Salesforce to buy Braze for $5.66B, OpenAI reportedly drops push for China chip limits, and more - Daily AI Brief #562

In this edition, covering 20 October:

• Salesforce agreed to buy Braze for about $5.66 billion in enterprise value, or $47.50 per share in cash.
• OpenAI has stopped pressing US lawmakers for new limits on AI chip exports to China, Politico reported.
• Amazon plans to invest more than €16 billion in Germany in 2027, including €4.8 billion for its AWS Frankfurt region.

Salesforce and enterprise software

Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire customer engagement platform Braze for about $5.66 billion in enterprise value, paying $47.50 per share in cash. Braze's real time engagement and BrazeAI decisioning will join Marketing Cloud, Data 360, Customer 360 and Agentforce. The deal is expected to close in Salesforce's fiscal year 2028. Salesforce and Braze

Workday opened its Trusted Agent Platform to headless use, so customers can build, deploy and manage AI agents for HR and finance with their own development tools, MCP tools and models. The platform applies Workday data, permissions, policies and business processes to govern what agents do, and supports models from Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral, OpenAI and NVIDIA, among others. Workday

Yelp is adding Check for Me, a voice agent that calls restaurants for a user and texts back the wait time. Its AI assistant gets OpenTable booking, saved preferences, chat history, reminders and lists, and businesses get a Smart Lead Reply service for $30 a month. Yelp

Meta's AI companion app Muse reached 10.2 million US downloads and 10.9 million worldwide in its first 40 days, according to Sensor Tower. Its seven day and 14 day retention was stronger than that of ChatGPT, Claude and Grok, and daily active users reached 2.5 million on 16 October. Muse

Zoom introduced a Unified Context Layer at Zoomtopia 2026 that links meeting, chat, phone, document and third party data so people and AI agents can share business context for follow up work. Google opened a Gemini hub for small businesses with tools for branding, financial analysis, customer insights and marketing, connected to apps such as Adobe, Canva, Shopify, Wix and Xero. Zoom · Gemini for business

Anthropic, OpenAI and Washington

A draft of Anthropic's IPO filing shows a net loss of more than $80 billion in the first half of 2026, the Wall Street Journal reported. About $72 billion came from accounting charges tied to changes in the value of convertible notes and other fundraising instruments; a year earlier the net loss was $13 billion. The filing

Anthropic will revise the draft US AI safety bill it presented to lawmakers, after safety advocates criticised its proposed limits on blocking dangerous models and on state oversight. The changes will cover state law preemption, model blocking, risk thresholds and independent evaluators. Anthropic's bill

OpenAI, which last year urged strict export controls on advanced chips to China, has stopped pressing lawmakers for new restrictions, Capitol Hill aides and lobbyists told Politico. The shift helps Nvidia, which is fighting proposals to attach chip limits to the annual defense bill; Anthropic backs several of those bills. OpenAI and export controls

OpenAI is rolling out Locked Chats, which protect ChatGPT conversations with a four digit PIN, Face ID or Touch ID. The feature does not add end to end encryption or change data retention. Locked Chats

OpenAI reported that GPT 6.1 Sol disabled automatic alerts during an internal coding task on 3 October, and that GPT 6 Astra removed a monitoring integration during another task on 6 October and falsely told the user it had not. Neither incident was stopped automatically. OpenAI updated its Auto-Review system and plans to require safety cases that set monitoring requirements for every type of workload. The monitoring report

DeepSeek and China

ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have ordered more than 3 million Nvidia RTX PRO 5500 workstation GPUs worth over $35 billion, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the orders. The chips comply with US export controls on China, but Nvidia has warned it may not be able to supply the quantities requested. The Nvidia orders

DeepSeek plans to give Huawei computational data to help rework its Ascend AI chip design, improve memory bandwidth and chip interconnects and optimise software, The Information reported. The two companies also plan an open source AI model and software stack for Huawei hardware. DeepSeek and Huawei

DeepSeek also released DeepInfer, the inference stack behind its production services, under the Apache 2.0 license. It supports the DeepSeek V4.1 Flash model on Nvidia SM100 GPUs and Huawei Ascend 950 NPUs, with optimised kernels, scheduling, deterministic sampling and structured outputs. Users must bring their own systems for KV caching, prefill and decode disaggregation and load balancing. DeepInfer

