AI Daily: OpenAI discussed spinning out robotics, hardware divisions

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly.

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SECURITY REVIEWS: The Center for AI Standards and Innovation at the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology announced new agreements with Google (GOOGL) DeepMind, Microsoft (MSFT) and xAI. “Through these expanded industry collaborations, CAISI will conduct pre-deployment evaluations and targeted research to better assess frontier AI capabilities and advance the state of AI security. These agreements build on previously announced partnerships, which have been renegotiated to reflect CAISI’s directives from the secretary of commerce and America’s AI Action Plan. Under the direction of Secretary Howard Lutnick, CAISI has been designated to serve as industry’s primary point of contact within the U.S. government to facilitate testing, collaborative research and best practice development related to commercial AI systems. CAISI’s agreements with frontier AI developers enable government evaluation of AI models before they are publicly available, as well as post-deployment assessment and other research. To date, CAISI has completed more than 40 such evaluations, including on state-of-the-art models that remain unreleased,” the group stated.

ROBOTICS, HARDWARE DIVISIONS: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has discussed spinning out the company’s robotics and consumer-hardware divisions late last year, with the intention of giving the company more room to grow without weighing on the core business, Berber Jin of The Wall Street Journal reports. The two companies would have been able to raise external funding and operate independently, but the plan was rejected, partly because OpenAI concluded both companies might have to remain consolidated on its balance sheet, people familiar with the plan told the Journal.

MEMORY CHIP SHORTAGE: The U.S. is working with allies in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East to address the global memory chip shortage through a supply chain coalition, Nikkei Asia’s Yifan Yu reports. U.S. officials are expected to visit Philippines for the Pax Silica project after a meeting between President Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping. Publicly traded companies in the space include AMD (AMD), Intel (INTC), Marvell (MRVL), Microchip (MCHP), Micron (MU), Nvidia (NVDA), Qualcomm (QCOM) and Texas Instruments (TXN).

RIVAL AI MODELS: Apple (AAPL) will let users choose from multiple third-party AI models for a range of artificial intelligence services to power features across its software when it introduces iOS 27, iPadOS 27 and macOS 27 this fall, people with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Apple is working on a similar approach for Siri, allowing users to swap out ChatGPT as the external chatbot within the voice assistant, Bloomberg previously reported.

COPYRIGHTED WORKS: A group of publishers, including Cengage Learning, Hachette, Macmillan Publishers, and McGraw Hill, filed a class-action lawsuit against Meta (META) alleging it illegally used pirated copyrighted materials to train its Llama AI models and removed copyright information to conceal the sources, The Wall Street Journal’s Katherine Hamilton reports. The lawsuit names Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who the publishers claimed personally authorized and actively encouraged the copyright infringement.

PARTNERSHIPS: ServiceNow (NOW) announced what the company calls “a significant expansion” of its partnership with Nvidia (NVDA) to extend agentic AI governance from desktops to data centers. This includes the introduction of Project Arc, a new enterprise autonomous desktop agent, secured by the Nvidia OpenShell runtime and governed by ServiceNow AI Control Tower. “ServiceNow and NVIDIA set out to make AI real for the enterprise, and today we’re showing the proof of that work. Whether it’s autonomous AI agents that can be trusted on the desktop, governance that extends to the data center, or open benchmarks that hold the entire industry accountable, this is enterprise AI that’s built to last,” said Joe Davis, executive vice president of AI Engineering & Delivery at ServiceNow. Project Arc is available as an early preview. The AI Control Tower integration with the NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory validated design is generally available. NOWAI-Bench, including EnterpriseOps-Gym and EVA-Bench, is available now as an open-source release.

ServiceNow also announced an expansion of its strategic partnership with Microsoft (MSFT) that the company said “brings order to the chaos of AI agent sprawl.” ServiceNow added: “The partnership includes a deepened product integration between ServiceNow AI Control Tower and Microsoft Agent 365, extending AI Control Tower’s existing governance across Azure-backed Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio to Microsoft Agent 365’s AI agent ecosystem. ServiceNow AI specialists will also be available in the Microsoft Agent 365 Marketplace, allowing the ServiceNow Autonomous Workforce to operate across the Microsoft 365 tools that employees use.” Jon Sigler, executive vice president and general manager, AI Platform at ServiceNow, said: “ServiceNow and Microsoft are helping organizations maximize value from every AI investment. With this expanded integration, customers can securely apply governance across ServiceNow and Microsoft environments with integrated visibility and controls, while putting ServiceNow Autonomous Workforce to work across the Microsoft 365 environment. This is an example of what it means to put AI to work at enterprise scale, with the trust and interoperability that business transformation requires.”

VIBE CODING: Apple (AAPL) is facing complaints from startups like Replit over inconsistent App Store enforcement as AI-driven “vibe coding” tools make it easier to build apps, raising concerns about how the company is adapting its policies to the rapid growth of AI-generated software, The Financial Times’ Michael Acton reports.