### Corporate and Strategic Developments

• AI search startup Perplexity made an unsolicited $34.5 billion all-cash offer to acquire Google Chrome. The bid, which significantly exceeds Perplexity's own valuation, comes amid antitrust pressure that could force Google to divest the browser.
• Sam Altman is co-founding Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface (BCI) startup positioned as a direct competitor to Elon Musk's Neuralink. The venture, valued at approximately $850 million and potentially backed by OpenAI's ventures arm, is being launched with Alex Blania, CEO of the WorldCoin digital identity project.
• Major AI firms, including Anthropic and OpenAI, are aggressively pursuing government contracts by offering their enterprise models to U.S. federal agencies for a nominal $1 fee to establish a market foothold.
• Character.AI has officially pivoted from its goal of developing AGI to focus entirely on AI entertainment. The company now leverages open-source models following a multi-billion-dollar technology licensing deal with Google.
• Elon Musk threatened legal action against Apple over alleged App Store bias favoring OpenAI, escalating a public feud with Sam Altman that also involved their respective AI chatbots.
• Microsoft is actively attempting to recruit top AI talent from Meta by offering multi-million-dollar compensation packages.

### Technical and Model Advancements

• Anthropic upgraded its Claude Sonnet 4 model to support a 1 million token context window, significantly increasing its capacity for processing large-scale documents and codebases.
• Robotics firm Figure demonstrated its Helix AI model, enabling the Figure 02 humanoid robot to autonomously perform complex manipulation tasks, such as folding laundry, by integrating vision, language, and motor control.
• OpenAI is updating GPT-5 with "Auto," "Fast," and "Thinking" modes and reintroducing a model picker for paid users following feedback on its initial rollout. ChatGPT also gained integration with Google Calendar, Contacts, and Gmail.

### AI Market and Growth Trends

• Market data reveals a rebound in ChatGPT's user traffic, alongside strong growth for specialized, single-purpose AI utility tools (e.g., background removal) and lightweight coding assistants.
• Enterprise AI adoption is shifting towards specialized, embedded copilots that solve specific workflow challenges in areas like recruitment, transcription, and customer support, rather than general-purpose platforms.