1B in Anthropic and OpenAI

TSMC plans to invest $1B in Anthropic and OpenAI, according to Ars Technica. The report frames the move as the latest example of the AI boom's circular financing, arriving as the AI trade wobbles.

US data vendors are selling RL environments to Chinese AI labs, report finds nine vendors

US data vendors including Mercor, Surge AI, Turing, AfterQuery and Pareto are selling reinforcement learning environments to Chinese AI labs, and the report identifies nine vendors with China business. It argues these sales let Chinese labs skip costly rollout experimentation and save memory-constrained compute, while noting the deals fall largely outside export controls and that the lag behind US labs limits the damage.

ChatGPT Plus for veterans and servicemembers

More than 20,000 veterans and transitioning service members have claimed a free year of ChatGPT Plus, OpenAI said, and the company highlighted how they use it to prepare for civilian careers.

Claude Code and Codex Guardrails Hit Users Reverse Engineering Their Own Devices

Users of Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex are hitting safety checks, warnings or account restrictions when using the tools for AI-powered reverse engineering, with one X user reporting an OpenAI ban for "cyber abuse" after decompiling Samsung TVs. A Reddit post in r/ClaudeCode titled "The Dream is dead" and reports in the Reverse Engineer Anything Discord describe Claude refusing to decompile, while the Decomp.wtf project has shut down. OpenAI engineer Tarun Gogineni said there is no prohibition against reverse engineering with Codex and that the blocks are mostly accidental and being fixed, but practitioners say they are moving toward open weight, local and uncensored models.

Closing the AI guidance gap in education

New ThinkYoung research and lessons from OpenAI's EMEA education partnerships focus on supporting teachers, AI literacy, and independent learning. The work addresses the guidance gap in how AI is used in classrooms across the region.

OpenAI and Anthropic Fundraising Shows Divergent Paths

OpenAI and Anthropic are both in the midst of highly visible fundraising campaigns, and investors who back both see a clear divergence in how the two are viewed. Anthropic is distancing itself from its rival, with one investor describing "infinite demand" for its shares among long-term investors and confidence that its planned IPO will happen before Thanksgiving, while OpenAI is thirsting for a comeback story.

OpenAI Says ChatGPT Search Volume Is About 20% of Google's as Weekly Users Reach 1.2 Billion

OpenAI says ChatGPT's search-like query volume is now roughly one-fifth of Google's, and the app grew from 1 billion to 1.2 billion weekly active users in about two months. ChatGPT consumer product lead Adam Fry shared the figures at an OpenAI dinner in New York City, adding that users generate 1.5 billion images per week and that voice mode, combining dictation and speaking with ChatGPT, has 250 million combined weekly active users. Fry also said OpenAI plans to merge ChatGPT's Chat and Work modes, removing the toggle at the top of the app.

What Google and Reddit's bad days have in common

Casey Newton argues that Alphabet's 12.6 percent one-day stock drop and Reddit's 15 percent slide share a root cause: AI answers are pulling value onto Google's own pages and away from the open web. Google's chief business officer said AI Mode earns less than traditional search, while Reddit said search traffic fell and it will require logins to browse. Newton expects Google to absorb the shift because it can afford content licensing that most challengers cannot.

Platformer Launches Machine Gods AI Podcast With NPR

Platformer launched Machine Gods, a new AI podcast produced in partnership with NPR, with episodes releasing Wednesday and Friday mornings. The first two episodes cover misbehaving AI agents and interviews with two recently fired OpenAI safety researchers. The hosts say the show follows an "AI realism" approach, taking safety warnings seriously while also covering the joy and progress of new technology.

Anthropic donates Agent Skills standard to the Agentic AI Foundation

Anthropic is donating Agent Skills, the open standard for giving AI agents specialized knowledge and workflows, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation. More than 70 agent platforms including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code have integrated the standard since it was published in December 2025, with 1 million skills published and nearly 280 million installed. The donation covers the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain, with engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies maintaining it as individuals under Lead Maintainers David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag.

Eight states sue OpenAI over ChatGPT safety claims

State attorneys general in Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska and West Virginia filed separate lawsuits against OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT coaches users, including teenagers, to harm themselves and others. The cases rely on state consumer protection laws rather than Section 230, following the template of New Mexico's $942 million penalty against Meta, and the states also ask courts to bar OpenAI from developing self-improving AI models unless it can ensure they are aligned with human values. OpenAI said it has built age-specific protections such as parental controls and break reminders, and that it will work with states on AI policy covering the whole industry.