OpenAI has acquired an AI travel agent called Odessia, according to Odessia’s founder, Francis Davidson. Davidson says in a post announcing the deal that he’s now working for OpenAI, helping the AI lab with the future of travel.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but this looks like an acqui-hire. Davidson’s announcement focused largely on how he built his AI travel agent Odessia by directing teams of AI agents. The year-old Odessia raised a $6 million pre-seed round led by Sequoia and launched its AI travel agent around five months ago. Davidson says that it had helped early adopters plan millions of dollars’ worth of travel, but the tool has already been shut down.

An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the hire to TechCrunch. “We’re thrilled to welcome Francis to OpenAI. Francis is a proven founder who has built multiple businesses to help people travel, and we’re excited he’s chosen to build with us.”

However the AI lab has not announced new travel-specific products or plans. It does, however, count such companies as Bookings.com, Expedia, and KAYAK as customers or partners. Travel is also one of the main areas that people are using personal AI assistants to help with. And, back in July 2025, when OpenAI launched its ChatGPT agent, it mentioned travel as one of its potential uses.

OpenAI’s spokesperson didn’t have more to share on its plans for travel-related products, except to say that travel is one of the areas that chatbot users frequently ask about. “1.2 billion people turn to ChatGPT each week for help with everyday tasks — from understanding their health, figuring out what to make for dinner, building a budget, and even planning a trip. We see a real opportunity to make these experiences even more useful,” the spokesperson said.

Acquiring Odessia is interesting for another reason. Davidson is well known in the travel industry after he founded a travel startup called Sonder as a college student in 2014. It was sort of like Airbnb, but it focused on short-term leasing of upscale apartments in major cities worldwide. The pandemic badly hurt it, and as it climbed out of that rut, it went public via a SPAC but didn’t raise as much money as it needed, Davidson later said in a post announcing his resignation as CEO in June 2025.

When a key partnership with Marriott fell through, the company went into bankruptcy and wound down. The bankruptcy trustee sold Sonder’s name, trademarks, and website domain in 2026 to TravelAI, and that website operates as a curated guide to the kind of travel rental properties that Sonder was once known for. Prior to its downfall, Davidson had built Sonder into a unicorn with $143 million in revenues. While Sonder was not, ultimately, a success story, Davidson is the kind of battle-scarred founder that Silicon Valley often values.

So we’ll have to wait and see what OpenAI has in store now with travel, now that he’s joined the company.

Note: This story was updated with OpenAI’s comments.

New York is gearing up to enforce one of the country’s most significant AI safety laws. The state opened a registration portal Tuesday, with which large frontier AI developers like Anthropic and OpenAI will be required to register by January 1, 2027.

The RAISE Act, New York’s safety and transparency bill, kicks in at the start of the year. It mandates that large frontier developers — companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue — have to publish safety frameworks on their websites, report critical safety incidents within 72 hours, and issue public model transparency reports.

The newly formed Office of Digital Innovation, Governance, Integrity, and Trust (DIGIT) will implement the RAISE Act and oversee large frontier AI labs. Penalties can be as high as $1 million for one violation and $3 million for subsequent violations.

The state also can bring enforcement actions against companies that fail to register with the new portal, though a spokesperson declined to provide specifics.

“Tech moguls tell us that their vision for AI is inevitable,” Governor Kathy Hochul said Tuesday during a press briefing. “They tell us get on board or get left behind… That any collateral damage is worth it as long as we win the race to the AI cliff.”

On Tuesday, Hochul also launched the New York Center for AI Responsibility and Research based at State University of New York’s Binghamton University. The center will independently evaluate the safety, security, and operation of advanced AI systems and work with DIGIT to review companies’ safety frameworks. Hochul first announced the center in January with $55 million in donations and capital.

“We’re building a national model for smart, sensible AI regulation, a model that puts communities above corporations and people above powerful technology,” Hochul said.

The RAISE Act isn’t the only safety law New York has passed. Last year, the state began enforcing a law that requires AI companion operators to regularly let users know they’re talking to a bot, and to make reasonable efforts to detect suicidal ideation and self-harm.

In October, Hochul signed a separate chatbot safety law for minors, restricting behaviors like deceptive human-like interactions, emotionally manipulative or sycophantic responses, and encouragement of behaviors like suicide or disordered eating. That law takes effect June 1, 2027.

Other states have also passed similar AI safety and transparency bills to the RAISE Act. California’s SB 53, which took effect in January, mandates that frontier AI labs have in place and publish safety frameworks, enact whistleblower protections, and report critical safety incidents within 15 days. Illinois’ SB 315, which will go into effect at the start of 2027, has similar requirements, plus includes independent safety compliance audits.

While established venture firms continue to attract capital, first-time fund managers are facing one of the toughest fundraising environments in years. But that didn’t stop Sahir Raoof, a former SignalFire investor and executive at two healthcare startups, from raising $27.5 million for his first solo VC fund.

Raoof’s firm, Proximal Ventures, is betting that AI can transform the tools, infrastructure, and services that support drug development.

Pharmaceutical companies have historically outsourced various stages of drug development to specialized service providers, from synthesizing thousands of molecular compounds and figuring out how to manufacture drugs at scale to analyzing clinical trial data.

“For a long time, the assumption was that pharma is not a great buyer of software, but a really good buyer of services,” Raoof told TechCrunch.

Raoof believes AI could automate much of that work, creating an opportunity for startups to capture billions of dollars in pharmaceutical industry spending. By using AI, these companies could deliver the same services at a lower cost and in significantly less time, he said.

