Microsoft’s AI Chief Warns on White-Collar Jobs, Samsung Ships the First HBM4, and Simile AI Raises $100M
This Week in AI Newsletter: 2/13/2026
Anthropic raised $30 billion in a Series G round co-led by D. E. Shaw Ventures, ICONIQ, and MGX, more than doubling its valuation to $380 billion and marking the second-largest venture deal of all time. The company says its revenue run rate now exceeds $14 billion, with Claude Code alone generating over $2.5 billion annually. More here.
Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman told the Financial Times that most white-collar tasks, from accounting to project management, will be “fully automated by AI within the next 12 to 18 months.” More here.
Samsung announced it has begun mass production and shipment of the industry’s first commercial HBM4 memory chips, built on its most advanced 6th-generation 10nm-class DRAM process. The chips deliver 11.7 gigabits-per-second speeds, exceeding industry standards and positioning Samsung for the next wave of AI compute demand. More here.
SoftBank posted a fourth consecutive quarterly profit, booking $1.62 billion for Q4 driven by a $4.2 billion gain on its $34.6 billion OpenAI position. AI-related holdings now account for more than 60% of SoftBank’s net asset value, up from 18% three years ago. More here.
A year after DeepSeek rattled the AI industry with its low-cost model, Chinese rivals including Alibaba and ByteDance are preparing to launch a wave of new AI models timed to China’s Spring Festival holiday on February 15. More here.
Palo Alto Networks completed its $25 billion acquisition of CyberArk, the largest deal in cybersecurity history, then promptly laid off hundreds of CyberArk employees including dozens in Israel. The company will also dual-list on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. More here.
AI startup Simile raised $100 million to build a model designed to predict human behavior, including helping companies anticipate questions on earnings calls. More here.
Matt Shumer’s viral essay “Something Big Is Coming,” warning that AI could disrupt jobs worse than COVID, has been viewed over 60 million times on X. Shumer confirmed he used AI to help write it, arguing that proves his point. More here.
PayPal partnered with Sabre and Mindtrip to launch an agentic AI travel platform that unifies trip discovery, booking, and payment in a single experience. More here.
Legal AI startup Legora is reportedly in talks to triple its valuation to $6 billion just four months after its last round, reflecting surging investor demand for AI-powered legal tools. More here.
OpenAI officially retired GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and o4-mini from ChatGPT today after usage dropped to just 0.1% of users, signaling the full shift to GPT-5.2 era models. More here.
The Pentagon is pushing to deploy the latest AI models across all classification levels, including for sensitive applications like mission planning, despite ongoing security concerns about frontier model reliability. More here.