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President Trump announced that he is directing all federal agencies to “IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology” and phase out existing Defense Department work within six months, jeopardizing not only Anthropic’s $200 million contract with the DoD but relationships it has with customers that do business with the federal government. TechCrunch has more here.

Stepping into the breach, OpenAI has reached an agreement to supply AI systems for classified Pentagon use, securing terms that bar domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons and paving the way for deployment through a new Amazon cloud partnership tied to Amazon’s $50 billion investment. The New York Times has more here.

Speaking of OpenAI, the company has finally closed a massive $110 billion round at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, the largest venture deal ever, according to Crunchbase News. Amazon is investing $50 billion, and Nvidia and SoftBank are each putting in $30 billion. The financing expands OpenAI’s AWS commitment by $100 billion, with the company now targeting $600 billion in total compute spending by 2030. CNBC has more here.

More on OpenAI: the company disclosed today that ChatGPT has reached 900 million weekly active users and 50 million paying subscribers, up from 800 million users in October. TechCrunch has more here.

The Wall Street Journal reports that federal agencies warned about safety and reliability issues with Elon Musk’s Grok before the Pentagon approved it for classified use. More here.

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By Tim Fernholz

Starting this week, Perplexity subscribers will have a new agentic tool at their disposal.

Perplexity Computer, in the company’s words, “unifies every current AI capability into a single system.” More specifically, Perplexity says it is a computer user agent that can execute complex workflows independently using 19 different AI models, even creating subagents to handle specific problems.

The tool is available now, only on the company’s highest subscription tier, the $200/month Perplexity Max. It runs entirely in the cloud, which might spare it some of the security concerns of other agentic tools like OpenClaw.

TechCrunch hasn’t done a hands-on demo of the new tool, but in example workflows on Perplexity’s website, it is shown handling tasks that involve collecting statistics, financial, or legal data; creating analysis; and sharing its findings as finished websites or visualizations. 

Perplexity invited the press to a background briefing with executives last week to discuss the product and lay out the agenda for the year. The event was intended to include a demonstration of the tool, but the company canceled the demo because of flaws found in the product hours before the event.

This tool represents the evolution of Perplexity, which made a splash early in the AI boom by wrapping frontier models in familiar user interfaces, particularly its search-engine-like answer service. It then moved on to launch its Comet web browser last summer. Competitors like Google have now changed their products to be more like those built at Perplexity, one executive said, but that’s a threat as much as a compliment.

Project Prometheus, a San Francisco-based AI company founded last November by Jeff Bezos that is building advanced systems to map and model complex manufacturing processes, is reportedly raising tens of billions of dollars for a holding vehicle to acquire industrial businesses disrupted by AI. It previously secured $6.2 billion at a roughly $30 billion valuation. The Financial Times has more here.

Salma Health, a two-year-old startup based in San Mateo, CA, that runs a brain health clinic network that integrates psychiatric and neurological care, clinical research, and AI-based support systems to coordinate diagnosis and treatment, raised an $80 million Series A round co-led by Mubadala Capital and Arch Venture Partners, with Lingotto Horizon and Averin Capital also contributing. More here.

Temple, a two-year-old Indian startup that is building a wearable that tracks cerebral blood flow for elite athletes, raised a $54 million round at a $190 million post-money valuation. The deal was led by Deepinder Goyal, with Steadview Capital, Peak XV Partners, InfoEdge Ventures, and Dharana Capital also anteing up. TechCrunch has more here.

BrainCheck, an 11-year-old Austin company that provides digital cognitive assessment tools to help detect and monitor brain health conditions, raised a $13 million Series A round led by Next Coast Ventures, with additional participation from S3 Venture and UPMC Enterprises. More here.

Flux, a six-year-old San Francisco startup that uses AI to enable hardware engineers to design and simulate chips before fabrication to identify errors and improve performance, raised a $27 million Series B round led by 8VC, with Bain Capital Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Outsiders Fund also participating. More here.

Sensera Systems, a 12-year-old company based in Golden, CO, that uses AI to analyze onsite video from construction jobsites in order to monitor progress, improve safety, and reduce project delays, raised a $27 million Series B round led by 10 Atlantic Group, with Egis Capital Partners and MUUS also pitching in. Pulse 2.0 has more here.

Tamarind Bio, a two-year-old San Francisco startup that has developed a no-code computational biology platform that runs AI and physics-based models to design and analyze molecular structures for drug discovery, raised a $12 million Series A round led by Dimension Capital, with Y Combinator also investing. BioPharmaTrend has more here.

