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Sep 18, 2026
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Supported by
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TGIF! OpenAI hires a global sales chief from SpaceX. The Securities and Exchange Commission is allowing tokenized stocks in the U.S. A U.S. lawmaker asks Chinese AI labs to collaborate on pacing AI development.
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OpenAI has hired Brian McCarthy from SpaceX’s Cursor unit as its new global sales chief, reporting to recently hired Chief Revenue Officer Dali Rajic, the AI firm said Thursday. In addition, two veteran sales executives from Snowflake, including a senior vice president who helped negotiate the firm’s commercial relationship with OpenAI, are leaving to join OpenAI, Snowflake told some employees Thursday. Their hires haven’t been previously reported. The moves come as OpenAI looks to rebuild its sales organization following the departures of several senior executives. OpenAI hired Rajic last month from Google’s Wiz unit to lead the team. OpenAI’s new hires from Snowflake are Mark Fleming, who was senior vice president of sales for Snowflake’s Americas Enterprise unit and a seven-year veteran of the database firm; and Jaime Patel, vice president of sales engineering for North America Enterprise. Fleming helped the company land major deals with OpenAI, ThomsonReuters and HubSpot. Patel built Snowflake’s sales engineering team, which helps customers adopt new technology, according to the email. McCarthy joined Cursor in February and was previously president and chief revenue officer at security software firm Rubrik and chief revenue officer at data analytics firm ThoughtSpot. He also worked at observability software firm AppDynamics, where Rajic also worked.
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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday issued a temporary order allowing certain types of tokenized stocks—crypto tokens that represent equities—to trade in the U.S., a crypto-friendly move that has drawn pushback from some traditional financial firms. Shares of tokenization firm Securitize and crypto exchange Bullish, which offers tokenization services, jumped 15% and 9% after the SEC order. The order, which the regulator calls an “innovation exemption” and will last for five years, would exempt trading venues from some rules that apply to stock exchanges so that they can list stock tokens that are directly issued by a public company or by a third party whose tokens convey the same shareholder rights and are not objected by the issuer. It would rule out crypto tokens that represent synthetic exposure to the underlying equities, which are popular outside the U.S. Separately, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued a guidance allowing crypto wallet software providers to enable trading of derivatives products without registering as an introducing broker. Hyperliquid Policy Center and Phantom had earlier filed a letter asking the CFTC to allow regulated companies to use on-chain markets for matching and settling trades while exempting developers and apps that don’t hold customer funds from registration requirements.
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Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman for Silicon Valley, has sent letters to Chinese AI companies including Alibaba Group, DeepSeek and Moonshot, requesting their commitments to join American AI labs in a binding international agreement to pace the development of the technology. Khanna, a ranking member of the House Select Committee on China, has also convened an emergency hearing to call for a U.S.-China agreement on AI pacing. The hearing will be on Sept. 23, the day before the scheduled meeting in Washington between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The two heads of state are expected to discuss AI among other topics. How to ensure AI safety has become a critical challenge for tech leaders, policymakers and regulators. Earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for leading labs to slow the development of advanced AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind head Demis Hassabis and xAI chief Elon Musk all expressed their support for the idea of pacing the frontier. “The CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI do not agree on much, but earlier this month, they all came together and agreed that we should slow the rate of AI advancement until society can develop the necessary guardrails. It is time for Moonshot, Alibaba, and DeepSeek to do the same,” Khanna said in a letter to Alibaba, according to The Washington Post, which first reported the lawmaker’s letters to Chinese labs. Earlier this week, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected the U.S. tech leaders’ calls for AI pacing as fearmongering. “The development of artificial intelligence concerns the common well-being of all humanity. All parties should jointly promote an open, inclusive, universally beneficial, and ethically sound approach to AI,” Guo Jiakun, a spokesperson for the ministry, said at a press briefing.
