The Three A's of OpenAI
Adverts, arguing, and answering questions from Congress. Press Clips #44 - January 26, 2026
Delivered to your inbox every Monday, Press Clips is a rundown of the previous week’s happenings in politics and tech in America. News, opinion, podcasts, and more, to bring you up to speed for the week ahead.
POLITICS
Sen. Markey (D-MA) questioned OpenAI, Anthropic and others about the use of advertising in chatbots, describing it as a “significant, and potentially dangerous transformation.”
Rep. Obernolte (R-CA) has a “forthcoming” billed being referred to as the “Great American AI Act.”
Director of OSTP Kratsios called for Congress to back Trump’s AI strategy.
Department of War launched the AI Acceleration Strategy, to “extend our lead in military AI deployment and establish the US as the world’s undisputed AI-enabled fighting force.
US Air Force is partnering with Stanford to test AI copilots.
Congress is reviewing agentic AI capabilities for use in defense.
Former FCC Chair Wheeler discussed three ‘chokepoints’ that will decide the AI era.
TECH
The Three A’s of Open AI:
Ads: OpenAI is officially bringing ads to ChatGPT.
Arguing: Their feud with Elon Musk continued, in a blog post on “the truth Elon left out.”
Answering: Questions from Congress.
Also:
Enterprise customers now account for 40% of the company’s business.
GPT-5.2 Pro set a new record on FrontierMath.
Source: EpochAI
At Davos, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei took shots at Trump’s policy on Chips and China.
Thinking Machines, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s AI startup, is in meltdown.
Elon announced that the Colossus 2 supercomputer is now live.
Two Chinese AI companies, Zhipu and MiniMax, went public.
The latest trends in AI, courtesy of EpochAI:
LLM inference prices are falling at 40x per year.
Total computing power of NVIDIA’s chip stock is growing at 2.3x per year.
OpenAI’s revenue is growing 3.2x per year.
The median time to build a gigawatt data center is 2.1 years.
Nathan Witkin argues that the METR’s “time-horizon of AI tasks” benchmark isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Zipline raised $600M+ at a $7.6B valuation.
TOP READS
Beware the Authoritarian Biopolitics of the AI Age (Sinification) ✍️
Winning the era of superhumanity (Scott Belsky, Implications) ✍️
Event: America’s Tech Long Game for Competing with China (CSIS) 🗓️
How AI Safety Is Getting Middle Powers Wrong (Anton Leicht) ✍️
Silicon Valley must decide which side it’s on (Brian Merchant) ✍️
Tyler Cowen interviews Francis Fukuyama (The UnPopulist) 🎧
Building Self-Aware AI Would Be a Bad Idea (AI Policy Bulletin) ✍️
Jon Hartley and Arthur Laffer on California’s new wealth tax (WSJ) 📊
Behavioral biases of AI models (Bini et al.) 📊
How AI Reaches the Most Extreme Parts of the World: From U.S. Navy Ships & Saudi Deserts to the Alaskan Arctic (Sourcery) 🎥
Winners and losers in the AI economy (Jack Clark, Anthropic) ✍️
Intel’s long series of unforced errors (The Chip Letter) ✍️
AI’s Harm By The Numbers (Harry Law) 📊
How shifting risk to users makes Claude Code more powerful (Understanding AI) ✍️
AI in 2026 (Tomas Pueyo) ✍️
On AI and children (Dean Ball) ✍️
How Reflect Orbital Is Building Satellites to Redirect Light From Space (The Generalist) 🎥
Anthropic’s Head of Economics on AI adoption, Claude Code, the burden of knowledge & future experts (Azeem Azhar) 🎥