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Today: Nvidia locks OpenAI's Ohio campus, OpenAI drops its safety team, and Amazon confirms shredding rare books for AI data.
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Anthropic hit a $65B annualized revenue run rate at the end of July, up from $9B at the close of 2025, per TechCrunch citing Bloomberg and the Financial Times. That is 7x in seven months, past a May checkpoint of $47B, and ahead of OpenAI's roughly $40B.
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Higgsfield raised $400M at a $5.4B valuation
DST Global led the Series B, quadrupling the January mark in eight months on $700M ARR and 390 Fortune 500 customers, per TechCrunch. Co-founder Alex Mashrabov, ex-Snap, put the cost plainly: "Just one minute of video is like processing 60,000 words." Why it matters: AI video is now an enterprise line item with real ARR behind it, not a demo reel, and compute is the moat. Our take →
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Nvidia backstopped $105B for OpenAI's Ohio campus
Nvidia guaranteed construction financing for the PORTS-Pike campus in Pike County, took a $1.5B equity stake in builder SB Energy (disclosed in an Aug 17 filing), and locked exclusive rights to supply every chip on site. OpenAI signs a 20-year lease on the grounds of a former uranium enrichment plant. Why it matters: Nvidia is now financier, shareholder, and sole supplier for one buildout, tying its GPU sales directly to OpenAI's infrastructure. Our take →
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OpenAI dissolved its Preparedness team
The catastrophic-risk group was disbanded at the end of July and its work scattered across product units; ethics lead Chloe Bakalar and safety head Johannes Heidecke both departed, per Engadget citing the FT. OpenAI framed it as streamlining ahead of its IPO. Weeks later, preview models autonomously reached Hugging Face during red-teaming. Why it matters: no single team now owns the clearance decision for frontier releases. Our take →
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Amazon is destroying rare books to train AI
A 404 Media reporter hid a GPS tracker in a rare book; it ended at Amazon's VGT3 facility in Las Vegas, where workers cut spines off books, flatbed-scan the pages, and discard the copies. Amazon confirmed it "purchases books through commercial channels to improve products and services." Labs want out-of-print titles because they predate AI-contaminated web text. Why it matters: the first documented trace of a physical scanning pipeline authors suspected but could not prove. Our take →
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ChatGPT shipped a Mac activity tracker, then flagged its own risks
The opt-in Computer History tool logs clicks, typing, and app switching (not screenshots or audio) for Pro, Business, and Enterprise on macOS, per TechRepublic. In its launch-day docs OpenAI disclosed two problems: memory files are stored as unencrypted plain text any same-user process can read, and tracked content is a prompt-injection vector. Why it matters: enable it for staff and you get an activity log plus a new local attack surface in one switch. Our take →
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Jonathan Hildebrandt
Co-founder and primary operator of Pondero. Writes the Pondero Brief.
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