White House gates GPT-5.6; tech unites to defend open source

The White House asked OpenAI to release its newest model, GPT-5.6, only to a small set of government-approved partners before opening it more widely, with federal officials clearing access one customer at a time during the preview. The request came from the Office of the National Cyber Director and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick warned against shipping without sign-off. It is the first time the US government has limited a frontier model before its public launch. Sam Altman told staff the arrangement is "not our preferred long-term model."

The Linux Foundation, backed by Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, NVIDIA, IBM, and banks including Citi and JPMorgan Chase, launched Akrites, a coordinated effort to fix vulnerabilities in the open-source software that runs critical systems. The group warns that AI has made finding flaws far easier than fixing them — of the thousands of validated vulnerabilities surfaced recently, fewer than 5 percent have been patched. Akrites gives maintainers one trusted place to report and remediate, and will act as a "maintainer of last resort" for abandoned but critical packages.

Italy's antitrust regulator opened an investigation into how Microsoft raised Microsoft 365 prices. The watchdog says Microsoft folded its Copilot and Designer AI tools into the suite and moved customers onto more expensive plans unless they actively opted out, without clearly explaining the change — a practice it called aggressive enough to limit consumers' freedom to choose. The probe echoes similar action in Australia and Switzerland, making Microsoft's AI-driven bundling a growing regulatory target across multiple countries.

Berlin-based Taktile raised $110 million in a Series C round led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, with Tiger Global, Index Ventures, and Balderton also joining. Taktile sells banks and insurers an "agentic decision platform" that automates high-stakes calls once done by hand — underwriting loans, assessing claims, and flagging financial crime. One of the world's largest insurers already runs several uses on it, projecting more than $90 million in claims-processing savings. The raise lands as lenders rush to put autonomous agents into core workflows.

xCures closed a $46 million Series B led by Innovius Capital to expand its "Clinical Clarity Engine," which uses AI to turn scattered, unstructured medical records into decision-ready data for doctors. Spun out of Cancer Commons in 2018 to help advanced-cancer patients find treatments, the company says it has now processed more than 300 million records from over 550,000 sites across every clinical field. Patient histories are often trapped in mismatched documents across labs, hospitals, and imaging centers; xCures aims to make them usable at the point of care.