SoftBank plans $50 billion for AI in Malaysia, OpenAI wins Anthropic customers with discounts, and more - Daily AI Brief #566

In this edition, covering 24 and 25 October:

• SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son plans to invest $50 billion in AI, new technology and data centres in Malaysia, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said.
• OpenAI is using steep discounts to win business customers from Anthropic, including Replit and Rippling, The Information reported.
• Elvis Presley's rights owners sued Anthropic, alleging it trained its models on 274 of his songs without permission.

OpenAI and Anthropic

OpenAI is using steep discounts to pull business customers from Anthropic, The Information reported. Rippling raised OpenAI's share of its coding work from 16 to 52 percent, Replit switched after a discount of more than 30 percent on a contract worth over $100 million a year, and DataCamp said its costs fell 80 to 90 percent. Discounts

A unit of Authentic Brands Group and other Elvis Presley rights owners sued Anthropic on 23 October, alleging it trained its models on 274 of Presley's songs, including "Can't Help Falling in Love", without permission. The FBI is weighing an economic espionage charge against former OpenAI engineer Abdulrahman Alfozan, already held over an alleged recording device in an OpenAI meeting room, the Wall Street Journal reports. Elvis lawsuit · Alfozan

The US community bank association ICBA and OpenAI formed an alliance to give eligible community banks access to OpenAI's Daybreak security service, training and support. A Convovo study found that Grok 4.7 picked Republican candidates in 92% of forced choices and OpenAI's GPT 6.1 Sol picked Democrats in 97% across nearly 500 US midterm races, when tested through developer APIs; the consumer apps generally declined to recommend candidates. ICBA · Convovo study

Compute and chips

SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son plans to invest $50 billion in AI, new technology and data centres in Kuching, Sarawak and peninsular Malaysia, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said after a video call; SoftBank did not immediately comment. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says AWS capacity is largely sold out through 2027, with Amazon planning about $220 billion of capital spending in 2026. Chinese AI chipmaker Cambricon's third quarter revenue of 3.53 billion yuan fell well short of forecasts as memory shortages limited production. SoftBank in Malaysia · AWS · Cambricon

New models

Block introduced Dessa, a speech to speech model trained only on human conversation, without text, that can listen and speak at the same time and runs locally on a high end MacBook Pro. Tencent released Hy-Nomas, a model that generates continuous video worlds from text instructions and camera controls. Dessa · Hy-Nomas

Policy

California State Senator Josh Becker announced the Frontier AI Safety Act, which would require major frontier developers to report each quarter what share of their research computing goes to safety work. US Senator Ron Wyden released bills to support workers who lose jobs to AI and to tax data center operators. The UK set out about £600 million mainly for AI related health and security threats, including £100 million for an AI Biosecurity Lab. California · Wyden · UK

Google's privacy policy says Search may use data that users let it access from Gmail, Drive and Google Photos to personalize content, including ads; Google says it does not use that content for ads unless users make it available to services that support personalized ads. Western Australia is seeking reimbursement from Deloitte for a university merger study that contained AI generated references and cost discrepancies. Google · Deloitte

Companies

Meta acquired Sundial, an AI data analytics platform founded by former Meta employees Julie Zhuo and Chandra Narayanan; it will stop serving outside customers. TD Bank U.S. says its new TD Credit Assist drafts six sections of a commercial credit memo in under 30 minutes instead of up to three days. Formic raised a $50 million Series B led by Mercato Partners for robots in US manufacturing. Sundial · TD Bank · Formic

Boston Dynamics will go ahead with a $1.3 million sale of four Spot robots to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement after about 300 employees petitioned against it. Axon announced its Body 5 body cameras with 25 times the AI processing power of earlier models. Boston Dynamics · Axon

Health and security

Google says its chest X-ray algorithms for tuberculosis run in about 40 facilities in South Africa, Sierra Leone and Côte d'Ivoire and have read more than 25,000 X-rays, and Indonesia's health ministry is fine tuning MedGemma to screen 50 million people a year. SOCRadar says affiliates of the INC and The Gentlemen ransomware groups used AI tools to target 62 organizations. Google health · SOCRadar