TODAY IN AI
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman / Source: Jason Redmond/Getty images
1. Alibaba’s AI arm drops its “biggest model” yet: The Chinese e-commerce giant unveiled Qwen3-Max-Preview — its largest language model to date with over 1 trillion parameters. Betting on scale, Qwen says the model outperforms Claude Opus 4, Kimi K2, and DeepSeek-V3.1 on reasoning and coding tasks. The model supports a 262K token context window and is available on Qwen Chat, Alibaba Cloud, and OpenRouter. Pricing starts at $0.86 per million tokens for shorter prompts.
2. Anthropic to pay $1.5B in record author lawsuit settlement: The Claude maker has agreed to pay authors about $3,000 per work for allegedly using their books to train its AI models. The company is also required to destroy the original files, but the settlement only covers past use and leaves future claims open. It may be the largest copyright recovery in US history. A court hearing on September 8th will determine final approval.
3. OpenAI’s costs expected to balloon past $100B+: The company is reportedly projecting $115B in cash burn through 2029 — an $80B jump driven by rising AI infrastructure costs. Losses are set to exceed $8B this year, rise to $17B in 2026, and hit $45B by 2028 as cloud costs soar. To offset the crunch, OpenAI plans on developing its own AI chips with Broadcom starting next year and building out new data centers.