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Microsoft executives expressed concerns in recent years that OpenAI’s use of paywalled articles from the New York Times and other publishers to train its models could pose legal issues, and OpenAI executives discussed how doing so could threaten those publishers’ businesses—but OpenAI proceeded with the practice anyway, a group of publishers including the New York Times, the New York Daily News, Ziff Davis, and others claimed in a new legal filing Thursday. The Times sued both Microsoft and OpenAI in 2023, arguing that both companies have profited from AI models that were trained using the Times’ articles without its permission in violation of copyright law. The newspaper is seeking billions of dollars in damages from the two companies. OpenAI and Microsoft have argued that training the models using the articles constitutes fair use because the models meaningfully transformed the articles. But in its court filing Thursday, the publishers claimed that an unnamed OpenAI executive described their models as an “existential threat” to news publishers, and that the models “are largely substitutive, period” and “will get more and more substitutive as they get better.” The filing also claims that Microsoft director of applied science Brent Hecht said such AI “necessarily threatens the economic stability of those who create the content.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella later testified under oath that, if he “had been made aware that OpenAI had scraped and trained on information that was behind a paywall,” he would have “invoked [Microsoft’s right to] require OpenAI to retrain its models,” the plaintiffs said in their filing. In a statement, a Microsoft spokesperson said that “Satya’s testimony and Microsoft’s position in this case are perfectly consistent. He spoke to broad principles and changes underway in how people find and consume information. Those observations should not be confused with conclusions about copyright questions before the Court, which Microsoft addresses in its filings.” The spokesperson added that Hecht’s comments “reflect one employee’s individual perspective, are not a legal analysis, and do not represent the company’s views,” and that Microsoft maintains that the use of news articles to train AI models is consistent with copyright law. The filing also claimed that OpenAI president Greg Brockman boasted internally that an OpenAI model “seems to be particularly good at predicting text of news articles like whenever i have it complete in the middle of a sentence in a NYT article, it seems to complete the sentence on point,” and that at another time Brockman and OpenAI executive Nick Ryder discussed ways to get around the Times’ paywall to scrape content for training. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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A team of cybersecurity researchers with startup Hacktron AI used Anthropic’s Claude to hack into OpenAI, gaining access to a key repository of OpenAI’s software, the researchers revealed Thursday. The hack, which occurred on July 25, further demonstrates AI companies’ vulnerability to AI-powered cyberattacks, following the Hugging Face incident, in which OpenAI’s AI models hacked the open source startup as well as OpenAI itself. The hackers said they disclosed the vulnerability to OpenAI, which paid them a $6,500 bounty for their work. An OpenAI spokesperson said the company has addressed the issue and thanked the researchers for sharing their findings. The hack involved gaining access to multiple employees’ ChatGPT accounts, which then provided the ability to read and suggest new code stored on GitHub, the code repository site. This brief has been updated to include OpenAI’s statement.
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Greg Jensen, the managing chief investment officer of Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, said demand growth for AI infrastructure is largely priced into markets. As a result, Bridgewater has begun looking for investment opportunities elsewhere. “We thought this was an incredible trade two years ago,” Jensen said in a wide-ranging interview with The Information. “A lot of it is now priced in,” he said, adding that Bridgewater has “a very small position on the AI build-out at this point and are much more interested in the disruption and adoption trades now.” Jensen said Bridgewater has modeled the world’s data center builds and what that means for various supply chain components out to 2028, and is beginning its 2029 model. Any potential upside in demand growth for the “picks and shovels” of AI, typically chips and other infrastructure, also faces risks like financing challenges and construction delays, he said. “We still think the market is probably underestimating a little bit what will be built in 2028, but it’s close, and that assumes no significant disruption,” he said.
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CoreWeave said on Thursday that it could sell up to 35 million shares, worth roughly $3 billion based on the prior day’s closing price, through a new at-the-market offering program. At the same time, the company announced plans to raise $3 billion in a convertible note issue, with an option for another $500 million. AI cloud companies have been tapping a range of options to fund heavy spending on infrastructure, including ATM offerings that allow them to sell shares into the open market with discretion over timing. CoreWeave, for its part, has already raised billions of dollars through debt and equity sales this year, including private placements of shares to Nvidia and trading firm Jane Street. The company said its new ATM program would provide “ongoing financing flexibility” as it works toward investment-grade status. The announcements come amid growing scrutiny of the returns on AI infrastructure spending and follow the Federal Reserve’s first interest rate hike in more than three years on Wednesday. CoreWeave also said that it has continued signing new contracts at higher prices in the current quarter, including three- to six-month contracts at approximately $40 million per MW on an annualized basis. CoreWeave shares were down about 5% in morning trading.
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OpenAI and law firm Cooley co-launched a product, called GO Public, that can draft S-1 filings, the document companies must submit to the Securities and Exchange Commission before they can go public, Cooley said Thursday. Lawyers at Cooley can prompt GO Public, which also has access to Cooley data, to write and revise S-1 filings within minutes, a process that the firm says typically takes a team of lawyers days to complete. The chatbot-like tool can also match sections to particular people’s tones of voice, such as the CFO of the company going public, for example, said David Peinsipp, a partner at Cooley who co-chairs the firm’s global capital markets group. “The real secret sauce, of course, is in the parameters we built into it,” he said. “This is where we take all the wisdom and experience and expertise that Cooley has built, specific to the agent’s goal, and then build a framework around it.” “We’re not scared of it,” Peinsipp added of the ongoing AI transformation of the legal industry, which has been “a strategic imperative” for the firm.
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