Weekly Recap

This week OpenAI raised another $11 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation, short of the $30 billion at $1.4 trillion it first sought. Anthropic filed to go public, and OpenAI's CFO said the company will keep investing in data centers regardless of the midterms, while promising to cover power costs and to stop using nondisclosure agreements with public officials. Money keeps coming in, but conditions are starting to attach.

The numbers that measure the pace are also being questioned from outside. METR, a nonprofit that tests frontier AI models, said Anthropic's models are improving about twice as fast as a year ago, and that most of the evidence it found most important was redacted from the public report. The same week Google pushed AI further into schools and search, and a report said the US approved Nvidia chip purchases by a Chinese firm with only an empty office. Who does the checking is the question for next week.