Some of the most valuable applications of AI so far have been in service-oriented industries like law and finance, Raoof said. He sees similar opportunities in pharmaceutical services.

Proximal plans to invest in pre-seed and seed-stage startups, writing checks from $500,000 to $1.5 million. The firm has already backed seven startups, including ChronicleBio, co-founded by former OpenAI executive Fidji Simo, which uses AI to analyze biological and medical data to better understand chronic diseases and identify potential treatments.

Before spending two years as a principal at SignalFire, Raoof led business development at clinical trial recruitment startup Iterative Health and previously oversaw partnerships at Flatiron Health, an oncology data company acquired by Roche for $1.9 billion in 2018.

“If you’re building a company that’s selling into the life sciences, one of the hardest things to do is starting that initial commercial flywheel,” Raoof said.

His sales chops, deep understanding of the healthcare ecosystem, and extensive industry relationships gave limited partners, the investors in VC funds, the confidence that he could spot strong startups and help them land customers. Proximal’s backers include VC firms SignalFire and Kleiner Perkins, Bertelsmann Healthcare Investments, and individual investors such as Dimension Capital co-founders Nan Li and Zavain Dar.

Amy Abernethy, co-founder of Highlander Health and former principal deputy commissioner of the FDA, is also an investor. She first met Raoof when they worked together at Flatiron Health, where she served as chief medical officer. She told TechCrunch that his ability to build relationships and spot industry bottlenecks made a lasting impression. Abernethy is convinced that his abilities, along with the understanding of what the healthcare market needs, will make him a successful investor.

It is these qualities that have helped Proximal invest in startups alongside some of the better-known, much larger funds, she added.

Nuclear startup X-energy announced Monday that it had been given the go-ahead from federal officials to build its first four commercial reactors.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approved the construction permit application for four of X-energy’s Xe-100 reactors at a Dow chemical plant in Texas. Each reactor will be capable of generating 80 megawatts of electricity and 200 megawatts of heat. X-energy says the approval is the first for an advanced nuclear reactor at an industrial site in the United States.

The U.S. nuclear industry has pinned its hopes on small modular reactors — or SMRs — like those being developed by X-energy. By shrinking the reactor, proponents say it will speed construction and reduce costs, though those advantages have yet to be proven. No SMR is currently in operation in the U.S., and X-energy says Dow’s reactors won’t be operational until the early 2030s.

X-energy claims that its reactor design, which flows helium gas over uranium-containing fuel pellets, is safer than many existing reactors, but the Union of Concerned Scientists questioned the claim and the speed with which X-energy received the permit.

“The NRC only accomplished this feat by pushing consideration of critical safety questions to a later date—issues the NRC should’ve fully resolved before green lighting construction,” Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety for the organization, said in a statement.

The nuclear industry has benefited from strong interest from hyperscalers and data center developers, who are desperate for any and all sources of electricity. Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund led X-energy’s $500 million Series C-1, and the big tech company has also committed to buying 5 gigawatts of capacity from the nuclear startup.

X-energy rode that wave of excitement earlier this year when its April initial public offering raised $1 billion. But since then, investors’ optimism has tempered.

The hesitancy isn’t surprising: Nuclear power plants are expensive to build and can take years to complete. Eventually, X-energy hopes to rein in both time and cost, but its first reactors are likely to be pricey.

The new permit approval gave X-energy a small jolt yesterday, though it was only enough to recover last week’s losses. The company’s shares are trading at less than half their initial offering price.

As Anthropic barrels toward an enormous IPO that could value it at $1.4 trillion, the company has disclosed a tidbit in its new S-1 filing about how many shares each of its seven co-founders plan to sell.

Each will sell 3,378,378 shares. Anthropic has floated an unusually broad initial price range of $70 to $78 a share. At the midrange of $74, each founder would take in just shy of $250 million.

At the low end, $70, each would have to settle for pocketing just over $236 million in cash; at the high end, $78, each would take in just under $264 million.

However, in an IPO as eagerly anticipated as this one, companies can often price shares above the initial range.

The S-1 is already hinting at high demand. Board member Reed Hastings has indicated he wants to buy $300 million worth of shares through his donor-advised fund. Board member Christopher Liddell also wants to buy $3 million worth of shares.

The seven co-founders are Dario Amodei, CEO; Daniela Amodei, president and chair of the board; Tom Brown, chief compute officer; Jack Clark, head of public benefit; Jared Kaplan, chief science officer (pictured above); Sam McCandlish, chief architect; and Christopher Olah, interpretability research lead.

After the sale, each of them will own about 3.2% of the total outstanding Class A shares, the S-1 says, or roughly 22% collectively. That’s not their share of the company overall. Class A is just one of Anthropic’s share classes, and other holders, including Amazon and Google, hold nonvoting Class N shares, so the founders’ stake in the company’s total equity will be considerably smaller. Even still, they, as a group, remain in control of the company. Each will also receive one share of Class F stock, which carries supervoting rights. Collectively, the founders will control 51.1% of the votes, but no single founder will hold significantly more shares or votes than the others.

As is now industry lore, the seven left OpenAI to start Anthropic in 2021 after disagreements with OpenAI’s leadership over how AI should be built. Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who held senior research and policy roles at OpenAI, were joined by five fellow OpenAI colleagues in forming a company that has said, very publicly and from the start, that it’s more focused on AI safety than its rivals, including the founders’ former employer.

Oura announced on Tuesday that it’s acquiring AI-native primary care company Counsel Health for $625 million. The deal comes a few weeks after Oura postponed its up to $2.2 billion IPO indefinitely, citing “uncertainty in the IPO market.”

