Startups

Character.AI, one of the earliest breakout successes of the generative AI boom, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States. The filing, reported Tuesday by Reuters, TechCrunch and CNN, lists estimated assets and liabilities for its owner, Character Technologies, at between $50 million and $100 million each.

The company plans to keep its platform running while it pursues a court-supervised sale, which it expects to complete in late November or early December. If no buyer emerges who is willing to keep the service operating, the platform will be wound down.

China's AI labs are heading for public markets — and Moonshot AI just became the biggest test case.

Moonshot AI, the Beijing company behind the Kimi chatbot, has completed its final private funding round at a valuation of about $50 billion, according to Bloomberg, up from $31.5 billion this summer and roughly $4.8 billion at the start of the year. The company is now preparing an initial public offering in Hong Kong targeting the first quarter of 2027, which could raise up to $5 billion.

Jeff Bezos thinks AI could hand workers something no union has ever secured: a three-day workweek.

Waymo is borrowing money for the first time — a sign that robotaxis are growing up.

On October 8, the Alphabet self-driving unit announced it had closed a $5 billion term loan, marking its first debt financing. In a company blog post, CFO Steve Fieler said the capital would support the expansion of Waymo's fully autonomous ride-hailing service across the U.S. and internationally, calling the loan "an important step in our evolution into a scaling commercial enterprise."

The race to Wall Street between the two biggest AI labs is becoming a race against the clock — and Anthropic is sprinting while OpenAI walks.

According to reporting from the Motley Fool and Reuters, Anthropic could begin marketing its initial public offering as early as the week of November 9, with trading potentially starting before Thanksgiving. The targeted valuation approaches $2 trillion, which would make it the largest IPO in history, clearing the bar set by SpaceX's June 2026 listing at roughly $1.78 trillion.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is closing in on one of the largest private financings in the history of the AI industry. Bloomberg reported this week that the company is set to raise at least 80 billion yuan — roughly $11.9 billion — with the final tally possibly reaching 100 billion yuan, as it builds a war chest ahead of a domestic initial public offering. Reuters confirmed the outline of the deal with a person familiar with the matter, though the agency noted it could not independently verify the figures and that DeepSeek, Tencent, and CATL did not respond to requests for comment.

Nvidia is circling the open-source coding world — and it already owns a seat at the table.

CoreWeave built its reputation selling raw AI compute. Now it wants to sell the software layer on top of it. At its Fully Connected conference, the company unveiled CoreWeave Forge, a development platform that folds model serving, observability, post-training, and evaluation into a single environment — and it comes with a striking performance claim: a preview feature called RL Rollouts that improved model reload latency by 15x in testing.

Manus is back on its own — and investors just backed that bet with a very large check.

Butterfly Effect, the parent company of AI agent startup Manus, said Thursday it has completed a funding round of more than $500 million, according to Reuters. The round was co-led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, with existing investors Tencent, HSG (formerly Sequoia China), and ZhenFund participating. The company did not disclose a valuation; Bloomberg had previously reported Manus was targeting roughly a $4 billion valuation.

French AI lab Mistral has launched Mistral Large 4, a 1.05-trillion-parameter natively multimodal model the company has nicknamed "le Chonk," now available in public preview via API. Open weights are promised by the end of October, after a red-teaming phase.