Altman said the Pentagon agreed with his company's principles that OpenAI's technology would not be used for domestic mass surveillance or for autonomous weapon systems, affirming that humans would take responsibility for the use of force.
OpenAI's first hardware release will be a smart speaker with a camera that will probably cost between $200 and $300, according to The Information. The device will be able to recognize things like "items on a nearby table or conversations people are having in the vicinity," The Information says, and it will have a Face ID-like facial recognition system so that people can purchase things. OpenAI acquired Jony Ive's hardware company last May in a deal worth nearly $6.5 billion.
From helping Beyoncé figure out how to launch an album exclusively on social media to onboarding Pope Francis to Instagram (he held my hands and asked me to pray for him) to watching creators become the next generation of entrepreneurs, the impact on culture that me and the team have been able to have is something that I take great pride in.
The rivalry between xAI and OpenAI is heating up again - this time, over wood-fired pizza. Over the weekend, Elon Musk and an OpenAI engineer jockeyed on X about wood-fired crusts, dough fermentation, and campus chefs. On its face, it was a lighthearted back-and-forth about free pizza for lunch. Underneath, it encapsulates a trend playing out in Silicon Valley: rival AI companies are publicly pitching culture - and perks like free lunch - in the talent war for top engineers.
Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this will quickly become core to our...- Sam Altman (@sama) February 15, 2026
Now that obsequiousness could be coming back to haunt them. As reported by MIT Technology Review, activists critical of the Trump administration and the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement have started a campaign called QuitGPT, urging regular users to ditch OpenAI's chatbot for good. So far, the campaign boasts over 700,000 supporters of the boycott. The QuitGPT website lists a few different ways to participate: quitting ChatGPT outright, cancelling paid subscriptions, and spreading the word about the boycott with others on social media.
According to the company behind ChatGPT, DeepSeek is systematically attempting to extract knowledge from leading American AI systems in order to improve its own models. In the memo, which OpenAI sent to the U.S. House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party, OpenAI outlines attempts to circumvent technical and access restrictions. The company claims that accounts linked to DeepSeek employees have developed methods to access AI models via external, obfuscated network routes.
OpenAI has disbanded a team that focused on - as the company itself described - ensuring that its AI systems are "safe, trustworthy, and consistently aligned with human values." At the same time, the team's former leader has been given a new role as the company's "chief futurist." OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch that the team's members have now been assigned to other roles. The news was first reported by Platformer.
In the court record, OpenAI vice president and general manager Peter Welinder said the company reassessed its naming plan and decided it would not use "io" (or "IYO," in any capitalization) in connection with the naming, advertising, marketing, or sale of AI-enabled hardware products, Wired reported. The dispute stems from a trademark lawsuit filed following OpenAI's acquisition of Jony Ive's startup io. OpenAI said it plans to move forward with a new name and will share it later.
" Our goal is for ads to support broader access to more powerful ChatGPT features while maintaining the trust people place in ChatGPT for important and personal tasks," an OpenAI spokesperson told Axios. The company says ads will not influence ChatGPT's answers, which it says will remain focused on what is "most helpful." If a user asks about recipe ideas, the answer may be followed by a grocery delivery service ad, for example.
On first glance, a recent Reddit post looks like the sort of PR nightmare that would give any tech company cold sweats: a disgruntled employee leaks a shelved Super Bowl ad revealing some highly anticipated products and a big-name celeb. But it's all a hoax, according to OpenAI.
From coding tools and chatbots to smart assistants and wearables, the commercials suggest the industry is moving past the hype and skepticism and is betting on mainstream AI adoption. With 30-second spots averaging about $8 million, companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon, and Meta used the broadcast to explain what their technology does and why it matters to consumers and businesses alike.
