funding

Anthropic is reportedly exploring a $50 billion funding round that could value it near $1 trillion, while VP JD Vance held a private AI call with Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei about AI risks to critical infrastructure.

Vellum announces a $25M funding round to build the world's first Personal Intelligence, introducing an AI assistant named @ash_vellum.

Venture capitalists have invested $50 million in humanoid robot startups that rely solely on vision-based systems.

Moonshot AI, the maker of the Kimi chatbot, has reached a $20 billion valuation following a funding round led by Meituan, marking a quadrupling of its value in just a few months.

DeepSeek is in talks to raise billions in funding from China's National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, valuing the startup at approximately $50 billion.

Tailscale co-founder David Crawshaw announces Series A for exe.dev, a new cloud provider aiming to fix fundamental abstraction mismatches in current clouds like rigid VM sizing and limiting PaaS layers.

The 2026 Forbes AI 50 list reveals that OpenAI and Anthropic alone have raised $242.6B, representing 80% of the $305.6B total raised by all listed AI companies.

Amazon invests an additional $5B in Anthropic, bringing its total to $13B, while Anthropic commits to spend $100B on AWS over 10 years for up to 5 GW of compute to train and run Claude.

OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation, becoming the fastest-growing technology platform to reach 1 billion weekly active users and generating $2 billion in monthly revenue by end of 2024. The round was anchored by Amazon, NVIDIA, and SoftBank, with participation from major global institutions and individual investors.

Google announces a $12.5 million pledge as a founding member of the Linux Foundation's Alpha-Omega Project to advance open source security in the AI era, alongside Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft/GitHub, and OpenAI. The funding will help maintainers address AI-driven threats and deploy advanced security tools like Big Sleep and CodeMender.

OpenAI announces $110B in new investment at a $730B pre-money valuation, including major funding from SoftBank, NVIDIA, and Amazon, along with strategic partnerships to expand compute capacity and global reach for AI products. The funding aims to accelerate deployment of frontier AI across consumers, developers, and enterprises worldwide.

OpenAI is contributing $7.5 million to The Alignment Project, a global independent alignment research fund created by the UK AI Security Institute, helping make it one of the largest dedicated funding efforts for independent alignment research to date. The total fund exceeds £27 million and will support a broad portfolio of alignment research projects worldwide.

OpenAI and the Gates Foundation announce Horizon 1000, a $50 million initiative to deploy AI capabilities across 1,000 primary healthcare clinics in African countries, starting with Rwanda by 2028. The program aims to address healthcare workforce shortages and improve care quality by turning advanced AI models into practical clinical tools.

OpenAI has announced a grant program offering up to $2 million to fund independent research exploring the intersection of AI and mental health, with a focus on safety and well-being. The program received over 1,000 applications and seeks interdisciplinary research combining technical expertise with mental health professionals and lived experience.

OpenAI launches a $50 million fund to support nonprofit and community organizations, informed by the independent OpenAI Nonprofit Commission report, focusing on AI applications in education, healthcare, economic opportunity, and community organizing.

OpenAI has announced $40 billion in new funding at a $300 billion post-money valuation, in partnership with SoftBank Group, to advance AI research, scale compute infrastructure, and develop tools for its 500 million weekly ChatGPT users on the path toward AGI.

OpenAI secured a $4 billion revolving credit facility with major banks including JPMorgan Chase, Citi, and Goldman Sachs, combined with $6.6 billion in new funding to provide over $10 billion in total liquidity for scaling operations and growth initiatives.

OpenAI has raised $6.6B in new funding at a $157B post-money valuation to accelerate frontier AI research, increase compute capacity, and expand access to advanced AI tools. The funding aims to scale the benefits of AI globally, with over 250 million weekly ChatGPT users already leveraging the platform.

The Frontier Model Forum announces the creation of a new AI Safety Fund with over $10 million in initial funding from major AI companies (Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI) and philanthropic partners to support independent AI safety research. The fund will focus on developing model evaluations and red-teaming techniques to assess frontier AI systems' dangerous capabilities.

OpenAI launches a $1M cybersecurity grant program offering funding and API credits in $10,000 increments to support practical AI applications in defensive cybersecurity tools and methods, with priority given to projects with clear public distribution plans.