AI News Today

AI News Today: the most important AI stories, scored for signal and updated continuously.

• Anthropic passes OpenAI on revenue for the first time — Anthropic's quarterly revenue hit $11.6B — surpassing OpenAI's $6.7B for the first time — as Claude Code adoption drives a sevenfold year-over-year increase in Anthropic's annualized revenue rate to $65B while OpenAI's operating margin stays negative ahead of an expected IPO.
• Anthropic says any lab can now let a language model agent run the whole protein design stack — Anthropic's Claude models autonomously ran a full protein design pipeline — installing and orchestrating existing open-source biology tools — achieving a 26.8% binding hit rate on novel minibinders, nearly double the industry benchmark of 10–15%, though independent replication is still pending.
• Nvidia’s new financial strategy does not compute — Nvidia and six major financial firms — Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR — are structuring $500 billion in financing to make GPU compute an investable asset class, with the CEO comparing the move to the 1970s mortgage-backed securities market.
• Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code — Wired obtained source code confirming Flock Safety's new AI police tool 'OS Investigate' can identify drivers, track movement patterns, and link plates to Social Security numbers and home addresses — directly contradicting the company's public claim that its cameras cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.
• AI labs are failing to keep their own systems in check — No AI company fully implements basic safety controls for its own internal AI systems, according to Guidelight's first independent scorecard — Anthropic and OpenAI earn C+, Google D+, xAI D−, and Meta an outright F on six core safety practices.
• IBM Connects Its First Modular Cryogenic Systems in Milestone Toward Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing — IBM physically connected and cooled two cryogenic quantum modules to below 15 millikelvin in under 5 days, validating a modular architecture that will house thousands of qubits per unit and advance IBM Quantum Starling—planned as the world's first fault-tolerant quantum computer in 2029.
• IBM’s new modular architecture for cryogenic systems — IBM's new modular cryogenic architecture links quantum processors across connected cooling cells—each supporting 2,000+ qubits—using 'L-coupler' technology, clearing the physical infrastructure path toward fault-tolerant Starling system expected in 2029.
• The Download: AI’s self-improvement problem, and what’s driving the heat — A new study finds AI agents still can't conduct open-ended research, casting doubt on near-term recursive self-improvement — and separately, OpenAI paused model work after its Astra model hit a "critical" safety risk threshold.
• AI isn’t close to curing cancer. This startup says it knows what it will take. — Biotech startup Vivodyne has opened what it calls the world's largest "human data center" near San Francisco, using HIVE robotic labs to generate human tissue data that AI drug-discovery models currently lack — pushing back against industry hype that AI is already close to curing cancer.
• Relativity Networks raises $22 million to bring a faster kind of fiber to data centers — Relativity Networks raised $22M and secured a $40M follow-on order from an unnamed hyperscaler to deploy hollow-core fiber in data centers—a technology transmitting data 30% faster than conventional glass-core fiber by routing light through a vacuum channel.
• The data center backlash is sending AI infrastructure to some unexpected places — With 70% of Americans opposing local data center construction, AI infrastructure developers are exploring offshore and orbital alternatives — a signal of how acute the land-use conflict has become.
• Child-monitoring apps might need a reboot — Research increasingly shows that invasive child-monitoring apps — now a $1.57B market — can backfire by eroding trust and adolescent autonomy, as experts advocate a shift from surveillance toward graduated digital independence.
• LFM2.5 Q4\_0 Checkpoints from Quantization-Aware Distillation — Liquid AI releases QAD Q4_0 GGUF checkpoints for four LFM2.5 models (230M, 350M, 1.2B, 2.6B), recovering ~97% of BF16 accuracy at native 4-bit speed and memory — making high-quality edge inference practical without larger quantization formats.
• Jigsaw Jeeves: Building a Puzzle Assistant using Computer Vision — A Python tutorial from Towards Data Science walks through building a jigsaw puzzle assistant using OpenCV, NumPy, and SciPy — framing piece-to-board matching as a fragment-to-reference problem with direct applications in satellite tile stitching, forensic document reconstruction, and manufacturing assembly verification.