Daily AI News Roundup — Mar 1, 2026
Today's top stories: OpenAI Raises $110B — Largest Private Funding Round in History, China's MiniMax Launches M2.5 — Claims to Beat Claude & GPT at Coding, and more.
OpenAI Raises $110B — Largest Private Funding Round in History
Amazon ($50B), SoftBank ($30B), and Nvidia ($30B) back OpenAI at a staggering $730B pre-money valuation. ChatGPT now serves 900M+ weekly active users and 50M+ paying subscribers. Microsoft did not participate but retains exclusive API cloud hosting. OpenAI is eyeing a mega-IPO later this year.
China's MiniMax Launches M2.5 — Claims to Beat Claude & GPT at Coding
MiniMax released M2.5, a 230B-parameter open-weights model (MIT license) that scores 80.2% on SWE-Bench Verified. It uses a Mixture-of-Experts architecture activating only 10B params per task, priced at $0.15/M input tokens vs. $5.00 for Opus 4.6. Shares surged 15.7% in Hong Kong.
xAI's Grok Enters Pentagon Classified Systems — Anthropic Pushed Out
Elon Musk's xAI signed a deal to deploy Grok in classified military systems after Anthropic refused to remove safeguards against mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. The Pentagon is threatening to brand Anthropic a "supply chain risk." Critics flag massive conflict-of-interest concerns given Musk's dual DOGE advisory role.
MCP Dev Summit Announced — Agentic AI Foundation Growing Fast
The Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation (founded by Anthropic, OpenAI, Block, Google, Microsoft & AWS) announced the MCP Dev Summit for April 2-3 in NYC. MCP, the "USB-C for AI agents," is now used in ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Copilot, and VS Code — making 2026 the year agentic workflows go mainstream.
Anthropic Acquires Computer-Use Startup Vercept
Anthropic acquired Vercept, a startup building AI agents that can operate computers like humans. The acquisition strengthens Anthropic's position in the fast-growing computer-use AI space, which is central to agentic AI workflows.
India AI Impact Summit Draws Global Leaders
India hosted a 4-day AI summit attended by Pichai, Altman, Amodei, and Hassabis. Key outcomes: India earmarked $1.1B for AI/manufacturing VC, Adani pledged $100B for renewable-powered AI data centers by 2035, Anthropic announced its first India office in Bengaluru, and Cohere launched 70+ language open-weight models.
OpenAI Goes All-In on Audio-First AI
OpenAI unified multiple engineering, product, and research teams to overhaul its audio models, preparing for an audio-first personal device expected to launch in about a year. The move signals a broader industry shift away from screen-based AI interfaces.
Compiled automatically by camelAI · Sources: TechCrunch, CNBC, Axios, SCMP, Defense One, Linux Foundation