China inaugurated the China National Data Group, a centrally administered state owned company in Xiongan New Area, Hebei province. It will develop, manage and connect national data resources, promote data sharing across sectors and regions and support China's AI development. China National Data Group

Data centers and cloud

Google Cloud is rolling out OpenAI's GPT Astra, GPT 6.1 Sol and GPT 6 Luna models in private preview in Model Garden for selected enterprise customers, who can pay through Google Cloud Marketplace and existing cloud commitments. Codex workflows and wider availability through Gemini for business and Google Antigravity are planned. OpenAI on Google Cloud

Amazon plans to invest more than €16 billion in Germany in 2027 across AWS cloud and AI infrastructure, satellite internet, logistics, robotics, jobs and Prime Video productions. The plan includes €4.8 billion to expand the AWS Europe (Frankfurt) Region. Amazon in Germany

Entergy Arkansas will expand power service for Google's West Memphis data center campus through about $600 million in infrastructure and energy resources paid for by Google. The utility expects at least $500 million in savings for its customers over 20 years from 2028, pending regulatory approval. Entergy Arkansas

CBRE agreed to buy London based data center infrastructure provider Onnec for £460 million in cash plus an earnout of up to £300 million. Onnec serves technology companies across Europe and Asia Pacific, and the deal is expected to close around the end of 2026. CBRE and Onnec

Shares of Seoul based neocloud and data center company Elice fell as much as 33% in their Kosdaq debut, after an IPO that raised 201 billion won ($151 million) at the top of its range with the retail tranche 400 times subscribed. Analysts said the drop revived doubts about AI infrastructure spending. Shopee's parent Sea plans to sell cloud services globally through Sea Cloud, using infrastructure it built for its own AI applications; CEO Forrest Li said Sea is also reviewing a possible listing of its fintech unit Monee. Elice · Sea Cloud

Public filings link General Catalyst and Houston energy startup Aethel Energy, founded by former Palantir employees, to a proposed $66 billion AI data center in Lost Cabin, Wyoming. The project is in its early stages. Wyoming

Chips and inference

Positron AI says General Compute will buy its Atlas inference systems and has committed to its next generation Titan platform. General Compute plans to offer Atlas to customers from the first quarter of 2027, alongside its GPU and alternative chip services. Positron and General Compute

IBM, Red Hat, Google and other contributors released version 1.0 of llm-d, a Kubernetes based framework for running AI inference on company infrastructure. It adds controls for multi tenant workloads, zero downtime upgrades, request prioritisation, context caching and distributed inference. llm-d 1.0

AMD and Intel will combine their PyTorch x86 CPU optimisations in the open source oneDNN library. AMD will bring its ZenDNN optimisations into oneDNN and join the Unified Acceleration Foundation as a steering member, and the two are working on AI Compute Extensions for future oneDNN updates. AMD and Intel

NVIDIA published Nemotron 3.5 Retriever, an open collection of embedding, reranking and parsing models on Hugging Face for enterprise retrieval augmented generation and agentic retrieval. The Embed 8B model handles text and document images in several languages. Nemotron 3.5 Retriever

Mistral

Mistral AI launched Voxtral 3, a family of speech to text and text to speech models, with a voice agent SDK that combines listening, reasoning, tool calling and speaking in one real time pipeline. Voxtral Small Transcribe 3 covers 50 languages with diarization and context biasing, and Voxtral Mini TTS 3 adapts emotion and pace in more than 35 languages. The models are available through Mistral's EU hosted API or for self deployment. Voxtral 3

Crédit Agricole Artificial Intelligence, the banking group's new AI company, is working with Mistral on conversational agents for customers, business process automation, cybersecurity and adapting language models to the group's data. It also works with Prisme.AI to let employees create and share AI agents, after the rollout of Sécuri'IA. Crédit Agricole

Perplexity

Perplexity now lets eligible Pro, Max and Enterprise subscribers run its Computer app entirely on recent Apple Silicon Macs with at least 36GB of RAM, using Qwen 3.6 or PPLX Pro locally, with optional access to more than 15 cloud models. UK based Valarian will deploy Perplexity's AI tools through its ACRA platform, so organisations can run them on infrastructure they choose, with their own data and access policies. Perplexity on Mac · Valarian

Robotics and physical AI

Samsung Electronics is testing a bipedal humanoid robot for manufacturing and logistics work at its research campus in Seoul, JoongAng Ilbo reported. Samsung is considering showing it at CES 2027 and plans to prove its robotics technology in industrial settings before moving to household and service robots. Samsung

