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Tech News
OpenAI is reportedly negotiating a private funding round of up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation, led by Coatue and UAE investors, according to CNBC sources. The deal may also include arrangements for OpenAI to secure additional computing capacity from the UAE. OpenAI declined to comment, and terms could still change.
OpenAI is finalizing a funding round of up to $30 billion that would value the company at $1.25 trillion, excluding the new capital, according to people familiar with the matter. UAE-based investors and Coatue are leading the round, which is being described as a bridge financing ahead of a possible IPO, with signatures targeted by the end of next week.
1Password launched 1Password for Agents, a system that lets AI assistants sign into a user's accounts without ever accessing the actual credentials. When an agent attempts a login, 1Password verifies its digital identity via a unique key, alerts the user for approval, then fills in credentials itself to complete the task. The service supports agents including Anthropic's Claude Duet, OpenAI's Dots and ChatGPT Work, Grok Bot, Meta's Muse, and Town's agents, with more integrations planned.
OpenAI made its Decisions API generally available to all customers, adding voice and visual input options and reducing global latency through geographically targeted inference. The API repurposes ChatGPT Luna to deliver fast, low-cost classification-style decisions, cutting response times from seconds to under 200 milliseconds, according to OpenAI product lead Nikunj Handa. Early customers including Box, Datadog, Ramp and Speak have already used it to replace standard LLM calls in their workflows.
Kevin Weil, formerly OpenAI's science lead, has launched Warp Sciences, a startup that trains robots using camera and sensor-glove data from human chemists to automate wet-lab drug discovery work. The company has raised $215 million at an $865 million valuation in a round led by Lightspeed, with IVP, Premji Invest, and Lux Capital also participating, Weil announced on X.
Canva unveiled Canva Craft, its first in-house AI image model, which plans a design before rendering it to improve accuracy on text and object placement. The model supports resolutions up to 2K and over 30 aspect ratios, and was trained on millions of templates from Canva's content library. It currently ranks fourth on the Design Arena leaderboard, behind three OpenAI models.
Developers of the widely used PHP programming language disclosed critical security vulnerabilities this week, prompting websites worldwide to go offline as organisations rushed to patch systems. The UK government confirmed 32 services were unavailable and four partially unavailable as a precaution, with ministers saying no major public-facing critical services were affected and no breaches have been confirmed.
Uber and OpenAI announced an expansion of their partnership, with Uber confirming its entire 30,000-person global workforce will now use ChatGPT Work, OpenAI's enterprise AI tool launched in July. Uber had piloted the tool with 1,000 employees earlier this year, where about 80% of early users were non-engineers across finance, operations, and product teams.
Nonprofit AI safety evaluators METR and Redwood Research spent three weeks in July and August with employee-level access to OpenAI's codebase, documentation and staff to test an internal monitoring system. They identified several previously unknown vulnerabilities, including one that could let AI agents hide hundreds of recent actions from oversight, and OpenAI says it has since patched the flaws affecting production safeguards.
Amazon reported it detected hackers attempting to exploit two vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language four days before the flaws were publicly disclosed, and said exploitation is now widespread. The US NSA and UK authorities separately warned organizations running PHP to patch immediately or take systems offline, and PHP's maintainers have released fixes. The bugs reportedly went undetected for more than a decade and were found with help from OpenAI and Google AI models.
Anthropic introduced Claude Duet, an AI agent app built on its Claude Opus 5.5 model targeting professionals and small businesses rather than personal errands. The app can generate daily briefings, build dashboards, suggest actions from user data, and complete background tasks via its own virtual machine before seeking approval. It connects to over 6,000 plugins in the Claude Marketplace and can make purchases through Stripe Link or Shopify Shop Pay, though it won't trade securities or transfer money between accounts.
A modder known as pepsipu (Sammy Hajhamid) created a software-only, tethered jailbreak for the Nintendo Switch 2, dubbed 'ns2jb,' with help from OpenAI's Codex tool. The exploit relies on the game SmileBASIC 4 and must be re-run each time the console restarts; a demo shows a modified Mario Kart World with added characters like Cinnamoroll, Peter Griffin and Steve from Minecraft.