In the winter of 2022, as the tech world was becoming mesmerized by the sudden, explosive arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Benjamin Alarie faced a pivotal choice. His legal tech startup, Blue J, had a respectable business built on the AI of a bygone era, serving hundreds of law firms with predictive models. But it had hit a ceiling.
The announcement, made Thursday, centers on Ironwood, Google's latest custom AI accelerator chip, which will become generally available in the coming weeks. In a striking validation of the technology, Anthropic, the AI safety company behind the Claude family of models, disclosed plans to access up to one million of these TPU chips — a commitment worth tens of billions of dollars and among the largest known AI infrastructure deals to date.
The San Francisco-based software giant announced Thursday a suite of new tools designed to create what it calls a "trusted AI foundation" for enterprises struggling with fragmented data, weak governance, and security concerns that have hampered AI deployments across corporate America.
The company announced Wednesday that its new real-time search API and Model Context Protocol server will give third-party developers secure, permission-aware access to Slack's vast troves of workplace conversations, messages, and files. The move assumes that conversational data—the informal discussions, decisions, and institutional knowledge that accumulates in workplace chat—will become the fuel that makes AI agents truly useful rather than generic.
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The Search API poses the most significant challenge yet to Google's dominance in providing search infrastructure to developers, offering access to an index spanning hundreds of billions of web pages with real-time updates and AI-optimized results formatting. The move comes as Perplexity positions itself as a disruptive force in the search industry, following its audacious $34.5 billion bid for Google's Chrome browser in August.
The integration, available immediately to Brex's more than 30,000 customers, allows founders to establish complete accounting systems directly within their existing Brex dashboard without switching platforms or manual data entry. The partnership marks Brex's evolution from a corporate credit card provider to a comprehensive financial operating system for growing businesses.
The Open Semantic Interchange (OSI) initiative brings together fierce competitors who have concluded that inconsistent data definitions across enterprise systems block AI scalability. The effort includes backing from BlackRock and participation from companies including Alation, Atlan, Blue Yonder, Cube, Hex, Honeydew, Mistral AI, Omni, RelationalAI, Select Star, Sigma, and ThoughtSpot. Together, they will establish the first vendor-neutral specification for semantic metadata — a Rosetta Stone for business data.