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2026
Pentagon awards classified-network AI contracts to seven vendors, excludes Anthropic over usage-policy stand-off
On May 1, the Department of Defense announced agreements with seven AI vendors — OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft, AWS, SpaceX and Reflection — to deploy AI on classified networks under the GenAI.mil platform, while continuing to exclude Anthropic over its refusal to remove usage-policy clauses against mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
May 1, 2026Industry News

DeepSeek releases V4 with 1.6T parameters and 1M-token context, sustains MIT-licensed open weights

DeepSeek released its V4 model series on April 24, with the flagship V4-Pro at 1.6 trillion total parameters (49 billion active), a 1-million-token context window and an MIT-licensed open-weights distribution, sharpening the U.S.-China open-source AI race.

Apr 24, 2026Industry News

Enpo Sekai opens ORDO closed beta reservations and launches product site

Enpo Sekai discloses ORDO (formerly HUM) desktop voice input product

Enpo Sekai publicly disclosed ORDO (formerly HUM) in mid-April 2026 as a macOS desktop voice input product, with internal beta planned around May 15 after final checks.

Apr 15, 2026Company News

SoftBank, NEC, Sony, and Honda set up Japan's "Physical AI" foundation-model joint venture

Four of Japan's largest companies — SoftBank, NEC, Sony Group, and Honda Motor — have established a joint venture to develop a domestic, trillion-parameter "Physical AI" foundation model intended to control robots, vehicles, and factory automation. The venture plans to apply for a NEDO program backed by roughly ¥1 trillion over five years.

Apr 12, 2026Industry News

The shift toward on-device AI in 2026 — observations

A few patterns we are seeing in how AI workloads are moving from the cloud onto the device — and what it changes for tool builders.

Apr 12, 2026Industry News

Local-first inference is rewriting the desktop tool stack

A second observation, looking at how the architecture of desktop AI tooling has actually changed in the last twelve months.

Apr 8, 2026Industry News

Thinking Machines and NVIDIA strike multi-year, 1 GW Vera Rubin compute partnership

Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab and NVIDIA announced a multi-year strategic partnership on March 10 to deploy at least one gigawatt of NVIDIA Vera Rubin systems, with NVIDIA also making an undisclosed strategic investment in the lab.

Mar 10, 2026Industry News

Enpo Sekai discloses TEAM OS, its internal AI development framework

Enpo Sekai publicly disclosed TEAM OS in early March 2026 as an internal AI development framework for organizing agent roles, skills, blueprints and project memory. It is not a customer-facing product.

Mar 10, 2026Company News

Japan unveils "third pole" AI strategy, targets 30% of global AI robotics market by 2040

On March 10, the Council for Japan's Growth Strategy, chaired by Japan's Prime Minister and convened by the cabinet, adopted a "winning strategy" framework that names AI robotics as a top priority and sets a target for Japan to become the "third pole" in AI alongside the United States and China, with over 30% of the global AI robot market and 40 trillion yen in domestic semiconductor sales by 2040.

Mar 10, 2026Industry News

Enpo Sekai prepares first Tokyo employee onboarding and broadens hiring scope

Enpo Sekai announced in early March 2026 that a suitable full-time employee candidate was preparing to join its Tokyo base, while the company broadened hiring beyond its initial three-role plan.

Mar 3, 2026Company News

OpenAI signs deal with US Department of War to deploy AI on classified networks

OpenAI announced on the evening of February 27 a deployment agreement with the US Department of War — the renamed Department of Defense — to run its models inside classified IL5 and IL6 network environments, after the Pentagon's parallel negotiations with rival Anthropic broke down over autonomous-weapons and surveillance language.

Feb 28, 2026Industry News

Enpo Sekai relocates headquarters from Osaka to Tokyo

Enpo Sekai arranged its headquarters relocation from Osaka to Tokyo in January 2026, selecting The SOHO in Aomi, Koto-ku as its new business base.

Jan 26, 2026Company News

Sakana AI partners with Google, sets finance and government as core targets

Tokyo-based Sakana AI announced a strategic partnership and undisclosed investment from Google on January 23, 2026, building on a $135 million Series B at a $2.65 billion valuation closed in November 2025 and signalling a focus on financial institutions, government agencies and defense in Japan.

Jan 23, 2026Industry News

NVIDIA unveils Vera Rubin platform at CES 2026 keynote, says next-gen chips in full production

At his CES 2026 keynote on January 5 in Las Vegas, NVIDIA chief executive Jensen Huang unveiled the Vera Rubin platform — the successor to Blackwell — declaring next-generation chips in full production, with broad availability targeted for the second half of 2026.

Jan 6, 2026Industry News

2025

Enpo Sekai starts B2B AI capability track

Enpo Sekai started a B2B AI capability track in December 2025, preparing to apply its character, voice, persona and agent-team know-how to partner-industry use cases.

Dec 20, 2025Company News

Enpo Sekai begins development of desktop AI character product

Enpo Sekai began early development of a desktop AI character product in December 2025. The project sits in the character, voice and persona layer and is not yet a release announcement.

