OpenAI offers feds a stake, Anthropic gets out of AI model jail and Meta wants to be a neocloud

OpenAI reportedly has floated giving the U.S. government a 5% stake in the company, perhaps the start of a series of such stakes in other AI companies as well.

This no doubt has traditional anti-industrial-policy Republicans, all apparently dead now, spinning in their graves, because it’s a dumb idea for all sorts of reasons — and likely won’t happen anyway. So why is Sam Altman (pictured) offering it? Some call it a bribe to the Trump administration for favorable treatment, but if that’s a harsh way to put it, this is the same administration that’s regulating it. Yeesh.

Anthropic models got out of jail, sort of, as the Trump administration lifted controls on two of its most powerful AI models — but with some potentially onerous restrictions. Meantime, while the U.S. futzes around with unclear, ever-changing rules, Chinese models keep getting better, with fewer guardrails.

Is Meta Platforms finally going to offer cloud services? Yes, at least until it comes up with AI models that are capable and popular enough to need that compute for itself. Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang told staff this week that it’s catching up, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg indicates things are going more slowly than expected, especially agents, the hottest thing in AI right now.

Indeed, it seems that everyone wants to be a neocloud: Softbank also said this week that it plans to offer AI cloud services starting next year.

New AI chips keep getting more funding — this week, inference chipmaker Etched launched with $800 million in funding — and likely will until Nvidia manages to keep up with demand for its graphics processing units. And the same goes for memory chips: This week South Korea launched a $584 billion chip manufacturing initiative with Samsung and SK hynix.

Will this AI party keep rocking? For now, there seems to be plenty of demand: Anthropic now is even reportedly in talks with Samsung to manufacture a custom AI chip, which has to be a positive demand sign given how many other infrastructure deals it’s doing.

But for how long? “The Big Short” hero Michael Burry views the Korean news as “the beginning of the end” for the AI play, which, of course, he’s shorting, so take that with however many grains of salt you wish.

Hoping to speed up AI and agent adoption in large enterprises, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft both created professional services organization to deploy engineers in organizations to help — which sounds familiar. No wonder Palantir CEO Alex Karp went off on the AI model makers, since this is how Palantir works.

To close, let’s step back a bit and look at how AI is ultimately going to matter to enterprises — and it’s not the usual artificial general intelligence Altman and the other AI leaders are always talking about. The real prize, Dave Vellante and George Gilbert say in their latest Breaking Analysis, is Enterprise AGI — that is, intelligence that’s unique to, and owned by, each enterprise based on their data.

I know most of you are off for the holiday, but if you have a few minutes, here’s all of this week’s enterprise and emerging tech news and analysis from SiliconANGLE and beyond:

AI and data: OpenAI and Anthropic jockey for fed favor

Analysis, opinion and food for thought

Breaking Analysis: Forget AGI. The real prize is enterprise AGI

Palantir CEO Alex Karp doesn’t hold back in interview as he rails against AI industry Tell us what you really think, Alex. Actually, he is, and not for the first time. Perhaps the AI model leaders are starting to threaten Palantir’s business model?

And a late addition: Dave Vellante lays out the real stakes in this battle: Alex Karp, frontier models and the real fight for Enterprise AI

Special Breaking Analysis: CoreWeave’s Vera Rubin bet shows AI infrastructure is becoming a full-stack game

AI: The generational force hollowing out the economy (per the New York Times)

Guest columns:

Don’t surrender data control in pursuit of intelligence

Geopolitical tension highlights the need for risk intelligence

New models and services

Report: SpaceX showed investors an AI device before IPO; Musk denies it

Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 with coding, safety upgrades, as Fable and Mythos controls lifted Alex Stamos sorts out the mess: “The only upside I can see from this whole mess is that there is a whole bunch of VCs with former or current Administration affiliation who we can now safely ignore on AI policy. They have shown that everything they ever said on AI regulation was just politically motivated.”

