☕️ OpenAI's Plan to Become a For-Profit Company Goes Up in Smoke

OpenAI backs down from its plans to become a fully for-profit company amid heavy pushback

After months of work and a heap of legal trouble to stop OpenAI from becoming a for-profit, OpenAI made a surprise reveal on Monday when it said announced that the company has abandoned its plans. The blog post states that its nonprofit arm would retain control of the company as its majority shareholder even as its for-profit LLC, an OpenAI subsidiary since 2019, transitions to a public benefit corporation.

​

What caused OpenAI to abandon its original plans?

OpenAI struggled with pushback all the way throughout, such as the aforementioned legal case with Elon Musk trying to stop OpenAI as Musk's xAI competes in the same industry. However, as OpenAI's blog post states, the startup attributes the change of plans to ex-OpenAI employees, civic leaders, and others sending a letter regarding safety concerns to attorneys general in California and Delaware to halt the startup's efforts. After a period of discussion, OpenAI ultimately bowed to the pressure as its restructuring plans evolved to what know of now.

Bloomberg report claims that Apple and Anthropic are working on a co-developed "vibe coding" platform

Apple may be partnering with Anthropic to integrate the AI startup's Claude Sonnet into a new "vibe-coding" version of Apple's Xcode programming software, according to an article by Bloomberg. This new GenAI-powered platform will help developers write, edit, and test code, and is meant to be an in-house tool - a public launch is, so far, undecided. This collaboration follows Apple's broader strategy of tapping into a network of AI's biggest names, be it OpenAI's ChatGPT in Apple Intelligence or potential future support for Google's Gemini, to accelerate its AI capabilities.

​

California man pleads guilty to using a compromised AI tool to hack a Disney employee and steal heaps of data

A 25-year-old California man, Ryan Mitchell Kramer, pleaded guilty to using a malicious AI tool to hack a Disney employee and steal confidential data. Under the alias NullBulge, he published what appeared to be a legitimate extension to ComfyUI, an AI-based image generator, on GitHub that harvested passwords, payment data, and sensitive files. After the employee installed the malware on April 2024, Kramer exfiltrated 1.1 TB of Disney Slack data and later threatened the victim before releasing the stolen information publicly. Kramer also admitted to having two other victims as well - the FBI is said to further investigate the case.

​

Cursor's developer company locks in $900 million in funding at a $9 billion valuation

Anysphere, the parent company behind the AI-powered developer platform Cursor, recently confirmed $900 million in a recent fundraiser, as reported by the Financial Times. Led by Thrive Capital, the round also saw participation from other well-known VCs such as Accel and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), putting the company at a $9 billion valuation. Other AI-powered coding startups have also been getting attention as Windsurf (formerly Codeium) earlier in February raised funding at roughly a $3 billion valuation, with OpenAI even having taken interest in potentially acquiring the company.

​

Hasan Sukkar, CEO of AI startup 11x, steps down from his executive position

​11x's founder and CEO, Hasan Sukkar, announced in a recent LinkedIn post that he is stepping down from his position as the startup's CTO, Prabhav Jain, will take the reigns as his successor. Sukkar stated that he is moving into a "non-executive chairman" position, where he will assist Jain in making strategic decisions, fostering industry relationships, and the like. This announcement follows recent news of sources alleging that 11x struggled with customer retention as its digital AI-powered workers had issues, along with an incident where the startup claimed to have customers it didn't have.

​

Google's charity arm, Google.org, pledges $12 million to upskill Asia-Pacific workers with AI

​As detailed in a blog post, Google.org is launching what it calls the AI Opportunity Fund: Asia-Pacific, a $12 million fund to prepare the region's workforce for the AI future. Out of the $12 million, $10 million will support AVPN in equipping Asia-Pacific's workers for the changing job market, while the remaining $2 million funding will go towards Infoxchange to reach nonprofits. The fund aims to support 10,000 staff and volunteers over two years by providing scalable and accessible AI tools in a region where funding for AI and AI-specialized talent is scarce.