SoftBank secures an upsized $11.87 billion two-year loan from roughly 20 banks for its OpenAI investment, while its shares plunge as much as 13% amid plans to repay $25.9 billion in September and potentially sell up to $20 billion in U.S. junk bonds.
Z.AI raises fresh capital by offering 21.97 million shares at HK$714—10% below the prior close—and selling 20.14 billion yuan of zero-coupon bonds due in September 2027, some carrying yields as low as minus 0.5%.
Rocket Money launches Rowan, a Claude-powered AI finance agent accessible via text that manages spending, cancels subscriptions, and negotiates bills — sparking an 11x surge in developer commits and near-zero hallucinations during beta.
Google Cloud launches flexible AI billing plans for enterprise users, introducing pay-as-you-go options, 10–20% token discounts through Flexible Savings Plans, and powerful new cost governance tools including spend caps, anomaly detection, and a FinOps agent that delivers natural-language cost summaries.
Revolut launches a dedicated AI division and unveils PRAGMA, a proprietary foundation model built with NVIDIA, reporting a 65% fraud detection boost, 2.3x credit risk accuracy improvement, and 41% better personalized recommendations across 80 million customers in over 40 markets.
OpenAI slashes GPT-5.6 prices by over 20% across multiple model tiers, dropping its top model to $4 per million input tokens to undercut Anthropic and DeepSeek as enterprises pull back on frontier AI spending.
Thomson Reuters launches 'Thomson,' its first proprietary AI model trained on decades of Westlaw, Reuters, and financial data, costing just $40 million to develop while reportedly matching frontier model performance — now live in CoCounsel Legal.
A powerful open-source AI quantitative trading platform launches on GitHub, bringing LLM-driven strategy generation, real-time stock monitoring, and backtesting tools to A-share market retail investors and quant enthusiasts via a modern FastAPI and React 18 stack.
Ramp launches Router, a free AI model routing service giving users single API access to top LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and xAI, complete with cost tracking and flexible routing strategies through the end of 2026.
The AI boom is widening America's wealth gap, with economists and hedge fund leaders directly challenging OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's claim that AI is an 'equalizing force,' as evidence mounts that its benefits are concentrated among the wealthiest Americans and cities.