Browsing: In Brief

Daytona Platforms announced on Friday that it had raised a $60 million Series B round at a $1 billion valuation led by FirstMark Growth. The company says it has now raised a total of $91 million.

OpenAI is reportedly close to securing another mega round of private funding, rather than plowing ahead with an IPO. The AI lab is working on raising up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation in a round led by Coatue and investors in UAE, sources told CNBC.

In a sign that crypto and blockchain-focused investing has receded in importance, Andreessen Horowitz announced Thursday that it is renaming its digital asset unit from a16z Crypto to a16z Frontier.

Eric Schmidt’s fortune is about to get even bigger. The former Google CEO is reported to own about 1% of Anthropic after investing tens of millions of dollars in the leading AI lab’s Series A round in 2021, per Bloomberg. The startup was valued at $461 million at the time

GM is closing a battery-assembly plant south of Detroit, a spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch.

Tenstorrent, a chip startup focused on inference, has raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation. The round comes five months after the 10-year-old Nvidia challenger reportedly received acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm at valuations of as much as $5 billion.

Anthropic updated its usage policy on Thursday, codifying new prohibitions on election interference, weapons software, and surveillance. But perhaps the most attention-getting change is a new prohibition against prolonged verbal abuse of the model, which is now expressly forbidden.

A little over a week ago, it was reported that OpenAI’s annualized revenue was approaching $70 billion, a figure that would have made it competitive with Anthropic’s reported run rate. Now, however, the AI lab is said to have told investors that the real revenue is some $20 billion lower than that.

On Thursday, at the Golden Age of American Innovation Summit, President Trump awarded Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Sergey Brin, and AMD’s Lisa Su the National Medal of Science, the nation’s top science prize. Dell Technologies’ Michael Dell and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella also receivedthe National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

The new devices — which include a smart lock, a thermostat, and a doorbell — are designed to integrate with the company’s smart home hub, another upcoming product that will reportedly launch on October 13. That hub is expected to include a 6-inch square display that can be placed on a countertop or mounted on…