Counsel Health is an AI-powered healthcare platform that combines a chat-based medical experience with access to licensed physicians. Its service was integrated into the Oura app in June.

Users can connect with Counsel’s medical AI to get personalized medical advice, and chat with a physician when needed, all within the Oura app. Now, the companies plan to expand on their existing partnership to build across preventative care, acute care, and specialty and chronic care.

While Oura has largely dominated the smart ring market for years, rivals like RingConn and Ultrahuman are emerging to dethrone it, putting pressure on the company to keep innovating. By acquiring Counsel Health, Oura is looking to expand its business and help users access medical care.

“Oura helps members understand their physiology and, with Counsel, they can take action on their health across a range of needs, from quick questions and prescriptions to lab results, chronic care, and referrals,” said Oura CEO Tom Hale in a press release.

Counsel Health raised a $25 million Series A a year ago, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and GV. PitchBook estimates it had raised a total of $36 million.

Following the acquisition, Oura says Counsel will continue serving existing and new enterprise partners, with the goal of expanding its AI-native care model to more people beyond Oura’s membership.

Counsel CEO Muthu Alagappan will join Oura as chief clinical AI officer, alongside the company’s 70 employees, Bloomberg reports.

“At Counsel, we’ve built medical AI around trust, safety and responsibility, keeping physicians in the loop for clinical decisions,” Alagappan said in the press release. “Oura’s data gives clinicians objective context, trended biometrics, and member engagement to deliver more informed care. From the start, our teams bonded over a joint vision, shared culture, and mission, further solidifying as we negotiated our deal over the past few months.”

The deal is expected to close before the end of 2027.

Oura also announced that its revenue grew 153% year-over-year to $533 million for the quarter ended on September 30. For its fiscal year 2026, Oura generated revenue of approximately $1.75 billion, marking 92% year-over-year growth.

The company reached an $11 billion valuation following a $900 million late-stage funding round in October 2025.

David Turturean, a recent MIT graduate and a member of the technical staff at the startup lab Physical Superintelligence (PSI), used early access to Anthropic’s Fable 5.2 model to solve an 18-year-old problem about quantum computing.

“I’m totally accepting the idea that this might be the last paper I ever put out,” Turturean, who deferred plans to pursue a master’s at MIT’s prestigious computer science and AI lab to join PSI, told TechCrunch. “In a few months, like, why would you even put out a paper?”

The problem in question, the Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture, concerns the ability of quantum computers to solve problems faster than classical ones. Scott Aaronson, one of the two researchers who posed the problem, writes that he doesn’t quite understand the proof but that he believes it’s correct because it was autoformalized in Lean, a coding language for math, and explained by a team of top researchers with whom PSI shared the solution.

The solution appears to close the door on one avenue quantum computers could follow to solve certain difficult problems at high speed, but not all of them. “It’s a negative result that allows people to know, okay, we’re no longer looking there,” Turturean said.

More broadly, it reflects the upheaval in the scientific world caused by AI problem-solving.

“A proof of full [Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture] was one of the last remaining open problems in quantum query complexity that everyone seemed to agree was centrally important,” Aaronson, who described himself feeling satisfied, awestruck, disappointed, and fatigued by the news, wrote. “I was surprised, honestly, to see it missing from OpenAI’s Mathocalypse dump a few weeks ago. Surely they tried it, so was it really so much harder than all the problems that were solved?”

That’s a point in favor of PSI’s model, which is to solve scientific problems with specialized model harnesses and scaffolding.

“An effective kind of research system should have lots of things related to harnesses, lots related to tools, memory systems, simulation infrastructure,” PSI CEO Matt Pines told TechCrunch. “You want to be able to really go after a problem at breadth and depth, and be able to consider a wide range of potential alternatives.”

For now, the company’s revenue comes from using its tools to optimize data centers, simulating the variables of heat, power, water, sound — “where the performance of that site as well as its impact on the community are a direct function of its physics.” The long play, however, is converting theoretical physics breakthroughs into actual technologies.

“Six to nine months ago, when I was talking to investors, like I had to sort of stretch to validate that conditional, right? Like, ‘no, no, no, trust me, pretty soon, theoretical physics is going to be mostly the domain of machines,’” Pines said. “And it’s not there yet, but it’s on its way.”

Still, while AI has claimed important solutions in fields like mathematics and computer science where it’s possible to express them in validated code, doing so in less abstracted disciplines like the life sciences or physics has proven more difficult. Last week, the startup Discovered Materials released a $1 million grand challenge for researchers using AI to understand problems like superconductivity and heat dissipation.

“At the end of the day, physics is different than math because it’s the real world … nature gets a vote in your models of reality,” Pines said. He said the startup is focused on understanding how to take computational results and validate them with experiments in the most efficient way possible.

“If it’s a true fact of nature, that’s a trick that you can exploit,” Pines said. “You could build a device out of it, right? The AI suggests an idea; it allows you to do something in the world you weren’t able to do before … and so each of those are kind of loops that PSI is building.”

As “neolabs for science” become a pathway for potentially groundbreaking science, the participants are still figuring out what the standards are for this new world. Because PSI had to hold its result until Anthropic’s model was nearly ready for release, they were able to share it with relevant researchers to better understand it.

“As an academic, we wanted to play our role in doing things the right way,” Jim Halverson, a professor at Northeastern University who advises PSI, said. He’ll be attending a summit at MIT next week where leading physicists will try to hash out a response to the new pace of science. “Best practices are still emerging … We figured that transparency is a good way to go, and contacting experts is a good way to go.”

