ENTERPRISE

OpenAI boasts one million business customers

OpenAI is getting down to business. 

The model company revealed Wednesday that it now has more than 1 million global business customers, including all organizations that “actively pay OpenAI for business use” through either ChatGPT for Work or direct consumption, dubbing itself the “fastest-growing business platform in history.” 

OpenAI credited its enterprise growth to its rampant consumer adoption, as user familiarity with ChatGPT has made it easier for businesses to deploy the tech with less friction. The company noted that ChatGPT for Work now boasts more than 7 million “seats,” up 40% over the last two months, and ChatGPT Enterprise has grown nine times year over year. 

OpenAI has taken an acute interest in appealing to enterprise customers in recent months. 

• The company pushed into the agent space in early October with the launch of AgentKit, a toolkit designed to make it easier for enterprises to deploy agents. 

• And in recent weeks, it launched a tool called company knowledge, allowing ChatGPT access to a user’s software stack for more contextually aware responses. 

• In September, it forged a multi-year, $100 million partnership with Databricks to integrate its models within the company’s enterprise platform.

• And on Wednesday, OpenAI announced a joint venture with Softbank, called SB OAI Japan, targeting business customers in the country with a “packaged enterprise AI solution” for corporate management and operations. 

But it’s not the only AI firm with its sights set on the enterprise. Anthropic has also keenly targeted business customers, striking deals with major professional services and tech firms and tailoring its product releases to the enterprise market. 

And this focus may be working in its favor: Anthropic reportedly aims to reach $70 billion in revenue by 2028 and expects to be cash flow positive. Meanwhile, OpenAI also has big revenue targets, but its losses far outweigh its projected sales. Targeting the enterprise market could help it claw back some of the cash it’s spent on its historic infrastructure buildout. 

OpenAI is trying to be everything to everyone. Though it’s seen significant growth in the enterprise space, the company is also heavily targeting the consumer market with products like its Sora app, as well as going after the search market with the launch of Atlas. With more than $1 trillion committed to building out AI data centers, OpenAI may be throwing anything at the wall just to see what sticks. Still, with so many irons in the fire, the tech firm may be at risk of becoming a jack of all trades and a master of none.

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POLICY

China restricts US chips

U.S. chipmakers are getting the boot from China. 

The Chinese government reportedly has issued guidance requiring state-funded data center projects to use only domestically made AI chips, according to Reuters. Regulators in the country have ordered data centers that are less than 30% built out to remove any imported chips installed and to cancel all purchasing plans.

Some projects were halted before they began, Reuters reported, including one facility that had planned to deploy Nvidia chips. 

The directive would limit the possibility for U.S. firms – namely, Nvidia — to gain market share in the country. It’s also only the latest governmental move restricting advanced AI chips from being sold in China. 

• On Tuesday, the Trump administration said it would not allow Nvidia to sell its Blackwell chips in China for now. “That's not something we're interested in selling to China at this time," White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a press conference. 

• China has also previously discouraged local tech giants from purchasing Nvidia’s H20 chips.  

And caught in the crossfire of these restrictions, Nvidia is not happy about it: CEO Jensen Huang said in late October that the company once held 95% market share in China, and now holds none. Huang told reporters last week at the APEC CEO Summit in South Korea that “It’s in the best interest of America to serve that China market.”

Still, Nvidia’s chips are in high demand in the country. In July, the Financial Times reported that at least $1 billion worth of the company’s AI chips had been illegally smuggled into China. Nvidia said that patchwork data centers are a “losing proposition” due to the support and services that they require.

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RESEARCH

AI complicates cyber threats, Google report finds

AI is making the threat landscape more complex by the day. 

On Wednesday, Google’s Threat Intelligence Group published findings showing a shift in how AI is used by cybersecurity threat actors. Rather than simply using it for productivity gains, AI-powered malware has become a growing part of threat actors’ strategies. 

According to Google’s AI Threat Tracker, AI is being used to “dynamically alter behavior mid-execution” of malware. 

• The intelligence group identified certain families of malware that use large language models during their execution, generating malicious scripts and hiding their own code to evade detection. 

• These threat actors will also use AI models to create malicious functions “on demand,” according to the report. “While still nascent, this represents a significant step toward more autonomous and adaptive malware,” Google said in the report.  

Additionally, AI tools like Gemini are also being abused across the attack lifecycle, including by state-sponsored actors such as North Korea, Iran, and the People's Republic of China, according to the report. 

More illicit AI tools have emerged in underground marketplaces this year, including phishing kits, deepfake generators and vulnerability-spotting tools, “lowering the barrier to entry for less sophisticated actors,” the report said. 

But given the wide availability of AI tools, these emerging threats aren’t surprising, Cory Michal, chief security officer of AppOmni, told The Deep View. AI has long powered both the cybersecurity defenses and threat actors alike. As these tools get better, so do the people utilizing them. “Threat actors are leveraging AI to make their operations more efficient and sophisticated, just as legitimate teams use AI to improve productivity,” he said.  

“AI doesn’t just make phishing emails more convincing, it makes intrusion, privilege abuse, and session theft more adaptive and scalable,” Michal noted.

LINKS

• Deutsche Bank explores ways to hedge its exposure to AI data centers

• VW, Horizon Robotics to develop AI chip for Chinese smart cars

• Google, Epic reach a comprehensive US court settlement, proposing app store reforms

• Cybersecurity firm Armis raises $435 million in pre-IPO funding at $6.1 billion valuation

• OpenAI unveils new benchmark for evaluating AI systems on Indian language, culture

• CoreWeave, CrowdStrike strike deal for agentic AI security

• Amazon debuts Whole Foods co-operated by humans and robots

• Pinterest CEO Bill Ready heralds open source AI for low-cost deployment

• Brex AI Agents: Finance platform Brex has debuted agentic finance capabilities.

• ElevenLabs-hosted LLMs: Now available in ElevenLab’s Agent Platform, utilize models from third parties to create voice agents.

• Runable: A general AI agent for any task, including creating slides, websites, documents, podcasts and more

• Lens with Gemini: Take a photo of any location and ask questions about it for answers in real time, now available in Google Maps

• Nebius Token Factory: The AI cloud provider now offers a platform for running open source models for inference workloads.

• Meta: AI Engineer, Reality Labs Foundation

• Scale AI: Applied AI Engineer, Enterprise GenAI

• Amazon: Sr. AI Language Engineer, Amazon Rufus

• Pinterest: Machine Learning Engineer, Monetization Engineering

GAMES

POLL RESULTS

Do you think taking AI off-planet the future, or a distraction from fixing Earth’s energy problem?

• It’s the future. Space is the next step for sustainable AI (19%)

• It’s worth exploring, but still too early to know (26%)

• It’s a distraction. The focus should stay on Earth (22%)

• It’s unrealistic. The costs and logistics don’t add up (18%)

• Something else (write in!) (15%)