OpenAI plans to nearly double its workforce to 8,000 by the end of 2026, with a major push into enterprise AI, a market where Anthropic has been steadily gaining ground.

OpenAI is acquiring Astral, the company behind some of the most widely used Python tools in the world. The deal signals how aggressively AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic are competing for dominance in AI-powered coding.

Chinese AI company MiniMax has released M2.7, a model that reportedly played an active role in its own development. Through autonomous optimization loops, it improved its own training process and posted competitive benchmark results.

Cursor releases Composer 2, the second generation of its own AI model for software development. The model is designed to keep pace with the leading coding models from Anthropic and OpenAI at significantly lower costs.

Europe leads in AI adoption and matches the US in talent, but owns almost none of the platforms it depends on. A new report by Prosus and Dealroom lays out where the disconnect starts: from missing infrastructure and fragmented regulation to a funding gap that hands Europe's best startups to American investors. Closing that gap won't be easy.