Cheap Chinese AI, agentic coding, and giant infrastructure deals

Reasoning models became the industry’s center of gravity. DeepSeek’s low-cost, open-weight R1 arrived in January and took $589 billion off Nvidia’s market value within a week, days after OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle announced a $500 billion American data-center venture. Coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Cursor turned into daily tools. Washington rescinded the Biden administration’s AI safety order while Brussels began applying the AI Act to general-purpose models. Two federal judges held that training on lawfully acquired books was fair use, and Anthropic paid about $1.5 billion to settle piracy claims. OpenAI reached a $500 billion valuation, Anthropic $183 billion, and Amazon cut 14,000 jobs with AI among the reasons given.

20 entries recorded

October

  1. Amazon cuts 14,000 corporate jobs and cites AI efficiency

    Amazon announced about 14,000 corporate job cuts on 28 October 2025. Andy Jassy said generative AI meant the company would need fewer people for some jobs and more for others. Challenger, Gray & Christmas attributed almost 55,000 American layoffs to AI across 2025.

  2. OpenAI sells shares at $500 billion and converts to a PBC

    A secondary share sale of up to $10 billion completed on 2 October 2025 valued OpenAI at $500 billion, the highest of any private company at the time. On 28 October, with approval from the California and Delaware attorneys general, it became OpenAI Group PBC.

September

  1. Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 4.5

    Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.5 on 29 September 2025 at the same price as Sonnet 4, $3 and $15 per million input and output tokens. The company said it could hold a single coding task for about 30 hours without help, against roughly 7 hours for Claude Opus 4.

  2. Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5 billion to settle authors’ claims

    Anthropic agreed on 5 September 2025 to settle the piracy claims left standing in Bartz v. Anthropic, paying about $3,000 a work for roughly 500,000 books, some $1.5 billion in total, and destroying the pirated copies. Judge Alsup granted preliminary approval on 25 September.

  3. Anthropic raises $13 billion at a $183 billion valuation

    Anthropic closed a $13 billion Series F on 2 September 2025, led by Iconiq Capital with Fidelity and Lightspeed as co-leads and participation from GIC, Insight Partners, and the Qatar Investment Authority. The round valued it at $183 billion, against $61.5 billion in March.

August

  1. OpenAI makes GPT-5 the default model in ChatGPT

    OpenAI released GPT-5 on 7 August 2025, describing it as a unified model that combined the step-by-step reasoning of the o-series with the faster replies of the GPT series, with a 400,000-token context window. It became the default for free and paid ChatGPT users.

  2. EU AI Act obligations for general-purpose models take effect

    From 2 August 2025 the EU AI Act required providers of general-purpose AI models newly placed on the market to keep technical documentation, publish a summary of their training data, comply with EU copyright law, and share information with regulators and downstream developers.

June

  1. Two federal judges rule AI training on books can be fair use

    Judge William Alsup ruled on 23 June 2025 that training a language model on books was transformative fair use, while sending Anthropic’s acquisition of more than seven million pirated books to trial. Judge Vince Chhabria issued a narrower fair-use ruling for Meta two days later.

  2. Tesla starts a limited robotaxi service in Austin

    Tesla began a limited robotaxi service in Austin, Texas on 22 June 2025 with about 10 Model Y cars running Full Self-Driving software and a human safety monitor in the front passenger seat. Riders and reporters recorded wrong-way driving and drop-offs in intersections.

  3. Cursor maker Anysphere raises $900 million at $9.9 billion

    Anysphere, which makes the AI code editor Cursor, confirmed a $900 million Series C led by Thrive Capital on 5 June 2025, with Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and DST Global taking part. The round valued it at $9.9 billion. The company said annualized revenue had passed $500 million.

May

  1. Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4

    Anthropic released Claude Opus 4, which it called its most capable coding model, and Claude Sonnet 4 on 22 May 2025. Both offered a choice between fast replies and extended reasoning, and could search the web while reasoning. Claude Code reached general availability the same day.

April

  1. OpenAI ships o3, o4-mini, and the Codex CLI coding agent

    OpenAI released its o3 and o4-mini reasoning models on 16 April 2025 together with Codex CLI, an open-source coding agent that runs in a developer’s terminal, reads and edits project files, runs shell commands, and connects to external tools through the Model Context Protocol.

March

  1. Turing Award goes to Barto and Sutton for reinforcement learning

    The Association for Computing Machinery named Andrew Barto and Richard S. Sutton, once advisor and student, recipients of the 2024 A.M. Turing Award for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning. The $1 million prize is funded by Google.

February

  1. Anthropic ships Claude Code as a research preview

    Anthropic released Claude Code alongside Claude 3.7 Sonnet on 24 February 2025: a command-line agent that reads a codebase, edits files, runs commands and tests, and iterates on a task with the developer approving the risky steps. It reached general availability on 22 May 2025.

  2. Paris AI Action Summit closes with a declaration the US declines

    Officials from more than 60 countries and organizations met in Paris on 10 and 11 February 2025, co-chaired by Emmanuel Macron and Narendra Modi. It closed with a statement on inclusive and sustainable AI covering safety, access, and governance. The US and UK did not sign.

January

  1. Nvidia loses $589 billion in a day after DeepSeek’s R1

    Investors sold AI-linked technology stocks on 27 January 2025 after DeepSeek’s R1 raised doubts about future demand for high-end AI chips. Nvidia fell about 17 percent and shed roughly $589 billion in market value in one session. The Nasdaq Composite fell more than 3 percent.

  2. Trump revokes Biden’s AI order and orders an action plan

    President Trump rescinded Executive Order 14110, Biden’s 2023 order on safe and trustworthy AI, on 20 January 2025. On 23 January he signed Executive Order 14179, directing advisers to produce an action plan on American AI leadership within 180 days.

  3. OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle unveil the Stargate venture

    At a White House event on 21 January 2025, Sam Altman, Masayoshi Son, and Larry Ellison announced Stargate, a joint venture to invest up to $500 billion in American AI data centers through 2029, $100 billion of it at once. The first site broke ground in Abilene, Texas.

  4. DeepSeek releases R1, an open-weight reasoning model

    The Chinese laboratory DeepSeek released R1 on 20 January 2025, an open-weight model trained with reinforcement learning to work through problems step by step. It matched OpenAI’s o1 on several benchmarks at a small fraction of the reported training and inference cost.

  5. Waymo’s robotaxi rides roughly triple to about 14 million

    Waymo’s driverless service averaged roughly 269,000 paid trips a week over the year while working toward a stated target of a million a week, ending it with an estimated 2,500 vehicles in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, and other cities, and about 14 million rides.