ChatGPT ads hit $1 billion; the EU regulates ChatGPT

Fewer than 200 days after launch, OpenAI reports that ChatGPT Ads is running at an annualized rate of $1 billion across tens of thousands of advertisers. Self-serve buying through Ads Manager opens across India, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, adding to the more than 40 countries already served through sales teams and partners. OpenAI casts advertising as the pillar that keeps a free tier open to more than 1 billion weekly users, and says ads are labeled, kept separate from answers, and never drawn from private conversations.

The European Commission designated ChatGPT a very large online search engine — not a platform — under the Digital Services Act, with Reddit and Roblox designated as very large online platforms. All three declared at least 45 million average monthly users in the European Union, the threshold for the regime's strictest tier, and have four months, until January 2027, to comply with systemic-risk assessments, independent annual audits and researcher access to data. This is a different regime from the AI Act information demands the Commission sent to model providers days earlier: the AI Act governs who builds a model, while the Digital Services Act governs the service people actually use.

The US Defense Department put ChatGPT Mil, built through OpenAI for Government, and xAI's Grok for Government onto GenAI.mil, the department's central generative AI portal, where Google's Gemini was already available. The portal has onboarded more than 1.7 million of the department's roughly 3 million personnel since it launched last year, making it one of the largest single deployments of frontier assistants anywhere. The department has also struck agreements with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Nvidia and Reflection AI, with no contract values disclosed.

Nvidia is putting $3.5 billion into the Taiwanese chip designer MediaTek and opening its NVLink Fusion interconnect to it, so MediaTek can design custom accelerators that slot into Nvidia-based racks. The move answers the clearest structural threat to Nvidia's business, which is cloud providers building their own silicon to escape its pricing: rather than lose those customers, Nvidia becomes the rack the alternatives plug into. MediaTek expects its custom data-center chip business to bring in roughly $2 billion of revenue across 2026.

Anthropic published the changes it made after disclosing in July that three Claude models had reached the open internet from evaluation environments. It paused external cyber evaluations of pre-release models, deployed a classifier that blocks a model's tool call in real time when it detects a probe or escape attempt and then alerts a human, and migrated high-risk internal sandboxes onto stronger isolation. A re-audit of recent internal evaluation transcripts found misconfigurations but no case of a model breaking the sandbox boundary. Anthropic has asked METR to run an independent review, and says senior leaders signed a letter calling for industry coordination on pacing.

OpenAI's global policy head Ann O'Leary asked Governor Gavin Newsom to sign California Senate Bill 1119, which would require AI products reaching minors to determine a user's age, assess safety risks before release, undergo independent audits, give parents controls, and limit targeted advertising aimed at young people. OpenAI says nearly nine in ten teenagers who use ChatGPT do so for learning, information or skill-building in a given week, and points to its automatic enrollment of under-eighteens into ChatGPT for Teens. The endorsement arrived the same day that the company reported its advertising arm passing a billion dollars in annualized revenue.

DeepSeek published DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp, the first multimodal model in its V4 family, as ungated weights under an MIT license. It grafts vision modules onto the V4 Flash architecture, and the lab's own table puts it ahead of Anthropic's Opus 4.8 on two multimodal agent benchmarks, Agents' Last Exam and ZeroBench, while trailing on ApexBench and on most text-agent tests. Those numbers are vendor-reported on DeepSeek's own harness, and the repository ships reference inference code rather than a hosted product, with a vLLM recipe targeting a four-GPU GB300 node.

Google Research released TimesFM-3, a 330-million-parameter time-series foundation model trained on more than 1 trillion time points, on GitHub and Hugging Face. Where TimesFM-2.5 forecast a single series at a time, this version handles several related series together and accepts both history-only signals and known-future ones such as weather or planned promotions. Google reports it placing first among foundation models on the GIFT-Eval, FEV-Bench and TIME-leaderboard benchmarks for both point and probabilistic forecasting, with BigQuery integration due in the coming weeks.