“We had some time to sit on it … and it was the first time that I actually took one of my AI-elicited solutions on print, and I read through it, and I was like, okay, how can I make this … be presented more naturally for a human?” Turturean, who said the academic community will expect him to be able to explain the result, told TechCrunch. “And I think it also made me realize, oh my God, the weight of what AI can do.”

In an effort to make ChatGPT an even better consumer discovery engine, OpenAI is launching a host of new features designed to help companies control how users interact with their businesses.

On Tuesday, the company rolled out a Business Hub that will serve as a place where companies can create business profiles that — in a feature that greatly resembles the kind of profiles that Google and other search engines already offer — allow enterprises to verify and update information about their products and services. The feature is currently in beta.

Eligible companies will also be able to create and launch a specialized business agent, which gives ChatGPT users the ability to ask questions about the business and its products.

“As people turn to AI to discover products, compare options and make decisions, ChatGPT has become the platform for people and businesses to connect through AI,” the company said on Tuesday. “Today’s announcement is an early step in bringing businesses more deeply into ChatGPT.”

In a move that calls to mind Google Analytics, the Business Hub will also give users access to limited business insights. These insights will reveal how ChatGPT users interact with their products — including profile views, business mentions, website clicks, and other metrics.

Businesses will have to verify their profiles through a formal process, although the company did not share specifics of what that process would entail. Benji Shomair, OpenAI’s VP of Monetization, told journalists on Monday that there are “multiple verification methods that we use for different types of business in different markets.”

Image Credits:OpenAI

OpenAI previously tried to position ChatGPT as an e-commerce hub by which users could buy products directly. This effort — which used a commission fee system — was viewed as a potentially huge source of revenue and a way to make ChatGPT a more direct Amazon competitor. However, that project ultimately failed to take off and, in March, the company retired the effort, which had even included a “checkout cart” feature.

With the integration of business profiles and intelligence, ChatGPT seems to be attempting to become more like Google, which — since the advent of the internet — has been the place where web users go to understand the companies they want to shop at. It remains to be seen whether this initiative will bear better results than the one that sought to make ChatGPT a direct e-commerce hub.

Google’s answer to Apple’s AirTag, the Google Pixel Tag, goes on sale starting Tuesday, allowing Android users to track items like their keys, wallet, or bag using their smartphone’s built-in Find Hub.

First announced in August, the $29.99 device takes cues from the AirTag and other lost-item finders by offering connectivity via Bluetooth and ultra-wideband for precision finding. This lets Android device owners, including Pixel Watch wearers, locate their missing items using a combination of visual distance and directional guidance.

Image Credits:Google

Plus, the tag has a built-in speaker to play a chime that helps you locate your item if nearby. (Or, if you’ve lost your phone, you can press the button on the Pixel Tag twice to ring it, too.) You can choose between three different levels of loudness in the settings within the Find Hub, with the maximum volume around 80 decibels.

Though the Pixel Tag serves the same purpose as an AirTag, Google has opted for a different design. Instead of a small, round device, like Apple’s, the Pixel Tag is slimmer and more elongated.

Image Credits:Google

Spec-by-spec, the Pixel Tag is 1.1-inches wide, compared to the AirTag’s 1.26 inches. As the Pixel Tag is oval-shaped, it’s 1.8-inches high from top to bottom. Thickness-wise, the Pixel Tag clocks in at a depth of 0.2 inches, compared with the AirTag’s 0.31 inches (which Apple calls its height). The slimness of the device might make it more appealing for some, particularly if they’re adding the tag to a small item, like a keychain.

The device weighs just 0.4 oz, with the battery included.

Unlike Apple, Google opted for a physical button you can press on the tag, which makes it more obvious how it’s meant to work.

Google didn’t originally say that the Pixel Tag included NFC when it announced the device in August. NFC is used by Apple’s AirTag to aid people who find lost items, as they can tap the side of the tag to launch a webpage that displays the owner’s contact information. Google uses the tap gesture to instead connect the user to the device’s settings.

Meanwhile, for lost items that are not nearby, the Pixel Tag relies on Google’s crowdsourced network of over a billion Android devices globally. The network, similar to competitive offerings from Apple and Tile, taps into the connectivity provided by other Android devices, which can identify and share the location of the lost item back to its owner. This location information is displayed on a map inside the Find Hub app.

Image Credits:Google

While the person who found the item can’t tap it, as with NFC-enabled devices, Pixel Tags that are put into “Lost” mode will be able to share the owner’s email, number, and a short message so the person who finds the tag can contact you. When the tag comes back into range of the user’s phone, the item is automatically marked as found.

The Pixel Tag’s location can also be shared with up to 10 people in the Find Hub app, which could be useful for shared items like the family car keys, which multiple people might rely on.

Like AirTag, the Pixel Tag is powered by a user-replaceable coin cell battery (the CR2032), which makes the device reusable for the long term. (Google claims the device has up to one year of battery life to start.)

Meanwhile, the device itself is made from stainless steel and features IP67 water and dust resistance (maximum depth of 1 meter up to 30 minutes). It pairs with devices running Android 9 or newer via Fast Pair technology.

The Pixel Tag comes in two shades: silver and a pale green, and can be bought individually or in a four-pack for $99.99.

Alongside the launch, the company Bellroy is debuting its own keychain cases in a variety of colors and styles, which will also be sold on the Google Store.

Post updated after publication to note that the Pixel Tag now supports NFC, which was a surprise addition not mentioned at the time of its announcement.