Meta to release new AI model with advanced coding capabilities ‘soon’ But… Mark Zuckerberg says Meta’s agentic AI efforts aren’t progressing as fast as he had hoped

China’s Meituan open-sources massive LongCat-2.0 AI model, saying it was trained on domestic chips

Google’s Gemini Omni Flash and Nano Banana 2 Lite support slick media content creation at lower costs

AWS launches forward-deployed engineering team to speed enterprise agentic AI adoption

Microsoft launches AI-focused professional services business with $2.5B investment

AWS turbocharges log analytics in Amazon OpenSearch Service at no extra cost

Couchbase’s AI Data Plane aims to turn fragmented data into real enterprise agent memory

CoreWeave debuts ARIA agent to automate AI research in Weights & Biases

Pinecone releases Nexus into public preview to bring business knowledge to AI agents

Neurologyca launches research labs to help frontier AI models understand people

Startup OpenMatter wants to make enterprises prove what their AI agents do

Groundcover lets AI agents work in Slack, Linear and GitHub with new connectors

Exabeam doubles AI detection coverage and adds Anthropic Claude support

Perforce launches Agentic Gateway to govern AI agents and cut token costs

Money matters

OpenAI could reportedly give 5% stake to US government

Global venture funding hits record $510B in first half as AI boom accelerates

AI data center builder Crusoe reportedly raising $3B at $30B valuation

Nvidia offers AI startups compute now, payment later

Schneider Electric acquires Cognite for $3.1B in industrial AI push

Together AI raises $800M to grow its AI-optimized public cloud

Verkada takes Nvidia investment to expand its physical AI platform

LeapXpert lands $180M to extract more intelligence from governed enterprise communications

Tripo AI secures additional $150M in funding to enhance its 3D and world models

AI software development startup 8090 nabs $135M funding round

TwelveLabs raises $100M to bring superintelligence to AI video models

AI stock trading startup EquiLibre raises funding at a $500M+ valuation

Homebuilding AI startup Higharc bags $90M in Series C funding

Venice raises $65M at $1B valuation for private, uncensored AI

Aligned bags $60M in funding to build the AI-native sales execution layer for enterprise deals

StirlingX raises $20M for sovereign data intelligence platform

Pie launches with $19.5M to bring AI marketing to small businesses

Exclusive: Agentic coding startup Baz brings code reviews to the planning stage as it extends seed funding to $17M

Software testing startup Arato gets $10M to stop businesses deploying AI systems blind

Build raises $8.5M to accelerate industrial infrastructure development project work

Policy

Sam Altman calls for US-led international forum to set global AI standards

Around the enterprise: Everyone wants to be a neocloud

New products and services

Meta shares jump 9% on reported plan to offer AI infrastructure services

SoftBank unveils plans to enter the US neocloud business with SB Neo

Anthropic reportedly in talks with Samsung to manufacture custom AI chip

New instances bring AWS’ Graviton5 CPUs to high-performance cloud workloads

Arcova promises to strip 18 months and up to $200M from AI data center builds

Money matters

South Korea launches $584B chip manufacturing initiative with Samsung, SK hynix

Inference chip startup Etched launches with $800M in funding

Raja Koduri’s Oxmiq Labs raises $35M to lower the design cost of custom AI silicon

Stathera nabs $35M to make vacuum-sealed silicon oscillators for AI chips

Omen AI raises $31M to help data centers avoid costly downtime with continuous liquid coolant monitoring

Policy

Chipmakers urge White House to avoid broad memory market interventions

Supreme Court rules constitutional privacy protections apply to geofence warrants

Cyber beat

New services

Vorlon debuts Guardian to block risky AI agent actions before they complete

Jamf launches Beacon threat hunting service for enterprise Mac environments

DNSFilter revamps MSP partner program as security costs squeeze providers

Money matters

Aikido acquires Root to patch open-source software without forced upgrades