Anthropic has released Claude Opus 4.1, an upgrade to Opus 4 that reportedly improves on agentic tasks, computer coding and reasoning. Pricing has not increased from what customers were paying for Opus 4, and the company promises “substantially larger improvements to our models in the coming weeks.” The move comes as Anthropic nears a new funding round targeting $3 to $5 billion, which could place a valuation of up to $170 billion on the startup. Recurring revenue hit $5 billion as of late July, which could increase to $9 billion by the end of the year. Claude Opus 4.1 was released two days before OpenAI unleashed GPT-5, and performs comparably in coding benchmarks. Continue reading Anthropic Seeks to Raise $5 Billion, Debuts Claude Opus 4.1

Amazon Q2 earnings outperformed analyst expectations, but a strong performance wasn’t enough to quell market fears in light of a gloomy forecast and Amazon Web Services growth seen as anemic, at +17.5 percent, which was slower than the expansion of its competitors Microsoft Azure (+39 percent) and Google Cloud (+32 percent). Amazon’s Q2 profit was $18.2 billion, up nearly 30 percent on revenue of $167.7 billion, a 13 percent gain year-over-year. Advertising income of $15.7 billion was almost $1 billion more than StreetAccount’s estimate of $14.9 billion. But for the current quarter, Amazon estimated operating income between $15.5 billion and $20.5 billion. Continue reading Amazon Profit Is Up 30 Percent, but Forecast Spooks Market

Alphabet reported a 14 percent year-over-year revenue increase to $96.4 billion, propelled largely by growth in the Google Cloud and Google Search divisions. Artificial intelligence had a significant impact across the board, including in spending. Capital expenditure is expected to be roughly $85 billion in 2025, compared to $52.5 billion in 2024. Google Cloud generated $13.6 billion in Q2, up 32 percent from the same period last year. Advertising sales totaled $71.3 billion for the quarter, a 10.4 percent improvement from the year earlier frame. Google Search, which is integral to advertising sales, was up 11.7 percent. Continue reading Q2 Revenue Hits $96B as Google Invests in AI Search, Models

OpenAI is adding Google Cloud to its list of global infrastructure providers for ChatGPT after relying exclusively on Microsoft Azure since the chatbot’s 2022 launch until January 2025 when Stargate was announced. Oracle and CoreWeave are also OpenAI cloud providers. Oracle is a Stargate investor, as is Nvidia, which holds a minority interest in CoreWeave. OpenAI has been active as it heads toward a December deadline for transitioning to a for-profit company. Meanwhile, ChatGPT is integrating a payment system to receive commissions on sales it initiates, and yesterday OpenAI launched a new AI agent that can perform complex tasks within a user’s browser. Continue reading OpenAI Contracts Google Cloud and Debuts ChatGPT Agent

Disney has become the latest entertainment giant to put ad inventory on offer through Amazon DSP, the tech giant’s demand-side platform that connects advertisers to channels for programmatic as well as premium ad purchasing and analytics. The integration, to be implemented in the coming months, links the Disney Real-Time Ad Exchange (DRAX) with Amazon DSP, providing direct access to inventory across platforms including Disney+, ESPN and Hulu along with data insights from both companies. The deal is one of many such alliances announced in proximity to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where Roku, Netflix and Yahoo also signed up with Amazon DSP. Continue reading Disney Integrates Real-Time Ad Exchange with Amazon DSP

A little over a year since the beta release of its conversational AI search and discovery tool, Cineverse is making cineSearch commercially available to business customers. The Los Angeles startup says its AI-powered framework “solves” the content-hunt quandary for digital networks and streaming services, finding programming across all streaming platforms. Cineverse is making cineSearch available for commercial licensing to OEMs and streaming platforms via the company’s own sales team and through Google Cloud Marketplace. CineSearch was developed using Google’s AI ecosystem — specifically Vertex AI platform and the Gemini 2.0 Pro model. Continue reading CineSearch Is a New AI Discovery Tool for Streaming Content

Google has formally announced the launch of its AI Futures Fund to identify and invest in artificial intelligence startups. Participating startups will get early access to Google DeepMind’s latest models — Gemini, Imagen and Veo, “hands-on support from Google researchers” and Google Cloud credits. The AI Futures Fund has been ramping up these past several months, working with startups including Fal, Replit and Synthesia, among others. In identifying up-and-coming AI startups, Google is competing against Amazon and Microsoft who have aggressively pursued nascent firms, most notably Anthropic and OpenAI, respectively. Continue reading Google Launches AI Futures Fund to Finance, Foster Startups

