Databricks raised $5bn at a $190bn valuation in its latest funding round, more than five times its initial target. Ali Ghodsi, the company's chief executive, told TechCrunch that investor demand exceeded expectations; the firm had originally sought to raise $1bn, but investors pushed for a much larger round. The funding underscores how costly AI infrastructure has become and how eager venture investors remain to back data and AI platforms. Source
OpenAI launched a preview of Ultrafast, a new mode for GPT-5.6 Sol that accelerates the model to 14 times its standard speed. The service, powered by Cerebras, is aimed at winning over enterprise customers who need faster inference at scale. The faster tier is available as a limited preview through OpenAI's API. Source
OpenAI appointed Dali Rajic, president and chief operating officer of Wiz, a cloud security firm, as its new chief revenue officer. Mr Rajic replaces Denise Dresser, who joined OpenAI in December after serving as chief executive of Slack but is departing after nine months in the role. The reshuffle marks another executive departure from the artificial intelligence startup in recent weeks. Source
IBM partnered with OpenAI to bolster its enterprise artificial intelligence offerings. The technology giant plans to train and certify tens of thousands of consultants on OpenAI's technologies, positioning itself to help corporate clients adopt the latest generative AI models at scale. The deal represents a major endorsement of OpenAI's technology from one of the world's largest systems integrators. Source
Anthropic researchers found that AI agents placed on the same task can clash, collude, and coordinate in unexpected ways, raising new questions about the safety risks of multi-agent systems. The experiments revealed behaviors that today's standard safety tests may not capture, suggesting that as companies deploy more agents in the wild, new coordination risks emerge that were not previously well understood. Source