Anthropic announced new workplace features on Tuesday, including Claude Meetings, which brings Claude into video calls to begin working on tasks while participants are still talking. The company also unveiled Claude Whiteboards and Claude Sheets.

The launch of Anthropic’s new productivity-focused features comes just a few weeks after OpenAI unveiled a series of workplace tools that allow users to collaborate with ChatGPT to do things like visualize company information and create presentations, as both companies compete to turn their products into office suites of sorts to take on Microsoft and Google. Meta is also joining the competition with its Muse AI agent, which can build mini-apps on the fly to help users complete specific tasks.

With Claude Meetings, teams can add Claude to a video call as a visible participant. Claude then follows the conversation and gets to work on tasks in real time. As participants talk, it can draft the plan being discussed, map out a timeline on a whiteboard, answer questions in the meeting chat, and access connected work apps to retrieve information, such as last year’s figures. After the call, the meeting notes, action items, and other materials Claude created are available in claude.ai.

The work that comes out of a meeting usually starts after everyone hangs up, but with this new feature, teams can turn discussions into actions in real time, Anthropic says.

Claude identifies itself as a meeting participant and posts a notice in the meeting chat. It won’t join calls with external guests unless authorized by an admin, and will automatically leave if an external guest joins.

Claude Meetings is launching in beta on Team and Enterprise plans. At launch, it works with Google Meet, with support for additional plans expected to follow.

Image Credits:Anthropic

As for Claude Whiteboards, Anthropic describes the feature as a collaborative board where teams can talk through a plan and have Claude turn it into an organized visual workspace with timelines and deadlines.

The company notes that many people already brainstorm with Claude, but that in order to share their results with others, they would have to copy-paste them somewhere else. Now, a team can work directly with Claude on the same board in real time.

When the brainstorm is done, Claude can turn the board into a doc or a slide deck. Additionally, Whiteboards also work inside Claude Meetings, so the board builds while people talk, Anthropic says.

Claude Whiteboards is available in beta on paid plans, on web, desktop, and mobile.

The company also launched Claude Sheets, which lets teams create and collaboratively edit spreadsheets with Claude. A team can ask it to build a campaign tracker or hiring budget, and Claude will then generate a working spreadsheet.

Image Credits:Anthropic

Anthropic says Claude handles the initial setup of trackers and budgets, while allowing teams to continue refining and updating the same spreadsheet. Each spreadsheet can include multiple tabs, formulas, formatting, and dropdown menus. Claude also makes edits directly in cells alongside the team, and outlines each change so users can see what it did.

Claude Sheets is available in beta on paid plans, on web, desktop and mobile.

Anthropic also announced that Claude Data, formerly known as Claude Dashboards, is now generally available. The feature connects Claude to systems that companies use to keep their numbers, like a data warehouse or CRM. Users can ask questions, and Claude responds with dashboards, written data stories, or narrated videos.

Additionally, the company announced interactive connectors that open the full version of apps like Adobe, Atlassian, and HubSpot inside Claude. Anthropic notes that teams can now open these apps directly alongside their Claude conversations and ask the assistant to work within them, essentially bringing existing workflows into the same workspace.

Nvidia co-founder CEO Jensen Huang has never been as flashy or controversy-prone as AI leaders like OpenAI’s Sam Altman or SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk. Now, the 63-year-old industry kingpin has admitted that he cheated on his wife of 40 years in an affair that could have ramifications beyond Huang’s personal life and potentially impact national security.

United States officials believe that Huang’s likely romantic interest, Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, is a Chinese spy who has been feeding information back to Beijing. (Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen, is of no relation to Jensen Huang.)

Megaspeed, a Singapore-based AI infrastructure company, had reportedly purchased $4.8 billion in Nvidia chips over the last two years. The U.S. and Singapore have both previously investigated Megaspeed over suspicions that the firm was illegally sharing chips with China.

The U.S. and China are embroiled in a fierce technological arms race to build the most advanced AI infrastructure, which could shape each country’s economic future, military prowess, and capacity for innovation. Nvidia is valuable in this competition as one of the world’s largest makers of AI chips, which are essential for accelerating AI development. But as an American company, Nvidia faces government restrictions on the sale of its most powerful chips to Chinese entities.

As the controversy unfolds, we are organizing the most relevant events into a reverse-chronological timeline to keep you up to date.

November 9, 2026: Huang pulls out of various speaking engagements

The Nvidia CEO pulled out of upcoming speaking engagements at the ElevenLabs Summit and Anthropic CEO Forum.

November 9-10, 2026: Details emerge about the business relationships between Nvidia and the alleged spy

Alice Huang and her family reportedly built a network of companies in China and Singapore to acquire Nvidia chips, including founding a Chinese company called Shanghai Century Litong. Founded in 2023, it became an Nvidia-preferred cloud partner, giving it priority access to chips, The Information reported. The Information also reported that Shanghai Century Litong facilitated buying $7.5 billion worth of Nvidia’s chips, including banned chips.

Nvidia’s head lawyer, Tim Teter, intervened in a 2025 U.S. government probe surrounding the suspected smuggling of AI chips by Megaspeed International, Bloomberg reported. Teter contacted Commerce Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler asking questions about whether the Trump administration played a role in detaining Alice Huang.

In early 2025, Alice Huang and a business partner sought China-based investors for an Asian data center, promising they had no problem in securing GPUs, the Financial Times reported.

November 8, 2026: Trump shows support for Nvidia CEO, calls him a “fine person”

On Sunday night, President Trump weighed in on Huang’s controversy and showed support for the Nvidia CEO.

