Flash News

TREE NEWS reports: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other company executives declined to appear at a congressional hearing held today on “runaway artificial intelligence” and national security. Republican Senator Josh Hawley disclosed the refusal, citing the report, and shared the article on X. No reason was given for the executives’ absence.

TREE NEWS update: Synopsys signed a multi-year, legally binding agreement with OpenAI to jointly develop GPT-Synopsys, a specialized semiconductor design model combining OpenAI’s frontier AI with Synopsys’ electronic design automation tools. The deal includes revenue-sharing and co-marketing; OpenAI gets a license to Synopsys’ EDA tools, and GPT-Synopsys will run on OpenAI-hosted infrastructure and integrate with Synopsys.ai and Synopsys Autopilot. Customer design data will be encrypted and not used for model training. Synopsys shares rose as much as 6.7%.

TREE NEWS update: California Governor Gavin Newsom posted an image showing the phrase “Unites States” misspelled beneath President Trump’s signature on yesterday’s White House Superintelligence Pact. Newsom mocked the agreement’s declared “golden age” of superintelligence in the post. The typo appeared directly under Trump’s signature on the document.

TREE NEWS update: Anthropic said Claude for government is now broadly available to US federal and state government agencies. The offering gives public-sector bodies access to Anthropic’s Claude models for government use. No further terms or figures were disclosed.

TREE NEWS update: Decrypt and MYR have launched The Information Exchange on Solana, a connected media ecosystem in which Decrypt serves as the destination, Myriad as the infrastructure and MYR as the token. The three-part structure ties a media outlet, its underlying rails and a dedicated token into a single Solana-based system.

TREE NEWS update: President Trump unveiled a one-page AI accord signed by OpenAI, Google and Nvidia that he described as ‘morally binding.’ The pact asks companies to adopt internal controls, independent audits and board oversight, but carries no penalties and drew criticism over its thin detail.

TREE NEWS update: London-based AI voice startup ElevenLabs saw its valuation double to $22 billion after existing investors and employees sold $300 million in shares, in a deal led by Wellington Management and T. Rowe Price. The transaction, reported on September 30, values the realistic speech-generation company near France’s Mistral, which raised €3 billion this month at a €21 billion valuation.

TREE NEWS update: MSCI has rolled out a new suite of indices built around the AI supply chain, letting institutional investors allocate to and hedge specific segments such as physical and digital infrastructure and AI applications rather than betting on the sector as a whole. MSCI index head Jana Haines said investors increasingly want granular cuts by industry, size, market cap and country. Bain estimates the compute needed for current AI infrastructure would require about $6 trillion in annual industry revenue by 2031, versus roughly $1.2 trillion from existing and known AI applications.

TREE NEWS update: Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said the exchange is building financial accounts for “superintelligence,” covering trading, payments and lending. He said such accounts could help users manage wealth and personal finances, and let teams of AI agents hold their own accounts to complete more tasks on users’ behalf. Armstrong did not disclose a launch timeline or specific product features.

TREE NEWS update: BMW plans to cut one-fifth of its management positions by mid-next year, using AI deployment as part of an already-agreed buyout program aimed at reducing costs and improving profitability. The automaker intends to shed roughly 8,000 positions, about 5% of its global workforce. BMW targets restoring its automotive margin to a long-term 8%-10% range by early next decade, with a 3%-5% return as an interim goal for 2028.

TREE NEWS update: Robinhood has opened AI agents that can monitor markets and trade automatically around the clock, the retail brokerage known as a hub for US retail traders said. The rollout puts agentic trading directly in the hands of retail users. Separately, DeepSeek open-sourced an Ascend-based AI toolkit aimed at Nvidia’s CUDA, with performance approaching hardware limits.

TREE NEWS update: Micron reports fiscal Q4 2026 results after the US close on Sept 30, with company guidance of $50bn revenue (±$100mn) and non-GAAP EPS of $31 (±$1). Consensus sits at about $51.07bn revenue and $31.52 adjusted EPS. D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria reiterated a $2,000 target, while Michael Burry swapped his short for June-dated $500 puts.

TREE NEWS update: GPU cloud provider GMI has raised $668 million in a funding round backed by Nvidia and other investors, The Information reported. The company sells cloud access to GPU compute capacity. No valuation or additional terms for the round were disclosed.

TREE NEWS reports: McDonald’s is using machine-learning models to set an ‘optimal price’ for each menu item at each restaurant, widening the price gap between branches just two miles apart. The AI pricing engine gauges what customers are willing to pay for items such as a Big Mac, with per-item, per-location pricing now varying more sharply across nearby outlets.

TREE NEWS update: Verona has launched verUSD, a US dollar stablecoin built for AI agents and machine-to-machine payments, going live on Ethereum, Solana, Polygon and Arbitrum on day one with plans to expand to more networks. The company said it has secured more than $100 million in launch commitments from ecosystem investors and partners including Animoca Ventures and Figment Capital, noting the figure does not represent issued or circulating verUSD.

TREE NEWS update: OpenAI said service has been restored for affected ChatGPT Pro and Plus users following a disruption. The company confirmed the recovery of access for the two paid subscription tiers in a brief statement. It did not disclose the cause or duration of the outage.

TREE NEWS update: Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said regulating artificial intelligence is “not the right starting point,” arguing that the focus should come before formal rules are drawn up. Bailey made the remark in comments on how authorities should approach AI oversight. He did not announce any new policy or regulatory measure.

TREE NEWS update: WuXi AppTec said on its investor interaction platform that AI in innovative drug R&D remains at an exploratory and trial stage, though it is expected to greatly boost efficiency and lower barriers in future. The company said AI-designed molecules still require an integrated, end-to-end CRDMO platform for complex synthesis, delivery and biological validation, and that it maintains a “HI (Human Intelligence) + AI” strategy.

TREE NEWS update: The Beijing Municipal People’s Government issued its Digital and Intelligent Beijing Development Plan for the 15th Five-Year period, calling for the city to take the lead in developing a token economy. The plan proposes building a quantifiable and priceable data value system based on tokens and encourages the construction of token factories, alongside new agent-economy models such as model-as-a-service and agent-as-a-service.

TREE NEWS update: The Beijing Municipal People’s Government issued the ’15th Five-Year Period Digital Beijing Development Plan’, calling for deeper coordination on computing power, public data sharing and the digital-intelligence industrial chain across Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei. The plan also seeks digital-intelligence ties with the Yangtze River Delta and Greater Bay Area, cross-regional rule mutual recognition and factor flows, and continued filing review, security assessment and confidentiality management for government large-model applications.