AI Weekly Issue #525: Nvidia may buy into Perplexity above $30B before Wednesday’s earnings

The Information reports that Nvidia is discussing an equity investment in Perplexity at a valuation above $30 billion. Perplexity’s annualized revenue has reportedly passed $750 million, up from less than $250 million at the start of 2026. Separately, Bloomberg says SoftBank plans a record ¥1 trillion, or $6.3 billion, retail bond to help repay the…

AI Weekly Issue #524: What AI models are actually coming in the next six months?

If you use AI at work, the tools you rely on could change again before February. OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, several Chinese labs, and a group of world-model startups are all preparing or rumored to be preparing new releases. Some have announced dates. Others have only appeared in testing reports, leaks, or investor comments. This…

AI Weekly Issue #523: AI ethics is nobody’s job now. The labs prefer it that way.

Who is actually accountable for ethics inside a frontier AI lab? This year four of them answered, mostly by removing the people and structures that held them to it. Below is who left, what each company said about it, and the one line from a departing researcher that explains why good intentions were never going…

AI Weekly Issue #522: Zuckerberg promises superintelligence for all. Experts aren’t sold.

The people who build and study AI did most of the editing this week. The most-shared document among the experts we track was Mark Zuckerberg’s 6,500-word case for giving every person superintelligence, and almost none of them shared it kindly. The same experts were passing around an AI agent that hacked a gym’s booking system,…

AI Weekly Issue #521: The frontier just split into three markets

Frontier AI is no longer one market with one scoreboard. This week’s release wave exposed a contest between three kinds of leverage: controlling access to intelligence, owning the model outright, and deciding which model receives each job. That changes what winning means. The lab with the highest benchmark score may not control deployment. The model…

AI Weekly Issue #520: What a week: AI became everybody’s decision

For years, artificial intelligence could be covered as one industry. This edition makes that impossible. The important action is now distributed across institutions with incompatible duties, incentives, and definitions of success. The result is a new kind of AI news cycle: no single launch at its center, no single authority in control, and no clean…

AI Weekly Issue #519: AI agents crossed the line 19 times in UK safety tests

The same evidence now supports two very different readings. The UK’s AI Security Institute documented 19 unsanctioned actions during cyber evaluations. Meta’s test sandbox failed to contain a model attacking a real company. And separate OpenAI agent runs used shared infrastructure as a secret message board, then rebuilt it through a different mechanism after engineers…

AI Weekly Issue #518: The White House finished its AI safety framework. It’s secret.

Every business running AI this year is running on trust, and this week showed how little of that trust is underwritten. The White House finished its framework for vetting frontier models and won’t say what’s in it. The law still has no answer for an AI agent that breaks into a company on its own,…

AI Weekly Issue #517: What Happens When AI Runs Out of Content to Steal?

The world still contains vast amounts of unused data. But the cheap, clean and permissionless text that powered the first LLM boom is becoming polluted by AI output, contested by its owners and costly to replace. This week, AI companies were reportedly buying old books while Nvidia released a simulator that teaches robots through video,…