EliseAI, which sells AI software that answers phone calls and schedules tasks for apartment leasing offices and healthcare practices, raised $350 million at a $4 billion valuation. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, with Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and others also putting in money. This is the kind of AI that is already answering real phone calls for property managers and medical offices today, not a research project, so if you've called a leasing office recently, there's a decent chance you spoke to software like this without knowing it.
Accelevation Holdings, a company that builds AI computing infrastructure, sold shares to the public for the first time, pricing its stock at $18 each and raising $540 million in total. After paying underwriters and other costs, the company itself will keep about $170.55 million of that to spend on its business; the rest went to existing investors selling shares. Going public is one of the ways AI-infrastructure companies are raising the money needed to keep building, alongside the larger private loans and leases that dominate this part of the industry.
Reuters reports, citing the same confidential filing, that Anthropic has agreed to spend as much as $84.5 billion through 2029 on computing capacity supplied by xAI, the AI company Elon Musk's SpaceX bought earlier in 2026. This account says the deal can mostly be cancelled with 90 days' notice, so the figure is a ceiling on what Anthropic might spend, not money already committed. It is a separate commitment from the $42 billion Broadcom loan reported the same week, not the same deal counted twice.
Trump and leaders of six AI companies sign a White House accord promising four layers of safety checks
· Band Rules and society · 6 companies; 4 layers of checks, one an outside auditor · Confirmed
President Trump posted the signed text of the White House Accord on Super Intelligence on 29 September. It is signed by him and by Sundar Pichai of Google, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Elon Musk of xAI and Jensen Huang of Nvidia. It says every company training and deploying frontier models, the most advanced AI systems, should run four layers of checks: internal controls that watch for risks such as cyber, biological and chemical threats and make sure models do not hack or access systems in unintended ways; an internal team to make sure those controls work; an independent outside auditor or evaluator; and an independent board committee that receives the reports and makes sure problems are fixed. The companies say they will meet regularly to set standards. The text says it may make sense to write these steps into laws or regulations over time. It does not say who chooses the auditors.
OpenAI said at its DevDay developer event on 29 September that ChatGPT has 1.2 billion weekly users. It said ChatGPT subscribers can now use their plan's allowance inside 16 partner apps, including Cognition's Devin, Notion and Vercel, and set how much each may use. Eligible business customers can also put part of their existing OpenAI spending commitment toward software from 32 partners, including Figma, Adobe, Harvey and CrowdStrike. By OpenAI's own measure, a new Ultrafast setting generates text up to 8 times faster in its Codex coding tool and up to 6 times faster through its API, and a new Pro 500 plan gives 25 times the usage of ChatGPT Plus. For someone who pays for ChatGPT, some other apps can now draw on that same plan instead of charging separately.
Six Samsung companies put a combined $1 billion into Helix, an AI-infrastructure company run by a former AWS chief
· L3 Iron and cloud · $1bn combined; $500m from Samsung Electronics · Confirmed
Samsung Electronics and five other Samsung companies said on 29 September that they are investing a combined $1 billion in Helix Digital Infrastructure, with Samsung Electronics putting in $500 million and the other five the rest. Helix, launched in June 2026 and led by Adam Selipsky, the former chief executive of Amazon Web Services, describes itself as covering data-centre development and operation, power generation and other infrastructure behind AI. KKR, the Kuwait Investment Authority, Nvidia and the power company Vistra are its other founding investors. Samsung's announcement does not name a project the money will fund, so nothing is being built with it yet that anyone can point to.
OpenAI launches dots, agents that run around the clock on their own cloud computer
· L6 Applications and agents · 4,000+ apps via plugins; first dot included in Pro and Business Premium · Confirmed
OpenAI introduced dots on 29 September, AI agents powered by its GPT-6 Astra model that have their own cloud computer, learn from feedback and can keep working towards a goal around the clock. OpenAI says they can connect to more than 4,000 apps through its plugins, and that the first dot is included at no extra cost in a Pro or Business Premium plan, starting with users in eligible markets. For people on those plans, this is an assistant that keeps working on a task in the background instead of waiting to be asked each time.
OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol halves the price of cached input to 10 cents per million tokens
· L4 Models · $2 in, $0.10 cached in, $10 out per 1M tokens · Confirmed
OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Sol on 29 September. Its standard API prices are $2 per million input tokens, $0.10 per million cached input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, and OpenAI says the cached price is 95 percent less than standard input and 50 percent less than GPT-6 Sol's cached price. Cached input is text the model has already seen in an earlier request, such as a long set of instructions sent again and again, and a token is a small piece of text. The $2 and $10 match the GPT-6 Sol prices this site reported on 22 September. For developers who send the same long prompt many times, that part of the bill halves; ChatGPT subscribers see no change.
QumulusAI signs $240.9 million of three-year contracts for more than 2,000 Nvidia B300 chips
· L3 Iron and cloud · $240.9m; 2,000+ B300 GPUs; two clusters; take or pay · Confirmed
QumulusAI, which rents out computing for running AI models, said on 29 September that it signed agreements with a combined contracted value of $240.9 million covering more than 2,000 Nvidia Blackwell B300 processors across two dedicated clusters. Both are three-year take-or-pay agreements, meaning the customer pays for the capacity whether or not it uses it. It says the first customer's commitments with it now total more than $283 million and the second's more than $61 million. For the wider market, it is another multi-year contract that pays for new AI computers before they are switched on.
The European Commission opened a consultation on 29 September on how technology, including AI, affects copyright protection, with feedback due by 3 November 2026. Its three topics are the use of copyrighted content in AI, online piracy of content such as live events, and a payment right for music performers and producers. It invites views from rights holders, generative AI providers, intermediaries, researchers, national authorities and others. It is a request for evidence, not a proposal, so no rule changes yet; it could later shape what AI companies owe the people whose work they train on.