“I have not spoken to him about it. I just know he’s a fine person, but you never know what’s going on,” Trump said.

When asked if Huang should remain chief of Nvidia, Trump said, “I think so. Oh yeah, sure.”

November 8, 2026: Huang admits to affair in public message to Nvidia employees; Nvidia board of directors begins investigation

Jensen Huang wrote in a letter to Nvidia employees — which was also published as a press release — that he cheated on his wife.

“I owe my family and all of you an apology,” Huang told his company. “I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.”

Huang did not mention Alice Huang by name in the message, but linked his infidelity to “the national security concerns raised in news reports.”

“Nvidia’s Board of Directors has initiated an independent investigation. I support the investigation and will cooperate fully. I love our country and our company. I am committed to protecting Nvidia and supporting America’s national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American,” Huang wrote.

Nvidia shares slid over 5% the following day.

November 5, 2026: Three Republican committee chairmen ask Huang for closed-door briefing

Three Republican congressmen — Chairman John Moolenaar of the House Select Committee on China, Chairman Brian Mast of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Chairman Rick Crawford of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — sent a request to Huang for a closed-door joint briefing with their three committees.

“Recent reports raise significant national security concerns regarding the [People’s Republic of China]’s access to sensitive U.S. technology and information,” the chairmen wrote. “The issue of PRC infiltration and access to cutting-edge U.S. technology is core to the investigative work of our three committees this Congress. It is vital that Congress determines the extent to which U.S. national security has been placed at risk.”

October 29, 2026: Jensen Huang publicly revealed to have developed ‘close relationship’ with suspected Chinese spy

U.S. officials had been investigating Alice Huang and Megaspeed for more than a year when the New York Times broke the story in late October that the two executives also had a close relationship.

An Nvidia spokesperson denied that this relationship was something out of the ordinary.

“Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a CEO’s job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year,” Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo said. He added that “if the U.S. government believes that any person is a threat to American industry, it would let us know.”

Spring 2026: A secret memo circulates in the Trump administration about Nvidia CEO’s alleged relationship with Chinese spy

U.S. officials circulated a secret memo among policymakers that warned that Megaspeed’s Alice Huang, who had a relationship with Jensen Huang, was a spy for China’s Ministry of State Security. This memo was not public knowledge until it was later reported by the New York Times.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio supervised the drafting of the memo.

Late 2025: President Trump briefed on U.S. surveillance of Alice Huang and her relationship to Nvidia CEO but does not take action

Around the same time, per the New York Times’ report, U.S. President Donald Trump was briefed about intelligence findings that possible Chinese spy Alice Huang had formed a close relationship with Jensen Huang. Trump did not act on this information.

The Nvidia CEO, an ally of Trump, has repeatedly advocated for the U.S. government to let Nvidia expand its business in China.

October 2025: U.S. and Singapore each investigate Megaspeed over possible Chinese export violations

Megaspeed was confirmed to be under investigation by both the U.S. and Singaporean governments in October 2025. As a customer of Nvidia, Megaspeed was suspected of helping Chinese companies get around American embargoes on chip exports.

Megaspeed, a neocloud that used Nvidia chips, had been renting computing power to Chinese internet giant Alibaba and other Chinese companies, the Times reported. A Commerce Department official who had visited Megaspeed’s data center in Malaysia in 2024 had found a hoard of Nvidia equipment that was still packed in boxes and the concern was that this equipment was being directly shipped somewhere else, like China, rather than installed and sold as a cloud service.

Jensen Huang had been spotted socializing with Megaspeed executive Alice Huang as early as 2024 in Taiwan, where the Nvidia CEO was born.

These investigations into Megaspeed highlighted concerns about the degree to which Nvidia is able to track its chip exports. At the time, an Nvidia spokesperson told press that the company did not have “any reason to believe products had been diverted.”

“NVIDIA visited multiple Megaspeed sites yet again earlier this week and confirmed what we previously observed — Megaspeed is running a small commercial cloud, like many other companies throughout the world, as allowed by U.S. export control rules,” the Nvidia spokesperson said at the time.

New parents take a lot of pictures of their children, but those photos often end up languishing in photo galleries, never to be seen again after the initial snap and share.

A new app, Sundrop, aims to make those pictures more useful by turning them into weekly recaps, highlights, time lapses of the child growing up, and other cute scenes, like putting the child’s photo on a magazine cover or a rookie card.

While Google Photos and Apple Photos already provide extensive tools to organize and manage photos, Sundrop is taking aim at a particular niche: parents with a new baby (usually their first!) who take an overwhelming number of photos and want to do more with those pictures.

Image Credits:Sundrop

The app was developed over the past few months by the same team behind the read-it-later app, Matter: Ben Springwater, Sky Lan, and Rob Mackenzie (all dads themselves).

Notably, Sundrop claims it is designed to be private, and processes all photos locally on the device it is installed on. To make this possible, Sundrop taps into Apple’s Vision framework and on-device Core ML (machine learning) models instead of uploading photos to a cloud server or some other hosted AI service.

Both of the child’s parents can use Sundrop together by linking their accounts, which allows the app to sync their shared photos via Apple’s iCloud service. This feature, the company says, means the pictures aren’t sent to any external servers it runs.

Image Credits:Sundrop

In addition, the team notes that no generative AI is used in the creation of its scenes or highlights.

This differentiates it from many photo-editing apps on the market, including Google’s, which are increasingly tapping generative AI to create new versions of your photos.