FlyFocus, a nine-year-old Warsaw startup that provides unmanned aerial systems and avionics designed and manufactured in Europe to reduce dependence on non-European drone technologies, raised a $5.3 million round. ffVC was the deal lead, with NCBR Investment Fund also joining in. Tech Funding News has more here.

Huper, a one-year-old Atlanta startup that is developing an AI chief of staff platform to analyze data from emails, meetings, and messaging to help executives track priorities and follow-ups, raised a $1.5 million pre-seed round. Investors included Nadia Partners, Link Ventures, and Long Ridge Equity Partners. Pulse 2.0 has more here.

JetScale AI, a one-year-old startup based in Montréal, Canada, whose AI platform analyzes cloud infrastructure usage to reduce enterprise cloud costs and energy waste, raised a $5.4 million seed round co-led by The Business Development Bank of Canada and Diagram ClimateTech Fund, with Telegraph Ventures, Fondaction, Mavrik, Cycle Momentum, and Spring Impact Capital also taking part. More here.

Trace, a one-year-old San Francisco startup that orchestrates enterprise workflows by mapping tools and processes so AI agents and humans can execute high-level tasks, raised a $3 million seed round. Investors included Y Combinator, Zeno Ventures, Transpose Platform Management, Goodwater Capital, Formosa Capital, and WeFunder. TechCrunch has more here.

LILT AI 

According to the 2026 “AI Shift in Multilingual Translation” report, 96% of professionals deem translation quality mission-critical. While AI is now essential for global scale, a significant gap remains: only 57% of organizations successfully maintain a consistent brand voice across languages. This disparity between AI-driven speed and brand integrity proves that human oversight is still indispensable for high-stakes communication. To bridge the gap between cost savings and quality, read the full survey of 400+ industry experts today. 

Paradigm, a San Francisco-based crypto venture firm with $12.7 billion in assets under management, is raising a $1.5 billion fund to invest in AI, robotics, and other frontier technologies while continuing to back crypto startups. The Wall Street Journal has more here.

SpaceX is targeting a confidential IPO filing as soon as March that would position the Elon Musk-led rocket and satellite company for a potential June debut at a valuation of more than $1.75 trillion and a raise of up to $50 billion. Bloomberg has more here.

Trump Media & Technology Group said it is in talks to spin off businesses including Truth Social into a new public company that would merge with a SPAC following its previously announced $6 billion tie-up with fusion firm TAE Technologies. The Wall Street Journal has more here.

In a newly released deposition in his lawsuit against OpenAI, Elon Musk claimed “nobody has committed suicide because of Grok,” as the case over OpenAI’s shift to a for-profit model heads toward a jury trial. TechCrunch has more here.

Toby Pohlen has left xAI, becoming the seventh co-founder to exit the company since 2023 and leaving just five of the original founders in place following SpaceX’s reported $250 billion acquisition of the business. Silicon Republic has more here.

Anthropic refused to give the Pentagon unfettered access to Claude — and now the government is moving to make it pay. The Washington Post traces how the dispute got to this point, including a debate over a hypothetical nuclear strike scenario that pushed both sides toward threats of blacklisting or forced seizure. More here.

OpenAI fired an employee for using confidential company information to trade on prediction markets such as Polymarket, as blockchain data shows clusters of suspicious bets tied to major OpenAI events including product launches and Sam Altman’s brief ouster. Wired has more here.

Plaid, a 13-year-old San Francisco-based fintech that connects apps to users’ bank accounts for payments and data verification, was valued at $8 billion in an employee share sale, up from $6.1 billion last year but still about 40% below its $13.4 billion 2021 peak. TechCrunch has more here.

Hyrox, the indoor fitness race that combines eight one-kilometer runs with eight standardized gym stations, is scaling to 135 events in 43 countries and drawing up to 40,000 participants per city as a festival atmosphere pulls in everyday athletes who want competition without Ironman-level commitment.

This Saturday, six planets – Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – will align in a rare weekend “planetary parade,” with four of them visible to the naked eye near twilight and the others viewable by telescope.

TAG Heuer’s $2,550 Connected Calibre E5 x Formula 1 Edition includes 24 track-specific watch faces for the 2026 season that display each circuit outline with a dot that travels the course as the seconds pass. It also lets fans check race standings and schedules from their wrist.

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