The Omniscient Bulletin · 2026-06-25
The Omniscient Bulletin — June 25, 2026
OpenAI taped out its own chip and got sued by 400 newspapers on the same day
OpenAI had the kind of day that captures the whole industry. In the morning it unveiled its first custom chip, an inference processor built with Broadcom to loosen Nvidia's grip on its data centers. By evening it was a defendant: nearly 400 local newspapers sued it and Microsoft over how those models were trained. The same company spent to build the machine and fought over the material that taught it. Around it the field kept moving: Qualcomm opened its own front in the chip war, venture money poured into AI agents for banks and hospitals, and the Pentagon bought AI to run its classified legal work.
Compute
OpenAI unveils Jalapeño, its first in-house chip, built with Broadcom for inference
OpenAI revealed its first custom silicon, an inference-only processor called Jalapeño designed with Broadcom, its clearest move yet to loosen Nvidia's grip on the chips that run its models. OpenAI says the part delivers substantially better performance per watt than current state-of-the-art accelerators and is tuned for real-time work like coding. It will lean on Broadcom's Tomahawk Ethernet to network the systems, and the first Jalapeño servers are due online by the end of 2026. President Greg Brockman said it targets workloads the company judged underserved.
Compute
Qualcomm launches Dragonfly data-center chips and signs Meta and Microsoft
A day after OpenAI's chip reveal, Qualcomm opened its own front against Nvidia. At its investor day it launched a full data-center line: the Dragonfly C1000 CPU, the AI300 inference accelerator, and a near-memory design it calls HBC Gen2. Qualcomm says the AI300 carries 54 times the effective memory bandwidth of its AI200 and four to eight times the performance per watt of GPU-based architectures on memory bandwidth metrics. Meta signed a multi-year deal to run the C1000 across its servers, and Microsoft was named an early customer for the HBC-based AI accelerators. The chips are not due to sample until 2028.
Policy
Nearly 400 local newspapers sue OpenAI and Microsoft over AI training
A coalition of publishers behind nearly 400 local and regional newspapers sued OpenAI and Microsoft in Manhattan federal court, the largest such group yet to take on the two companies. The suit, led by Richner Communications, accuses them of systematically copying articles, including paywalled work, to train ChatGPT and Copilot, and of stripping bylines and copyright notices in violation of the DMCA. It seeks damages and an injunction. The case was filed by Platkin LLP, the firm started this year by former New Jersey attorney general Matthew Platkin.
Industry
Taktile raises $110M led by Goldman Sachs to put AI agents inside banks
Taktile raised a $110 million Series C led by an arm of Goldman Sachs, with Tiger Global, Index Ventures, and Y Combinator joining, though it declined to disclose a valuation. The startup sells what it calls an operating system that lets banks and insurers turn frontier-lab models into dedicated agents for high-stakes work like underwriting, fraud checks, and claims. The raise is a marker of how fast money is moving into applied AI for regulated industries, where buyers want the models wrapped in controls before they touch a real decision.
Industry
Assort Health hits a $1.2B valuation with $120M for patient-care AI agents
Assort Health raised a $120 million Series C at a $1.2 billion valuation, led by Menlo Ventures with Lightspeed, Felicis, First Round, and former quarterback Joe Montana taking part. The company builds AI agents that handle the patient journey, from scheduling and intake to eligibility and refills, and says its model has learned from more than 190 million patient voice interactions. It reports revenue up twentyfold in the past fifteen months. The deal adds another unicorn to a day thick with funding for AI agents built for a single industry.
Policy
The Pentagon picks Casepoint's AI to run eDiscovery for classified legal work
The Defense Department named Casepoint the exclusive vendor under a blanket purchase agreement worth up to $98.8 million to handle eDiscovery for classified legal operations, serving offices including the DoD general counsel and the Defense Legal Services Agency. The software sorts and reviews sensitive documents for litigation, investigations, and records requests; one department user reported cutting manual review time by 50 to 75 percent. Casepoint holds high-level IL5 and IL6 authorizations and says its system does not rely on outside generative-AI models.