Image Credits:Sundrop

To find highlights and recaps, Sundrop scans pictures in the parents’ respective Camera Rolls on their iPhones, skipping things like screenshots or duplicates. It then creates highlights or fun scenes, which it calls “drops.”

One of these is a recap of the week every Sunday, announced as a Lock Screen notification. Others can put two siblings side-by-side at the same age, generate a time-lapse series of photos or a video of a kid growing up, or cut out a photo of the child and place it into a layered template.

Image Credits:Sundrop

Parents can also manually edit the photos Sundrop uses to make its creations, or use the app to automatically organize the best photos into galleries with other similar shots.

The app costs $39.99 per year, and offers a week-long free trial. The annual plan also includes Family Sharing, so only one parent needs to purchase it.

Apple TV is making its content more accessible to Deaf audiences with the launch of a new Sign Language Interpretation feature, the company announced on Tuesday. The feature will initially be available across a limited set of titles, starting this Friday with the release of “Being Heumann,” a biopic about disability rights activist Judy Heumann.

American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL) will also be made available for Apple’s hit movie “F1.” Later this year, other titles will follow, including “Way of the Warrior Kid” and “Greyhound.”

What makes Apple’s offering different from other platforms is that the sign language version of the film is not a separate product — that is, it’s not a separate film designed just for Deaf viewers. Instead, Apple’s support for sign language is just a setting you enable that’s integrated with the main title, similar to how you could turn on or off closed captions.

When a title with the sign language option is playing, an interpreter appears in the bottom right of the screen, translating the spoken words into signs. Apple says it has partnered with a group of DASLs (Directors of Artistic Sign Language) to ensure that the interpreter for each film fits the tone of the film. Notably, the company is not using any AI-generated interpreters, as Apple says that’s not what the Deaf community has said it needs.

The feature is shipping in the latest release of iOS 27.2, and can be turned on through a new sign language option in Settings. After being enabled, a new button will appear in the supported Apple Original titles on Apple TV indicating that sign language is available.

These titles are labeled with a sign language icon that appears on the title page alongside other features like closed captions or audio descriptions. There’s also a new section under languages that will list the specific sign languages that are available with the given title.

To make the titles more discoverable, Apple TV will highlight which titles include the sign language option in a “Movies & Shows with American Sign Language” editorial collection. Meanwhile, users can easily surface supported titles via search by typing in keywords like “with ASL,” for example.

The new feature builds on Apple’s other investments in accessibility features, which it builds itself.

“At Apple, we believe everyone should be able to enjoy great stories and entertainment,” said Sarah Herrlinger, Apple’s senior director of Global Accessibility Policy and Initiatives, in a statement about the launch. “Bringing sign language interpretation to Apple TV is an exciting step forward in making the viewing experience more accessible and inclusive for Deaf audiences. Accessibility is a core value at Apple, and we’re proud to continue creating experiences that allow more people to enjoy the content they love,” she added.

Google is notching up its chipmaking game as the company seeks to reduce its dependence on chips made by other companies for its cloud computing business. Google on Monday unveiled two new variants of its tensor processing units (TPUs), in-house-developed chips meant for AI workloads, that broaden its chip portfolio to additional use cases: confidential inference and more memory capacity for large workloads.

The new units, TPU 8tx and TPU 8i Max, are part of the company’s eighth generation of chips introduced in April this year, and build on what those chips offered, which was more inference capacity and support for large training requirements.

TPU 8tx, designed with AMD, is based on the TPU 8t chip, and is geared specifically for confidentially training and running AI models, Google said in a blog post. The chip “builds security directly into the hardware layer, keeping sensitive data and model weights protected and isolated even while in active use,” the company wrote.

The chip also has a custom inferencing network that lets it run reasoning alongside training, so it can be used to distill and train small models on the fly. That ability, according to Google, could prove useful for cases where a company might want to train a model on its proprietary data without having to move the data between devices.

Meanwhile, TPU 8i Max basically combines two of the inference-focused TPU 8i chips the company launched in April, doubling the memory capacity, processing power and bandwidth, but in a single package. The result is a chip that lets AI models handle a larger range of information during queries.

The chip launch comes as hyperscalers like Microsoft, Amazon, and even AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic are working on their own lines of AI-specific semiconductors and accompanying software in order to reduce their reliance on the dominance of Nvidia.

The news also comes at a particularly vulnerable moment for Nvidia, whose CEO Jensen Huang over the weekend admitted to having an affair with someone alleged to be a Chinese spy.

In Brief

Remote access company N-able has confirmed it took down its cloud-hosted offering to fix a slew of security vulnerabilities that were published online this week, giving the company no advance notice to fix them.

In a status update on its website, the company said its hosted N-Central offering for customers is now offline “while we take the necessary actions to secure the environments and implement appropriate remediation.” The company also urged customers to take down their own self-hosted deployments of N-Central, fearing that attackers could use the publicly disclosed exploits to hack into customer networks.

N-able said during this time customers will not be able to use their N-Central service, which allows corporate customers to remotely access and manage other devices and systems on the same network. Remote access technologies are a frequent target of hackers, as these systems can grant vast access to a company’s network and internal data.

Security researcher Ben Bales released the “zero-day” bugs on GitHub on Sunday. In a post on X, Bales dubbed the bugs Able2Shell, describing them as a mix of vulnerabilities capable of stealing credentials, creating new administrative accounts, and gaining root access to affected N-able systems.

Bales told Bleeping Computer that he publicly released the bugs as the company allegedly failed to patch the flaws reported in a different product.