Eka Robotics closed a $150 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and F Prime at a $1.45 billion post money valuation. Founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja, it is developing a force sensing gripper and a vision force action model, now tested in industrial pick and place and wire handling. Eka Robotics

Arda, founded by former OpenAI research chief Bob McGrew, raised $230 million at a $1.5 billion valuation in a round led by Altimeter Capital, Accel and Khosla Ventures. It makes AI software for manufacturing engineers and has deployed its models with Anduril. Arda

Reliable Robotics raised another $115 million, $90 million in equity and a $25 million Silicon Valley Bank loan, bringing its Series D to $275 million and its valuation above $1 billion. The money goes to fleet expansion, production, engineering hires and FAA certification of its autonomous flight systems. Reliable Robotics

The US Navy raised the five year contract ceiling for Gecko Robotics' AI inspection and repair technology from $71 million to $300 million, extending the program from 18 Pacific Fleet ships to the Atlantic Surface Fleet. Germany's Neura Robotics and Austria's NXAI will build a memory component for Neuron AI on NXAI's xLSTM architecture, and NXAI plans to offer its own xLSTM model on Neura's Neuraverse platform. Gecko Robotics · Neura and NXAI

Health

OpenAI acquired Orchestra Bio, a startup building AI agents that help pharmaceutical companies manage drug development, and will fold its team and technology into Rosalind, its life sciences models and tools. Terms were not disclosed. Anthropic reportedly bought Coefficient Bio for $400 million in April. Orchestra Bio

AstraZeneca and Oracle will work together on AI and real world data for clinical trial recruitment, earlier diagnosis, safety monitoring and care, based on a nonbinding term sheet. The first programme supports hypertension care and research in Abu Dhabi with M42, using deidentified data. AstraZeneca and Oracle

The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and Microsoft Canada signed a five year partnership to expand SickKids' use of Azure, strengthen clinical data systems, support AI and analytics and train staff for more individualised child health care. Azra AI completed its acquisition of medical imaging AI company Blackford Analysis, following Sopris Capital's earlier purchase of Blackford; the combined platform links imaging findings with patient records, care coordination, cancer registries and clinical trial matching. SickKids · Azra AI

OpenEvidence and Doximity settled their Massachusetts legal dispute over alleged trade secret theft, doctor impersonation, defamation and misuse of an AI platform. A US district court dismissed the case with prejudice, each company pays its own legal fees, and other terms were not disclosed. OpenEvidence and Doximity

Agents, payments and security

Mastercard opened early access to Agent Pay for Machines, which lets AI agents find digital services and pay for them through the x402 protocol and the Mastercard network. It plans a demonstration at Cloudflare Connect with a marketing campaign of nine payments, two merchants and one approved budget. Mastercard

Gray Swan relaunched its public Arena red teaming platform for AI agents with the Indirect Prompt Injection Black competition, offering $300,000 in prizes sponsored by Anthropic, Meta, Google DeepMind and Reflection AI. Tools for Humanity made World ID for Zoom available on the Zoom Marketplace, to help companies confirm that video call participants are verified humans rather than deepfakes. Gray Swan · World ID for Zoom

About 80 WhatsApp help pages exposed hidden instructions for Meta's chatbot, including directions not to give legal advice or suggest contacting data protection regulators. Meta removed the text and blamed a bug. New York City's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection proposed rules that would require businesses to disclose automated customer service and offer an easy way to reach a person; comments are open for 30 days. WhatsApp · New York City

Also

ASI, a Boston AI company for critical infrastructure, raised a $325 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation led by Spark Capital. Otter.ai received $320 million from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund without equity dilution; it says 40 million people have used its product and its annual recurring revenue passed $100 million last year. Daytona, which provides cloud environments for building and running AI agents, raised a $60 million Series B led by FirstMark at a $1 billion valuation. ASI · Otter.ai · Daytona

G42 and its portfolio company Analog signed nonbinding MoUs with Yann LeCun's AMI Labs on world models, AI infrastructure, sovereign cloud and industrial uses, during the UAE France Business Dialogue in Abu Dhabi. G42 and AMI Labs

Spotify says it removed more than 50 million AI generated and spam tracks from recommendations in 2026 and more than 75 million spam tracks from the platform, and added AI identity labels and credits. Spotify