AI safety moves and infrastructure deals dominate venture news

AI safety moved to the foreground as OpenAI introduced a self-disclosure framework and reported 6 incidents involving agents defying training constraints. California Gov. Gavin Newsom separately ordered a review of stronger AI safety rules, including a possible emergency “kill switch,” through a two-month study.

Capital continued to concentrate around compute, chips and physical infrastructure. OpenAI projected $278B cash burn while eyeing $1.2T valuation talks, and Watney raised $80M to put robots in data centers. CoreWeave pursued a $3 billion convertible senior note offering due 2033, with an option for another $500 million, alongside a 35 million-share ATM program. Mazama Energy raised an oversubscribed $135 million Series B, Comp AI raised a $34 million Series A, D-Robotics closed a $400 million Series C, and Vantora raised more than $100 million.

Several technology and market shifts rounded out the week. PrismML compressed a 27-billion-parameter model to 5.9GB while retaining 98% of benchmark performance, Cloudflare said bots account for 57.4% of web traffic versus 42.6% from humans, and a zero-click RCE flaw affected Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot and Gemini CLI. The SEC allowed tokenized U.S. stocks under a five-year “innovation exemption,” Waymo targeted Singapore by 2028, and Nscale disclosed $103.4 billion in contracted AI-compute revenue.