Monday, 17 August 2026

Voice-input startup Wispr raised a $280M Series B at a $2B valuation, led by Menlo Ventures, expanding from dictation into meeting notes and wearables.

Groq raised a $350M Series A at a $3.5B valuation, down from $6.9B last year, to fund its shift from selling AI chips to renting out GPU inference capacity.

Anthropic's August risk report raises its misalignment-risk rating to low and discloses an unreleased internal model, Model 2, with no public release plans.

NVIDIA is guaranteeing up to $105B in financing for a new OpenAI data center at Ohio's PORTS-Pike campus, plus a $1.5B direct equity stake in builder SB Energy.

Fortinet acquired Virtue AI to add AI runtime protection, autonomous-agent red-teaming, and MCP-tool scanning to its Security for AI portfolio.

404 Media traced a tracker inside a purchased rare book to an Amazon facility in Las Vegas, and Amazon confirmed it scans out-of-print texts to train AI.

OpenAI says a near-frontier open-weight model with cyber capabilities ships end of August, and could speed up attacks on unpatched systems.

Google's imagen-4.0 generate, fast, and ultra endpoints stopped serving August 17, months after Vertex AI's side retired; Gemini's image model replaces them.

NVIDIA's Nemotron 3.5 Lightning model is now available in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, giving AWS builders one-click access to the open model.