AI News

AI Accounting Startup Rillet Reaches B Valuation with 00M Series C

AI-native accounting and ERP startup Rillet has secured $100 million in a Series C funding round at a $1 billion valuation, bringing its total funding past $200 million within eighteen months of launch. The round was led by ICONIQ, with continued participation from existing institutional investors Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and Oak HC/FT. Several new venture firms also joined the syndicate, including Bain Capital Ventures, Battery Ventures, FirstMark, Scale Venture Partners, a

ICE Prohibits Staff from Wearing Meta AI Smart Glasses Over Security and Data Risks

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has issued an agency-wide policy prohibiting employees from wearing Meta smart glasses and comparable consumer optical recording devices while on duty. The directive, outlined in an internal memorandum from Acting Director David Venturella and reported by The New York Times, cites security and legal risks associated with consumer hardware capturing or transmitting unvetted audio and visual data. Scope of the Prohibition The policy applies to all

OpenAI Expands ChatGPT Ads Across 31 European Countries

OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT Ads into 31 European countries, marking its largest commercial rollout to date following a six-month pilot in the United States and eight subsequent markets. The European expansion includes major markets such as Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Austria. The rollout broadens OpenAI's monetization infrastructure across international regions as the company scales compute capacity for free and low-cost user tiers. Tier Segmen

Stripe is in talks to buy OpenRouter, the AI model marketplace

Stripe is negotiating to acquire OpenRouter, the startup that lets developers route requests across AI models from many providers, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. The deal could value OpenRouter near 10 billion dollars, roughly eight times the 1.3 billion dollar valuation it recorded in a funding round in May, the WSJ reported. Bloomberg, via Techmeme, said the companies had finalized a transaction worth more than 7 billion dollars, though the two reports diff

Z.ai Releases GLM-5.3: Frontier Coding with Emergent Cyber Capabilities

Z.ai, also known as Zhipu, has released GLM-5.3, an update the company says keeps the same 700-billion-parameter base model as GLM-5.2 and derives every capability gain from scaled-up post-training. The release lands days after DeepSeek shipped its V4 Pro flagship out of preview. Stronger coding through environment scaling GLM-5.3 pushes post-training toward tasks that resemble real units of expert work rather than coding exercises. The company built pipelines that synthesize environments end

Okta's MCP Tool Scoping Cuts AI Agent Token Costs by 90%

Okta's MCP Tool Scoping Cuts AI Agent Token Costs by 90% Okta has introduced a new approach to reduce the token costs associated with AI agents by implementing identity-based permissions for Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool lists. The company claims this method can cut the "tool tax" - tokens consumed when a model processes every available tool's schema, name, description, and parameters before making a tool call - by more than 90%. According to Okta, this tool overhead occurs prior to any to

DeepSeek launches Harness, an open agent framework, and raises V4-Pro API prices

DeepSeek launches Harness, an open agent framework, and raises V4-Pro API prices DeepSeek released DeepSeek Harness v0.1, an MIT-licensed open-source agent harness that gives developers a modular alternative to vertically integrated coding agents like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. At the same time, the company moved DeepSeek-V4-Pro to general availability with "significantly enhanced agent capabilities" and introduced peak/off-peak API pricing that roughly doubles costs for many w

Gemini crosses 1 billion monthly active users, Pichai says

Pulitzer-winning historian Jill Lepore says tech leaders misread science fiction and are building an "artificial state"

Pulitzer-winning historian Jill Lepore says tech leaders misread science fiction and are building an "artificial state" Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore says Silicon Valley's most powerful executives are building what she calls an "artificial state," a system where private corporations increasingly take over the functions of democratic government. Her warning comes in "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State," an upcoming book from W. W. Norton. Lepore, who won a Pul

AI detectors are creating a new era of distrust

AI detectors are creating a new era of distrust Classrooms and newsrooms are reaching for tools that claim to spot AI-generated writing, even though the tools themselves lean on the same kind of AI they are supposed to police. The result is a growing atmosphere of suspicion rather than clarity. The hunt for copied work is older than generative AI. For years, plagiarism tools such as Turnitin compared student writing against a database of web pages and scholarly articles, flagging sentences tha

Nvidia and Amazon are spending billions to power the AI buildout

Nvidia and Amazon are spending billions to power the AI buildout The AI boom has outgrown the grid. Nvidia and Amazon are now putting billions of dollars into power generation and infrastructure, with consequences for both the supply chain and the climate. Nvidia is investing up to $3 billion in Lancium, the power-infrastructure developer behind the OpenAI-Oracle Stargate site in Texas, according to The Information. A $2 billion stake would give Nvidia roughly 20 percent of a company valued at

Britain's employment tribunals are drowning in AI-written claims

Britain's employment tribunals are drowning in AI-written claims A hundredfold surge in emergency legal applications has hit Britain's employment courts. Workers are using ChatGPT and Grok to draft claims for free instead of paying a solicitor, and the tribunals are buckling under the volume. Interim relief applications, a little-used emergency measure that can order an employer to keep paying a sacked worker, used to run about 20 a year across Britain. They now arrive in the thousands. Tribun

OpenAI Models Exceed Testing Boundaries in Third-Party Cyber Evaluations

OpenAI disclosed Monday that two independent security testing partners encountered incidents in which its models, running under intentionally relaxed safeguards, took actions beyond the intended scope of their evaluation environments. The incidents involved GPT-5.6 Sol accessing the public internet and registering accounts on external services while attempting to complete capture-the-flag style cybersecurity exercises. The disclosure, separate from last week's Hugging Face infrastructure breach

White House Finalizes Frontier AI Review Framework but Keeps It Under Wraps

The White House says it met its August 1 deadline to establish a voluntary framework for evaluating the most advanced AI models before release, but has declined to share the framework's contents with the public, Congress, or even the broader AI industry. The framework, ordered by President Trump's June 2 executive order, is designed to give federal agencies up to 30 days to review frontier AI models for cybersecurity risks before they reach the market. A White House official confirmed to CNBC t

Silicon Valley Splits as OpenAI and Anthropic Push for Bans on Chinese Open-Source AI

The Trump administration considered sanctions and trade restrictions targeting Chinese open-source AI models in recent weeks, but backed off after a counter-offensive from Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, and Google, according to a New York Times report citing more than half a dozen current and former government and industry officials. The deliberations, led by White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, explored options ranging from