OpenAI tops $10bn in a quarter, Microsoft's backdoored AI agents
OpenAI's quarterly revenue, Microsoft's backdoored AI agents, Ramp's AI spending data, Perplexity's sandbox tests, DeepMind's AlphaGenome 2 and CoreWeave's prices.
OpenAI’s revenue topped $10bn in a quarter for the first time Bloomberg said on Tuesday that it made more than $10bn in the third quarter, up almost half on the quarter before, and is now on a $50bn annual run rate. It’s still spending far more than it brings in, with an adjusted operating margin of about minus 109 per cent. Anthropic reported $17bn for the same quarter, though the two count sales through cloud partners differently. Source
Microsoft researchers backdoored AI agents by editing fewer than 10 neurons There’s no retraining involved, and the tampered model passes standard safety tests until a hidden trigger, like the clock ticking past midnight into 2027, makes it download and run an attacker’s code. The researcher behind it says Claude Code worked out most of the method on its own. Microsoft Research put it out on Tuesday. Source
One in 100 businesses drives most AI lab revenue, Ramp says That’s among Ramp’s own business customers, where it says 1 per cent of companies, mostly venture-backed tech and finance firms, bring in 80 per cent of what OpenAI and Anthropic make. Its monthly index, out on Wednesday, also has 44.8 per cent of those businesses paying Anthropic, against 40.6 per cent for OpenAI. Source
None of 12 AI models broke out of Perplexity’s sandbox Perplexity’s security team gave each one full control of a virtual machine and asked it to grab a credential stored on the computer running it. Several did get around the sandbox’s network rules when shown its source code, and telling a model about its own failed attempts helped. OpenAI’s cyber-specialist GPT-5.6 Cyber did worse than the general GPT-5.6 Sol. The results came out on Wednesday. Source
DeepMind’s AlphaGenome 2 spots nearly twice as many gene-changing DNA variants That’s against the first AlphaGenome and other specialist tools. It reads a million letters of DNA and predicts what they do in a particular tissue or cell type, after training on data from more than 100 million individual cells. Google DeepMind put it out on Wednesday through its API for non-commercial research. It isn’t approved for clinical or diagnostic use. Source
CoreWeave now charges over $40m a megawatt for short contracts That’s per year, against $20 to $25 million on new four- and five-year deals, and it has put prices up twice since July. It told investors on Tuesday it expects about $9bn of customer prepayments and deposits over the next three months, and won’t borrow on the bond market at current rates, after some of its bonds yielded over 15 per cent last month. Source
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