As OpenAI has jockeyed with Anthropic to win over developers with new models and tools this year, its advertising business at times has seemed like an afterthought. Not anymore.

Over the last few months, the company has unleashed a flurry of new products and tools to court advertisers, even as it has cut ad rates. That’s helped lure a lot more advertisers, new data show. The company has also gone on a hiring spree. Nearly half of the roughly 140 OpenAI employees working on ads joined between July and September, according to Crustdata, which tracks employees’ public profiles. Meta Platforms, where ad chief Dave Dugan spent 12 years, is the biggest source of talent.

OpenAI said Wednesday it is testing allowing some U.S. advertisers to sponsor AI agents working in ChatGPT, a move that would bring ChatGPT ads closer to what Google and Meta Platforms already offer.

ChatGPT users who click an ad can now start a conversation with an AI agent to ask follow-up ...

Boris Cherney, the head of Anthropic’s coding tool Claude Code, last month found himself in the middle of an online spat that highlighted how some developers are finding workarounds to using Claude Code with cheaper non-Anthropic models, including those of rival OpenAI, to save costs.

Developer Alex Getman used a proxy made up of lines of code to connect Claude Code to OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol. Fifteen minutes after Getman typed the first coding requests into Claude, Anthropic shut down the account, he said. 

Claude Code is popular because it comes with all the tools assembled to read and run files, search codebases and run tasks in parallel. But it doesn’t need to run on Anthropic models. And developers are saving money by using cheaper models with the Claude Code harness. For that reason, Getman’s posts about the ban drew a million views within hours. 

OpenAI said Thursday it will pause new subscriptions to its $200-a-month plan for Astra, its new flagship model, another sign of the compute crunch facing AI companies.

Thibault Sottiaux, who leads OpenAI’s Codex coding agent, cited strains on the company’s systems and a desire to preserve ...

OpenAI has told some business partners that it will no longer accept advertising in ChatGPT for image- and audio-generating products—which compete with its own features.

The change, which hasn’t been previously reported or reflected in its published ads policy, blindsided existing advertisers such as Adobe, which sells such products. And if extended to other competing products, the new policy could narrow OpenAI’s potential ad revenue. OpenAI has given investors aggressive projections for ad growth, which it sees as a key way to make money off its large audience of people who don’t pay for the service.

Anthropic, Australia’s Macquarie Asset Management and the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC said Monday they were launching a new entity to develop, operate and lease AI data centers for Anthropic to meet demand for its Claude models.

The group will initially focus on U.S. data centers but ...

Even before Stripe entered talks to buy startup OpenRouter for $10 billion, several tech companies were exploring or developing router technology, which helps customers use the most cost-effective AI models. And Stripe’s talks with OpenRouter, which my colleagues last week reported have entered the advanced stage, have set off a frenzy of interest in router startups —including from big software companies like Snowflake that have yet to get into the fray. 

That’s been the experience of Thibault Jaigu, CEO and co-founder of Requesty, a five-person UK startup whose software routes developers using AI to various models. “The race to optimize is crazy,” said Jaigu, who said at least 25 companies had approached Requesty in the past couple weeks wanting to talk, including about possible investments, acquisition or other partnerships. 

By optimize, Jaigu is referring to developers’ demand for tech that helps cut costs by switching to older models from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI for some tasks, or to cheaper open-source alternatives such as China’s Kimi. Need for this technology has risen as AI agents consume more tokens, the units of text or other data that are the basis for pricing many AI services, and as open-source technology has advanced. 

Lyft said late Thursday its gross bookings rose 23% in the second quarter to $5.5 billion, beating the 18% to 21% growth the company forecast in May, as its European taxi business and a record share of rides booked through partnerships lifted the average value of each trip. But it forecast a ...

Airbnb said late Thursday that revenue for the three months ended in June rose 17% from the year-ago quarter to $3.6 billion, topping its guidance of 14% to 16%, as the short-term rental company reported higher demand across regions. Net income climbed 27% to $816 million. Shares jumped 9% late ...

Nscale, a privately held cloud provider, on Thursday said it agreed to buy Anyscale, a startup that trains, finetunes and runs AI models and applications. Nscale is paying $1.6 billion, The Information earlier reported.

The deal will let Nscale offer more AI services, pairing its data centers ...