February 24 – March 2, 2026
The AI stories that shaped the week
Meta announced a multiyear agreement to purchase up to $100 billion worth of AMD chips, including MI540 GPUs, to diversify AI infrastructure beyond NVIDIA and support its personal superintelligence development goals.
Read source →Samsung launched the Galaxy S26 series at Unpacked in San Francisco, with the flagship device built around on-device Galaxy AI for everyday interactions — representing a major push toward AI-native consumer hardware.
Read source →Perplexity introduced an autonomous "digital worker" that orchestrates 19 different AI models as sub-agents, capable of running entire workflows by treating multiple models like specialised team members handling parallel tasks.
Read source →Payment company Block announced layoffs of over 4,000 employees (approximately 40% of staff), with CEO Jack Dorsey citing AI tools that enable smaller, more efficient teams. The announcement reignited debate about AI's immediate economic impact on employment.
Read source →OpenAI announced a $110 billion funding round at a $730 billion pre-money valuation — one of the largest private fundraising rounds in history. Investors include SoftBank, NVIDIA, and Amazon.
Read source →The Trump administration ordered federal agencies to cease using Anthropic technology with a six-month phase-out, designating the company a supply-chain risk. The dispute stems from Anthropic's refusal to allow unrestricted government use of Claude for surveillance and autonomous weapons applications.
Read source →Alibaba released Qwen 3.5 Small, a family of four dense open-source models (0.8B to 9B parameters). The 9B model scored 81.7 on GPQA Diamond, outperforming much larger models and expanding access to high-performance AI.
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