The current week of AI briefings, Monday to Sunday, in plain English. The weekly summary is on top; each day's full report is linked below. Updated every morning and again mid-afternoon on weekdays; a new week starts each Monday.
This week at a glance
The week opens with Nvidia at the center of two very different stories. Nvidia's board opened an independent investigation after reporting that CEO Jensen Huang was the target of a foreign intelligence effort - and Huang admitted an affair in a memo to employees. The same weekend, Nvidia partnered with Korea's Rebellions and SK Telecom on sovereign AI infrastructure built around Korean-made chips.
In Washington, the small federal office that assesses frontier AI safety - leaderless and no longer publishing its research - has been asked to informally report to the White House, the Associated Press reports. And on Monday afternoon, Google widened its TPU chip lineup with two new systems - one built for massive context windows, its first that keeps data encrypted while in use - in what Bloomberg calls an escalation of its rivalry with Nvidia.
On Tuesday, Anthropic's first concrete IPO price - roughly 867 million shares at $70 to $80, raising up to $69.3 billion - reached investment banks and was withdrawn the same day as inaccurate, days before the planned roadshow. Meanwhile, eight countries and the major AI labs signed a Paris declaration committing to shutdown mechanisms, outside audits and risk disclosure for powerful models, and Meta released Muse Ember, a cheap small model built for the repetitive work agents do. In the afternoon the model race took over: Google opened Gemini 4 Carbon, its strongest model, to paying users, Anthropic shipped the faster, cheaper Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 pair, and Nvidia's GR00T 2 showed robots copying skills demonstrated only by humans.
On Wednesday, OpenAI opened Businesses in ChatGPT - profiles, product feeds and labeled Business Agents in front of what it says are 1.2 billion weekly users - while Anthropic put Claude inside live meetings, drafting plans and whiteboards as people talk. IBM and Microsoft pooled more than 6,000 pre-built agents into a joint platform for regulated industries, and Google's Gemini Robotics 2.5 sorted parts at 96% success on Mercedes production lines in its first factory proof of concept. And the midterms drew $187 million in AI-made ads - routine now, but not decisive, Poynter reports. In the afternoon, Applied Intuition opened talks to raise at least $1.5 billion at about $30 billion, double its 2025 price, Bloomberg reports.
On Thursday, the Nvidia story broke open: the board was reportedly preparing to dismiss Jensen Huang after a second alleged affair, and hours later Huang had resigned, with CFO Colette Kress named interim CEO. Meanwhile Reuters found a blacklisted, PLA-linked university had bought Nvidia H200 chips through a reseller. The money kept moving: OpenAI's quarterly revenue crossed $10 billion for the first time, CoreWeave said customers will prepay for the AI buildout, and Mercor raised $750 million at a $20 billion valuation. DeepMind released AlphaGenome 2, predicting what genetic variants do one cell type at a time, and Australia put criminal penalties for AI companies on the table.
On Friday, Nvidia began life without its founder: interim CEO Colette Kress called an all-hands for November 18 and the board opened its search for a permanent CEO. Google released Gemini 4 Hydrogen, a faster, cheaper model now reaching Search and the Gemini app. The buildout rolled on: SpaceX pledged more than $74 billion for two AI supercomputing campuses, Nebius posted 571% revenue growth and still lost a sixth of its value, and AMD claimed a benchmark edge over Nvidia's next chip. And the pushback grew: nonprofits sued five AI giants to freeze frontier development, Notion confirmed customer chats leaked in the Fireworks breach, and United barred AI agents from completing flight bookings. In the afternoon, Congress summoned Jensen Huang and Commerce Secretary Lutnick to testify on national security and chip sales to China, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Wallet with all three big card networks so agents can pay with per-purchase approval, and LangChain raised $300 million at a $3 billion valuation.