Dec 15, 2025Company News

Enpo Sekai launches enposekai.com corporate website

Enpo Sekai Co., Ltd. today launched its official corporate website at enposekai.com. The trilingual site (English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese) provides company profile, product directory, news and blog, careers and contact information. The previously held domain forworldinc.com now performs a 308 permanent redirect to the new address.

Dec 11, 2025Company News

Anthropic launches Claude Opus 4.5, claims state of the art for coding and agents

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5 on November 24, 2025 at $5/$25 per million tokens with a 200k-token context window, claiming the first SWE-bench Verified score above 80% and a roughly two-thirds price reduction versus the previous Opus generation.

Nov 24, 2025Industry News

Japan designates AI and semiconductors as 'national strategic technologies'

Japan's Prime Minister's cabinet has placed artificial intelligence and semiconductors at the top of a new "national strategic technologies" framework, building on a 21.3 trillion yen comprehensive economic package approved on November 21, 2025 and Japan's first AI promotion law that took full effect in September.

Nov 24, 2025Industry News

Enpo Sekai and Distant Stars cooperation enters business execution stage

Enpo Sekai reported that cooperation with Hong Kong-based Distant Stars Limited had entered actual business execution, including game development and operations work in November 2025. Distant Stars’ Steam distribution foundation, established in 2024, will support publishing for selected new products.

Nov 20, 2025Company News

Google launches Gemini 3 and embeds it directly into Search

Google released Gemini 3 on November 18 and integrated it into Search the same day. CEO Sundar Pichai called it "our most intelligent model" as Gemini 3 set a new high score on Humanity's Last Exam and topped LMArena.

Nov 18, 2025Industry News

Anysphere closes $2.3B Series D for Cursor IDE at $29.3B valuation

Anysphere, the maker of AI-native code editor Cursor, closed a $2.3 billion Series D at a $29.3 billion post-money valuation co-led by Coatue and Accel, with the company crossing $1 billion in annualized recurring revenue at the close.

Nov 13, 2025Industry News

Enpo Sekai announces three-site web plan

Following its June strategy decision, Enpo Sekai announced a three-site web plan: one corporate site and two product sites for application and game products.

Nov 5, 2025Company News

1X Technologies opens consumer pre-orders for NEO humanoid robot at $20,000

Norwegian-founded 1X Technologies opened consumer pre-orders for NEO, a 5'6" household humanoid robot priced at $20,000 outright (or via monthly subscription), with first US deliveries scheduled for 2026.

Oct 28, 2025Industry News

NVIDIA signs LOI to invest up to $100B in OpenAI for 10 GW of compute

NVIDIA and OpenAI announced a letter of intent for a strategic partnership under which NVIDIA intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the lab deploys at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems for next-generation AI infrastructure, with the first gigawatt targeted for the second half of 2026 on the Vera Rubin platform.

Sep 22, 2025Industry News

Mistral AI closes €1.7B Series C at €11.7B valuation, ASML takes lead position

Paris-based Mistral AI raised €1.7 billion in a Series C round at a €11.7 billion post-money valuation, with Dutch lithography giant ASML investing €1.3 billion to become the company's largest single shareholder.

Sep 9, 2025Industry News

Enpo Sekai begins first hiring plan

Enpo Sekai began planning its first full-time hiring track in August 2025, setting three priority roles: product management, sales and translation, and engineering.

Aug 15, 2025Company News

OpenAI launches GPT-5 with router-based reasoning system

OpenAI launched GPT-5 in a livestream led by Sam Altman, introducing a unified model family with a real-time router that selects between a base model and a longer-reasoning "GPT-5 thinking" variant, alongside smaller GPT-5 mini and GPT-5 nano models for the API.

Aug 7, 2025Industry News

Google DeepMind unveils Genie 3, a real-time interactive world model

DeepMind announced Genie 3, a foundation world model that generates interactive 3D environments from text prompts at 720p and 24 fps, sustaining a few minutes of continuous interaction per episode and pitched as training infrastructure for embodied AI agents.

Aug 5, 2025Industry News

EU AI Act's general-purpose AI obligations enter into force

On August 2, the European Union's AI Act began applying transparency, copyright, and technical-documentation duties to providers of general-purpose AI (GPAI) models, with additional obligations for systems trained above 10^25 FLOPs and an EU AI Office now in place to coordinate enforcement.

Aug 2, 2025Industry News

Thinking Machines Lab closes $2B seed round at $12B valuation

Mira Murati's six-month-old AI lab raised $2 billion in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Nvidia and AMD also participating, at a $12 billion post-money valuation.

Jul 15, 2025Industry News

Enpo Sekai sets business direction for the AI era

Enpo Sekai set its core business direction in early June 2025, shifting its development focus from traditional game production toward AI-assisted products, including character, voice, persona and practical workflow tools.

Jun 5, 2025Company News

SoftBank to lead $40 billion OpenAI funding round at $300 billion valuation

SoftBank Group will lead a funding round of up to $40 billion in OpenAI at a $300 billion post-money valuation, structured in two tranches and gated on OpenAI's restructuring into a for-profit entity.

Apr 1, 2025Industry News