OpenAI's former Chief Operating Officer, Brad Lightcap just announced he is stepping down from the company Here is the full letter Lightcap sent to OpenAI employees: "Team, it is bittersweet to share that I’ll be moving on from OpenAI to start something new. I feel incredibly fortunate to have spent most of the last decade pursuing our mission and building this company. Sitting here today, mission success feels within sight. It has been the honor of my life to help bring us to this point, and to do it alongside all of you. I joined OpenAI in 2018, eight years ago this month, because I wanted to work on something hard. @sama introduced me to @gdb and @ilyasut, who showed me a pitch deck suggesting that because models improve predictably with scale, AGI was not only possible but likely. If you had told me then that we’d be where we are today, I wouldn't have believed you. In the years that followed, I had the privilege of building the first versions of most of our operations and business teams – from Finance to Legal, People, CorpSec, GTM/Gov, Partnerships, and more. Among the most rewarding parts of this journey for me has been watching each of these teams mature under brilliant leaders. I am excited for the next decade in the hands of this incredibly capable team. At the same time, we grew from a small research lab to one of the most consequential companies of our time. I was reminded of that fact constantly – from serving our first user to our billionth, to the growing scale and ambition of our partnerships and the occasional curveball (the Blip, etc.). Through it all, I’m proud of how we’ve maintained our focus on people. It always amazes me how quickly the world has adopted our tools and rallied behind our mission. I hope we will continue to earn their trust. Over the last few months, I’ve been focused on the next horizon and what would stand in the way of mission success. I believe there are a few important new things the world will need to get right as we enter this next period. I’ll have more to share soon, but I believe in OpenAI more than ever and am excited to help you all advance the mission from a different vantage point. I am deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to work with all of you, and to so many of you for the support through the years. The old OpenAI meme that “the real AGI is the friends you made along the way” really rings true for me. I will be around for the next few weeks. I am not going far and hope to continue to support you all however I can. I’ll always be a phone call away if you need me. Brad"

DAILY SITUATION RECAP: SpaceXAI releases Grok Bot in early beta. Grok Bot is an agent swarm product designed for white-collar work tasks, an early preview of what Leopold Aschenbrenner called a “drop-in remote worker”. Bots can learn workflows and improve over time. This is likely part of the joint SpaceXAI-Tesla MACROHARD project, which seeks to eventually emulate entire software companies. OpenAI VP of Special Projects Brad Lightcap departs the company in order to start something new. Lightcap joined OpenAI in 2018 as CFO and helped build out many of its operations and business teams. He became COO in 2022, and VP of Special Projects (including the OpenAI Deployment Company) in April 2026. Previously, he was an investor at YC (along with Sam Altman) and worked in finance at Dropbox and JPMorgan. River AI raises $1.1B. The neolab, founded by xAI cofounder Igor Babuschkin, seeks to build powerful personal AI that knows and works for the user, starting with enterprise and moving to individuals over time. Anthropic is responding to tough investor questions on competition from cheap open-source Chinese models, on the firm’s tense relationship with the Trump administration, and on public backlash against data centers. Anthropic makes a $9.1B deal with Riot Platforms for compute. Riot is a former Bitcoin mining firm (and also former biotech diagnostic machinery manufacturer) that’s now pivoting to providing AI data center capacity. UK sovereign AI startup Cosine raises $15M, backed by the UK government and major financial companies. The 30-person startup plans to train LLMs for highly regulated industries that need sovereign AI. $15 million is around 0.005% of the total cumulative funding raised by OpenAI and Anthropic. Gemini hits 1 billion monthly users, becoming the fastest-growing product in Google’s history. Google now has 14 products (Search, Gmail, Drive, Chrome, Maps, Play Store, Calendar, Photos, Android, Discover, Lens, YouTube, Messages, Gemini) with more than a billion users. VC firm Accel raises $3.5B to make early-stage AI investments. $1.35B will go to larger rounds and follow-on investments, $800M to US (primarily Silicon Valley) investments, $800M to Europe and Israel, and $550M to India. Intel raises $20B in a share sale, showing continued demand for AI stocks. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson calls for a data center moratorium amid increasing anti-data center sentiment nationwide. Written by @theojaffee. Read more at our link in bio.