OpenAI floats a 5% US government stake; Cloudflare makes agents pay

OpenAI has held early-stage talks about handing the US government a 5 percent equity stake — worth roughly $43 billion at its $852 billion valuation — the Financial Times reported. CEO Sam Altman pitched it as the best way to share AI's upside with the public, and floated a broader framework in which Washington would hold 5 percent of each leading US lab, including Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI, through a sovereign "public wealth fund." The stakes would be donated, not sold — but talks are early, would need Congressional sign-off, and neither OpenAI nor the White House has confirmed anything.

Cloudflare opened a waitlist for its Monetization Gateway, which lets any website, API, or AI tool charge for access using the open x402 protocol: a client requests a gated resource, gets a "payment required" response, pays in stablecoins, then retries. It extends Cloudflare's earlier pay-per-crawl feature from AI scrapers to the whole "agentic web," where autonomous software makes tiny payments with no human in the loop. More than 25 companies have joined the backing coalition.

Meta is building a cloud service, internally called Meta Compute, to sell access to its AI computing power and models, per a Bloomberg report, putting it in direct competition with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The Instagram parent has committed roughly $183 billion to AI infrastructure but earns little from its own models, so renting out excess capacity is a way to recoup the spend. SpaceX's xAI unit struck similar compute-leasing deals weeks earlier; Meta's stock rose about 6 percent on the news.

GitHub started rolling out Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.7 Code — an open-weight model from the Chinese lab — inside GitHub Copilot for Pro, Pro+, and Max subscribers, with business and enterprise plans to follow. GitHub hosts the model on Microsoft Azure and bills it by usage. It is a notable sign of Chinese open models reaching the West's most widely used coding assistant, though enterprise admins must switch it on manually before their teams can pick it.

Venice AI raised a $65 million Series A led by crypto firm Dragonfly, reaching a $1 billion valuation in its first outside fundraise. The platform routes queries to more than 200 AI models while encrypting inputs on the user's device and storing nothing on its servers, pitching itself as a neutral, "uncensored" alternative. Founded by early Bitcoin figure Erik Voorhees, it is already profitable, with more than $70 million in annualized revenue and about 3 million users.

Weave Robotics opened orders for Isaac 1, a mobile home robot priced at $7,999 up front or $449 per month, with California deliveries slated for fall 2026. It handles laundry and a daily home "reset," navigating autonomously by default but falling back to remote human teleoperation when a task gets tricky — an honest admission that fully autonomous home robots are not here yet. It is the follow-up to the company's stationary Isaac 0.

The Wall Street Journal reported that SpaceX has shown investors a handset-like AI device — slimmer than an iPhone, running a custom operating system, and drawing on technology from xAI, the AI company SpaceX absorbed earlier this year. Paired with Starlink's direct-to-phone service, it could position SpaceX against carriers like Verizon and AT&T. Elon Musk called the report "utterly false," and SpaceX told investors the design is early enough to still change, so treat this as developing.

Google put Gemini Spark, its agentic assistant, into a macOS beta for US users on the $100-per-month Google AI Ultra plan. On the desktop, Spark can work with local files and connect to apps like Google Tasks and Keep, pushing it into the same territory as Claude's desktop app and Microsoft's Copilot. Google says remote task-handling — fetching files from a laptop while you are away — will follow. For now it is US-only and limited to adults.