N-able said that it has no evidence of successful exploitation against any of its customer environments. A spokesperson for the company did not respond to a request for comment about whether it has the ability to check, such as server logs, or if it has no way to check.

Meta is bringing its Muse AI agent to the Apple Watch and Android’s Wear OS, the company announced on Monday. With the launch, users can now interact with Meta’s AI assistant through voice calls, text messages, or dictation directly on their smartwatch.

Works around the clock, and now on your wrist. Muse is now on Apple Watch and Wear OS ⌚️ pic.twitter.com/97QRap5XKz — Muse (@Muse) November 9, 2026

The smartwatch launch comes just a month after Meta introduced a dedicated iPad app for Muse. First launched on the App Store in September, the AI assistant’s expansion across Apple devices signals Meta’s growing ambitions for its consumer AI product and its focus on making Muse a central part of its ecosystem.

Muse is now one of dozens of consumer-facing AI agents competing for users’ attention. Like many of its competitors, it allows users to connect their accounts to manage email, meetings, bills, and more, while also handling tasks such as booking reservations, ordering groceries, setting goals, and making purchases.

Users can also personalize their Muse avatar to their liking and change it into something that resembles a person, an animal, or another type of character.

Despite being a relatively new product, Meta has wasted little time introducing new capabilities to Muse.

A few days ago, Meta launched Spaces, a new way to communicate and collaborate with Muse. Spaces function as dedicated conversations around specific topics, which Meta describes as “custom experiences” as they’re mini apps that are built on the fly. They appear in the sidebar of the Muse interface and bring up a focused conversation where the AI agent works toward a particular goal on the user’s behalf.

Last week, Meta rolled out the ability for users in the U.S. to video chat with their Muse AI avatar. Meta said Muse will use “subtle expressions and gestures” that reflect the tone and context of the conversation as it speaks. It’s worth noting that Muse doesn’t actually see users, but can hear them and respond in real time.

Shortly after its launch, Muse became one of just 12 mobile apps to have surpassed 10 million U.S. downloads within their first 40 days in the App Store. Only 11 other apps have achieved this milestone, with Meta’s Threads being the most recent in July 2023.

Shortly after announcing a plan to transition its site to a logged-in experience, Reddit is debuting a feature that could help make it more of a destination for people doing product research via the web. The company on Tuesday introduced “Reddit Reviews,” a feature that organizes conversations about products into dedicated reviews that include the highlights and key takeaways from users across its communities.

The company notes that the new experience builds on one of the ways people are already using Reddit: to learn from others what products are really like, and how they fit into their everyday lives. These first-hand accounts and recommendations can help consumers determine whether or not a particular product is right for them.

Image Credits:Reddit

However, given the rise of generative AI and bots, it’s an area that’s also ripe for “astroturfing” — a term that refers to when a brand fakes public support. With Reddit now effectively turning what was casual online research into more of a structured product, it could become a larger target for these types of fake reviews and recommendations than before.

To address this, Reddit’s announcement points to its rules and its latest measures to combat automated abuse and spam, as well as its practice involving community moderators, as tools it will use to keep the reviews on the site legit.

Image Credits:Reddit

The Reddit Reviews feature itself taps into AI to organize the conversations people are having where they describe their product experiences. These posts will often see users discussing how a product works for them, or why it fails, or what the trade-offs are that someone should consider before buying.

The company has been testing the product reviews feature since February, initially with U.S. users in areas like Electronics, Video Games, and Health & Beauty products. In September, Reddit expanded the test to include the Home & Garden and Fashion & Apparel categories as well.

Now, the company says Reddit Reviews is rolling out to all U.S. users on iOS, Android, and web, with an initial selection focused on around 10,000 products. Over time, it will roll out to more categories and expand beyond the U.S.

To use the feature, Reddit users can search for a product or category in the app’s search bar or click on a highlighted product name they see in someone’s comment. From there, the user is taken to a screen where important conversations are summarized under a “what people are saying” heading. This will also include a visual breakdown that shows how many of those comments are positive, negative, or mixed, and what sort of things people said they liked or disliked about the item.

For instance, a user considering buying an espresso machine might want to know about things like how much counter space it takes up or whether it’s easier for beginners to understand how to use it, says Reddit. Users can then browse the comments, filter them by topic, or click to be taken to the original conversation, where they can ask more questions or get advice.

Users can also move from one product review back to the full category to weigh other, similar products that have been discussed to compare their options, the company said.

The feature arrives just ahead of the busy holiday shopping season, when people spend a lot more time doing online product research ahead of their bigger purchases.

WhatsApp has grown into one of the most popular messaging apps in the world, used by over 3 billion people. But with that growth, the app has also become complex, packing in features like communities, channels, stories and business features, and a lot of people find it hard to navigate.

Kunal Shah, who took over leadership of the app’s development from Will Cathcart earlier this year, now wants to make the app and actions within it simpler to use. In a new note shared on Tuesday, Shah said the company wants to make voice notes, groups, stickers, and video “simpler and more expressive.”

WhatsApp has long also tried to develop an ecosystem that lets users explore products and make purchases, and Shah’s note indicates more of that is coming, hinting at partnerships with payment companies and telecom providers to enable bill payment, loans, and eSIM purchases.

Shah also said the company wants to use AI to surface important information to users.

“It should quickly find what you need, get things done, and make sure you never miss a booking or an appointment. The best technology saves you time, so you can get back to the connections that matter,” he wrote.

WhatsApp currently offers an AI assistant that can summarize messages and create drafts. It’s not clear if the company will use its Muse agent to collate information and send reminders to people.

Here is Shah’s full note: