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Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the widely used open AI model distribution platform, for $12.93 billion. Hugging Face will keep its brand and remain open to third-party models, clouds, and hardware, according to Nvidia.
Startup Abliteration.ai now hosts modified, open-weight AI models—including Z.ai's GLM-5.3—with safety refusals removed, letting users query them via browser or API. TechCrunch tested the free web version and got the model to produce password-stealing code and instructions for culturing a dangerous pathogen. The company, founded late last year and incorporated in March, frames this as a service for red-teaming and offensive security testing.
Nvidia is said to be closing in on a $13 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, the widely used hub for open-weight AI models, following its $6 billion deal with Poolside and Stripe's over $7 billion purchase of OpenRouter. Together the deals mark a surge of major capital flowing into companies built around freely distributed AI models rather than proprietary frontier systems.
Nvidia is said to be pursuing an acquisition of Hugging Face, the widely used repository where developers share and download AI models, according to reports from The Information and CNBC citing sources familiar with the matter. The deal isn't finalized, and Hugging Face had reportedly drawn interest from other suitors including Salesforce, while Nvidia, Google and Microsoft have all previously invested in the startup founded in 2016.
IBM has released Granite 4.2, the latest addition to its open-weight, self-hostable language model lineup, offered in 3B, 8B, and 30B parameter sizes. All versions use a decoder-only design and support a 128,000-token context window, while the 8B and 30B models add agentic reinforcement learning that trains them to use tools like web search and terminal commands.
Reports indicate OpenAI and Google are both losing key AI researchers to competitors and startups, though the departures are affecting each company differently in terms of scale and strategic impact. Separately, Nvidia has committed an additional $6 billion to support open-weight AI models, while rare-book dealers report a surge in sales tied to AI-era demand, alongside mixed feelings about that trend.
New spending data from payments firm Ramp, covering 70,000 US companies, shows Anthropic's top-tier model Fable 5 accounts for just 11 percent of total spending on the company's AI tools. Businesses are increasingly reserving expensive frontier models for complex tasks while routing routine work to cheaper options, including Anthropic's own older models and open-weight offerings from Chinese competitors.