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OpenAI has secured $11 billion in a new funding round that values the company at $1.25 trillion, according to Bloomberg sources. The round hasn't closed yet and is expected to reach roughly $20 billion in the coming weeks, falling short of the $30 billion target Bloomberg reported OpenAI was pursuing in September.
OpenAI has disclosed a new cybersecurity-focused AI model, reportedly called Aardvark, that identified potential exploitation methods for close to 1,000 known flaws in Linux systems. The model is designed to analyze code and systems to surface vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers.
Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national and former OpenAI worker, entered a not guilty plea Friday in San Francisco federal court to a charge of intercepting oral communications. He was indicted by a grand jury on Oct. 27 and remains jailed without bail since his October arrest, and was returned to custody after the hearing.
OpenAI has closed a new funding round valuing the company at $1.25 trillion, raising roughly $11 billion so far, according to Bloomberg. The company is reportedly still seeking additional investment that could push the total to $20 billion, short of an earlier target of $30 billion at a $1.4 trillion valuation.
Censys security researcher Silas Cutler identified more than 800 instances of Artex, an open-source autonomous penetration-testing tool, accessible over the internet without any password. Artex, released publicly in July, has been linked to multiple cyberattacks, including a September incident targeting Korea's finance industry. Cutler noted the software does not require internet exposure, and while many deployments likely belong to authorized testers, the reason so many are publicly accessible remains unclear.
Following a market slide tied to voter backlash against local data center projects in the midterm elections, executives from Arm, OpenAI and Qualcomm pushed back on fears of a lasting hit to AI infrastructure spending. Arm's Rene Haas called the sell-off reaction short-term thinking, OpenAI's Sarah Friar pledged continued investment and community engagement including a promise not to raise electricity bills, and Qualcomm's Cristiano Amon said data centers are only a small part of his company's business.
OpenAI launched GPT-6 Cyber, a variant of its newest flagship model built specifically for cybersecurity defenders, giving early access to security teams at companies including Mozilla and Palo Alto Networks. The rollout came the same week Anthropic also pushed updates to Claude, as both companies continue adding incremental capabilities to their chatbots rather than full public releases of new frontier models.
In Tuesday's U.S. midterm elections, voters decided on 41 ballot measures related to data centers, approving added restrictions in all but one. The results came alongside Democratic wins for governor and congressional seats, with candidates who campaigned partly on tighter oversight of data centers and Big Tech. TechCrunch's Equity podcast discussed the implications for the tech industry, noting OpenAI's recent efforts to rebrand data centers.
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC the company will continue investing in AI infrastructure and raising capital to meet customer demand, even after voters in Tuesday's midterms largely rejected or restricted local data center projects. She said OpenAI will keep working to build trust with communities and pointed to a policy blueprint the company released this week outlining commitments for its own data centers.
Intermediaries such as Handshake and firms pitching to media and startup founders are offering companies and individuals payments—reportedly ranging from roughly $1,000 to as much as $2 million—for archives of internal documents, emails, Slack messages, call transcripts and work records. The buyers say the material is destined for AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, which want proprietary 'knowledge work' data to train models now that public web data is largely exhausted.
Payments firm Ramp reports that while AI token usage kept rising, actual spending on AI services grew just 1.5% combined across August and September, down sharply from 42% growth in July alone. Ramp's lead economist Ara Kharazian said the slowdown is concentrated among the top 1% of spenders, who have dipped slightly below the roughly $10,000-per-employee monthly spending they hit over the summer.
OpenAI announced GPT-6 Cyber, an AI model built for vulnerability research, which uncovered 81 unknown high-severity Firefox flaws and helped patch many of them. In Linux kernel testing, the model flagged 2,308 potential issues, reproduced 1,724 of them, and built privilege-escalation exploits for 948 distinct bugs. OpenAI rated the model's cybersecurity capability as 'Critical,' up from 'High' for its predecessor, and restricted access to select customers in its Daybreak Red program.