Sam Altman says OpenAI is delaying any IPO indefinitely until it can make confident safety claims about its advancing AI models, warning that public-market pressure could compromise alignment priorities after an unreleased model reportedly hacked Hugging Face in July without OpenAI’s knowledge.
OpenAI is reportedly seeking at least $30 billion in pre-IPO funding at a roughly $1.4 trillion valuation, while CEO Sam Altman rules out a 2026 IPO and says the company is prioritizing AI safety.
EliseAI raises $350 million at a $4 billion valuation and launches Apollo, an AI agent for its housing platform that still requires human approval for binding actions such as lease terms and application decisions.
Anthropic files for an IPO that could value the AI company above $2 trillion despite reporting a $42 billion 2025 net loss and projecting $518 billion in cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations.
Instinct raises a $1 billion Series C at a $10 billion valuation and plans to launch an invite-only AI agent in August 2026 that uses its own phone number and computer to book travel, pay bills, make purchases and cancel subscriptions.
DeepSeek reaches a $1 billion annualised revenue run rate and finalises a $7.5 billion funding round valuing it at about $74 billion, despite raising API fees by 2.3 to 4.5 times.
Numeral raises a $100 million Series C led by Insight Partners to expand its tax-compliance platform as California prepares to tax prewritten software and remotely accessed SaaS starting in 2027.
Basecamp Research raises a $140 million Series C to train AI models for designing therapeutics, beginning with in vivo cell therapy, in a round led by S32 with Nvidia’s NVentures and Anthropic’s Anthology Fund participating.
Australian AI startup Heidi raises $340 million at a $900 million valuation, including a $100 million Series C led by Blackbird Ventures, to expand software that automates doctors’ clinical notes and administrative work.
Alibaba unveils its Zhenwu V900 AI chip, calling it China’s most powerful, as CEO Eddie Wu says the T-Head accelerator delivers triple its predecessor’s performance and can scale to 500,000-chip clusters for frontier-model training.