AI
AI Giants Court Governments, Custom Silicon, and Enterprise Embedded Engineers
OpenAI floats 5% government stake, Anthropic eyes Samsung chip deal, Z.ai launches ZCode, Microsoft deploys 6,000 engineers.
OpenAI in talks to give Trump administration 5% stake worth $42.6 billion
OpenAI is in early discussions with the Trump administration to grant the U.S. government a 5% stake in the company, according to the Financial Times. The proposal, which could also involve other U.S. AI companies offering similar stakes, is part of CEO Sam Altman’s argument that the public should share in AI’s financial upside. Based on OpenAI’s most recent funding round, a 5% stake would be worth approximately $42.6 billion. The White House has been weighing various partnership options to benefit from AI industry growth, and Trump told reporters last month he planned to meet top AI executives to discuss giving the public a stake. The arrangement could help address pushback against AI, which threatens jobs across many industries. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
OpenAI in talks to give Trump administration a 5% stake in the company, FT reports →
Anthropic reportedly explores custom AI chip manufacturing with Samsung
Anthropic is in early-stage talks with Samsung Electronics to manufacture a custom AI chip, as reported by The Information. The project lacks a detailed design, with the company still deciding the chip’s function and power requirements. Anthropic downplayed the effort, stating that chips from AWS, Google, and Nvidia remain central to its strategy, and declined to comment on its own chip roadmap. The company has hired chip engineers including Clive Chan, an early member of Tesla’s and OpenAI’s custom chip teams, who is expected to build out a dedicated chip group. The move follows a broader industry trend toward custom silicon to reduce AI infrastructure costs, with OpenAI recently unveiling its first in-house inference chip ‘Jalapeño’ built with Broadcom, while AWS, Google, and Meta also run custom AI chips.
Z.ai launches ZCode to challenge Cursor, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot in AI coding
Z.ai, the Beijing-based AI lab formerly known as Zhipu AI, launched ZCode, a free desktop application described as an ‘Agentic Development Environment’ for its GLM-5.2 large language model. The tool supports macOS, Windows, and Linux, offers bring-your-own-key for third-party models, and provides a 1.5x usage-quota bonus for GLM Coding Plan subscribers. ZCode uses an agent that plans work, edits files, runs checks, and iterates across multi-step tasks, with continuous follow-up via desktop, mobile Remote, and Feishu/WeChat Bot. The GLM Coding Plan starts at $16.20/month for Lite and goes up to $144/month for Max, with a promotional 1.5x quota bonus through July 31. GLM-5.2, released on June 16, is a 744-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 40 billion active parameters and a one-million-token context window, trained on 28.5 trillion tokens using Huawei silicon. It ranked second globally on Code Arena as of mid-June, trailing only Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5, and its API pricing offers up to 82% cost reduction compared to Claude Opus 4.8. The launch comes amid geopolitical tensions: the U.S. briefly suspended access to Anthropic’s models on June 12, then lifted controls on June 30. ZCode’s BYOK architecture and GLM-5.2’s MIT-licensed open weights allow self-hosting, avoiding both U.S. export-control and Chinese data-sovereignty concerns. Z.ai’s market cap crossed HK$1 trillion ($128 billion) on June 22, and JPMorgan raised its revenue forecast for the company, projecting a 534% revenue surge for 2026.
Z.ai launches ZCode to challenge Cursor, Claude Code and GitHub Copilot in AI coding →
Microsoft launches $2.5 billion ‘Frontier Company’ to embed 6,000 AI engineers inside enterprise clients
Microsoft has launched a new business unit called ‘Frontier Company’ with a $2.5 billion budget and 6,000 industry and engineering experts. The unit will embed these experts directly with enterprise customers to co-design, co-innovate, deploy, and continuously improve AI systems at scale based on measurable business outcomes, according to Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft Commercial Business. Althoff described the initiative as going beyond the standard ‘Forward Deployed Engineering’ model to become the largest results-oriented engineering organization in the industry. Microsoft positions itself as a platform-neutral alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic, which deploy only their own models through their own deployment firms. To scale the effort, Microsoft is leveraging its existing partner network including system integrators Accenture, Capgemini, EY, KPMG, and PwC. Rodrigo Kede Lima will lead the new unit.