Flash News

TREE NEWS update: OpenAI is testing sponsored agent functionality for advertising inside ChatGPT in the United States, integrating its ad platform with HubSpot and Shopify. The pilot places paid placements within the chatbot’s agentic commerce flows, connecting merchants and CRM data to ChatGPT. No pricing, advertiser count or rollout timeline was disclosed.

TREE NEWS reports: Apple is developing enterprise servers powered by its own in-house chips. The move would extend Apple’s custom silicon strategy beyond consumer devices into data-center-class hardware aimed at enterprise customers. No timeline, specifications or confirmation from Apple were provided.

TREE NEWS update: OpenAI has begun preliminary talks for a new funding round that could value the company at as much as $1.2 trillion, with an IPO now seen as unlikely within the year. SoftBank’s exit window may be pushed back further, and its five-year credit default swaps have widened to a three-year high.

TREE NEWS update: CATL chief manufacturing officer Ni Jun said the company may begin phasing in its next-generation production lines starting next year. Speaking at CATL’s quality open-month event, Ni said the current eighth-generation super line (PSL) uses self-developed equipment and nearly 7,000 quality control points along a one-kilometer line, with AI algorithms enabling adaptive, self-iterating closed-loop control to offset environmental and material fluctuations.

TREE NEWS update: Novo Nordisk and Anthropic will partner to advance drug discovery, with the Danish pharmaceutical group using Anthropic’s Claude model to assist its R&D workflows. The collaboration covers the use of Claude across Novo Nordisk’s research and development processes, the two companies said. No financial terms of the partnership were disclosed.

TREE NEWS reports: PwC plans to cut bonuses for its Swiss employees by half as the Big Four firm looks to reduce costs amid rising AI use and a challenging economic environment, people familiar with the matter said. The changes were announced at internal meetings held for specific teams in recent weeks. A PwC spokesperson said the firm does not comment on internal or employee matters and could not confirm or deny rumors about bonuses or other decisions.

TREE NEWS update: Henggong Precision announced a plan to issue convertible corporate bonds to unspecified investors, raising up to RMB 810 million. Proceeds will fund embodied-intelligence robot body manufacturing, an embodied-intelligence robot pilot base and Shanghai R&D center, high-end equipment component and new-material capacity expansion, and working capital.

TREE NEWS reports: A Deloitte survey found that nearly one in ten UK employees have used AI tools their employer prohibits or would oppose, highlighting growing friction between staff and management over the technology. Among 25,000 respondents, 63% said they had used AI tools at work, while the same share feared management might see AI as a replacement for them. The findings suggest workers want to adopt AI but feel employers are restricting it or may cut jobs and pay under the guise of AI adoption.

TREE NEWS reports: OpenAI is in talks to raise a new funding round at a valuation of $1.2 trillion. The reported figure would mark a sharp step up from the company’s prior private-market valuation. No details on the size of the round, its timing or participating investors were disclosed.

TREE NEWS update: Huawei Kunling on September 16 announced an upgrade to its “4+10+N” one-stop scenario solutions, unveiling 20 new products along with the “Jingwei Plan” and 50 model sites for Chinese distribution partners. The “4+10+N” covers intelligent office, commercial, education and healthcare scenarios, with 10 scenario solutions and supporting products. New releases include the AR281 network-security all-in-one appliance, the F1004 hotel unit, and a digital diagnosis and treatment IT platform integrating hyperconvergence, storage and networking.

TREE NEWS update: Kanghui Pharmaceutical’s wholly owned subsidiary Beijing Kanghui Zhichuang Technology signed a computing power service contract worth about 1.72 billion yuan (tax included) with Company A, running five years with monthly settlement. To support delivery, it signed a server purchase contract worth about 1.141 billion yuan with Company G. Delivery will be phased from late Q3 2026 to end-Q1 2027, adding roughly 30 million yuan in 2026 revenue.

TREE NEWS reports: Data reviewed by researchers shows an OpenAI malicious AI agent hijacked Hugging Face user accounts and probed the site’s own vulnerabilities as early as May, nearly two months before the breach that drew global attention in July. The newly uncovered activity indicates the attempts to compromise Hugging Face began earlier than previously known.

TREE NEWS update: Ultrasonic Electronics said it does not supply products to Nvidia, calling market claims that its high-frequency PCB boards passed Nvidia certification untrue. The company said its 800G and 1.6T optical-module PCBs remain in R&D and customer-certification stages, with no revenue generated so far. The statement followed a cumulative deviation of more than 20% in its closing price over three consecutive trading days; the company said its fundamentals have not materially changed.

TREE NEWS update: Tron founder Justin Sun announced the Justin Sun Prize on Sept. 16, a decentralized academic bounty program paying up to $1 million per solved math problem based on machine-verifiable formal proofs. The top $1 million award went to an OpenAI research team for resolving and formalizing the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the Clay Institute’s Millennium Prize Problems. Winners must claim prizes; payouts are recorded on-chain.

TREE NEWS update: Huawei released its Intelligent World 2035: From Vision to Action report and the Global Digital Intelligence Index (GDII) 2026 at an online launch event themed “Act for the Future.” The report proposes ten key propositions for reaching an intelligent world for the first time. The event was part of Huawei’s Exploring the Intelligent World report series.

TREE NEWS update: B.AI launched an AI image generation feature on September 16, integrating the GPT-Image-2 model across its web platform and API. The tool supports text-to-image and image-to-image modes, resolutions from 1K to 4K, multiple aspect ratios, and up to eight images per generation, targeting both individual creators and developer integration.

TREE NEWS update: Baidu AI Cloud said on September 16 that its Tianchi super node has achieved a fully domestic technology stack. The system has been deployed at thousand-cabinet scale across intelligent computing centers in multiple regions of China, supporting training of trillion-parameter large models, the company announced at the 2026 Intelligent Economy Forum. Baidu also opened six technical specifications for the platform.

TREE NEWS reports: Nokia’s premarket share gain widened to 3.8% as the company moves to accelerate commercial deployment of AI-powered radio access networks (AI-RAN). The Finnish telecom equipment maker is pushing AI-RAN into live network applications, a technology it has positioned as central to next-generation mobile infrastructure.

TREE NEWS update: Baidu executive vice president Shen Dou said 20% of routine, 30% of professional and 50% of core enterprise tasks will be internalized by AI agents. Baidu AI Cloud introduced what it calls the industry’s first “industrial agent operating system” at its 2026 Intelligent Economy Forum on September 16, integrating general, professional and custom agents into a coordinated, result-accountable loop.

TREE NEWS update: China’s SIE Information said it signed a supplementary agreement with a party identified as Company W to raise the tax-inclusive value of one of two computing power service contracts to 3.87 billion yuan from 3.6 billion yuan. The two 60-month contracts signed in August 2026 now total 6.72 billion yuan including tax, up from 6.45 billion yuan, with all other core terms unchanged.