The new smartphone lineup from Chinese manufacturer Honor will include AI image-to-video capabilities developed in partnership with Google Cloud. The Honor 400 series will let users generate videos from static photos, according to the company. Google recently added support for Veo 2, which generates videos at up to 4K, for Gemini Advanced subscribers, and Honor says its new phones will have Veo 2 baked into the operating system, beating Google’s own Pixel phone to the punch. The Huawei spin-off is set to launch the 400 series May 22. Continue reading Google Veo 2 Video Generator Coming to New Honor Phones

Artificial intelligence is making big inroads in shopping, with Visa, Mastercard and PayPal all announcing AI-enhanced purchasing. Unveiled at the Visa Global Product Drop event, Visa Intelligent Commerce enables AI “to find, shop and buy for consumers based on their pre-selected preferences,” Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell said, noting “each consumer sets the limits, and Visa helps manage the rest.” That news came a day after Mastercard introduced Mastercard Agent Pay and PayPal emphasized agentic efforts at its Dev Days event last week. Agentic commerce is the use of AI to transact on behalf of a customer or business. Continue reading Visa, Mastercard and PayPal Embrace AI Agentic Commerce

Alphabet revenue was $90.2 billion in Q1, a 12 percent increase year-over-year that reflects “robust momentum” across Google Search and YouTube ads and Google Cloud, each delivering double-digit growth rates. Google Cloud was up 28 percent to $12.3 billion in divisions including AI infrastructure and generative AI solutions. Net profit surged 46 percent to $34.5 billion while operating income grew 20 percent to $30.6 billion. Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said the quarter was “super exciting” due to breakthroughs in performance by Gemini 2.5, calling it “our most intelligent AI” and a strong foundation “for future innovation.” Continue reading Alphabet Profit Is Up 46 Percent, Driven by AI and Advertising

Among the many tech advancements unveiled at Google Cloud Next include a major generative media upgrade to Vertex AI, Google Cloud’s managed AI development platform. The new Vertex AI Media Studio lets enterprise users generate complete videos from scratch using text prompts. Lyria, Google’s text-to-music model is now available on Vertex in private preview. Both are subject to an “allowlist.” Chirp 3 now creates custom voices with just 10 seconds of audio input, while Imagen 3 has gained improved abilities for reconstructing missing or damaged portions of an image. Continue reading Vertex AI Movie Studio Can Create Videos from Start to Score

Google has debuted a new accelerator chip, Ironwood, a tensor processing unit designed specifically for inference — the ability of AI to predict things. Ironwood will power Google Cloud’s AI Hypercomputer, which runs the company’s Gemini models and is gearing up for the next generation of artificial intelligence workloads. Google’s TPUs are similar to the accelerator GPUs sold by Nvidia, but unlike the GPUs they’re designed for AI and geared toward speeding neural network tasks and mathematical operations. Google says when deployed at scale Ironwood is more than 24 times more powerful than the world’s fastest supercomputer. Continue reading Google Ironwood TPU is Made for Inference and ‘Thinking’ AI

Google has acquired Wiz, a multi-cloud security firm that will remain cloud-agnostic under its new ownership. In fact, the ability to expand its customer base to companies that use competing cloud services like AWS or Azure was a key incentive for Google to buy the five-year-old startup, whose mandate is “to help every organization secure everything they build and run in the cloud — any cloud.” Google agreed to pay $32 billion for the New York-based firm, which had annual revenue of $700 million last year and was on track to increase that to $1 billion in 2025. Wiz, which had been considering an IPO, was most recently valued at $12 billion. Continue reading Google Agrees to Buy Cybersecurity Startup Wiz for $32 Billion

Google is expanding its AI presence in the UK market, hosting a splashy launch event there for Agentspace. Google in December launched Agentspace, an AI agent hub that makes it easy for enterprises to build, manage and deploy custom agents using Gemini. The gathering was hosted by Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and included participation by local customers BT Group and advertising powerhouse WPP. Google invited UK businesses to store cloud data locally using its $1 billion data center, opening there this year. The company also promoted its new Chirp 3 audio generator, which offers HD voice synthesis. Continue reading Google Launches Agentspace in the UK and Promotes Chirp 3

Cerebras Systems was founded 10 years ago on the belief that there would be a shortage of processors powerful enough to drive enterprise AI computing at scale. Its solution, the Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine, is integrated into Cerebras’ CS-3 systems, which will power six new data centers launching this year that the company says will make it “the world’s number one provider of high-speed inference and the largest domestic high speed inference cloud.” Cerebras notes the new facilities will collectively serve over 40 million Llama 70B tokens per second to clients that now include Hugging Face and financial intelligence firm AlphaSense. Continue reading Cerebras Is Moving into Mainstream with New AI Data Centers