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May 13, 2026
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Happy Wednesday! The House Oversight Committee opens an investigation into OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s personal investments. Google plans to hire hundreds of engineers to help customers adopt its AI products. A former Alibaba researcher seeks a $2 billion valuation for his new AI lab in its first fundraising.
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The House Oversight Committee has opened an investigation into OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s personal investments and their ties to OpenAI’s commercial partnerships. At the same time, 10 Republican attorneys general—including from Florida, Montana, Nebraska, Iowa, Arkansas and West Virginia and Louisiana—also asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to review OpenAI’s governance. On Friday, James Comer, the Kentucky Republican and chair of the committee, sent Altman a letter requesting a briefing about potential conflicts of interest involving the OpenAI CEO’s personal stakes in startups, according to a copy of the letter. The committee’s letter follows reports that Altman pushed OpenAI to partner with companies he has stakes in, including fusion startup Helion and aerospace firm Stoke Space. Meanwhile, the state attorneys general warned in a letter to SEC chair Paul Atkins that self-dealing by Altman could hurt state pensions and retail investors who could end up holding OpenAI shares after a future initial public offering.
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Google plans to hire hundreds of engineers to help customers start using its business-focused AI products, according to a person familiar with the situation. Google’s new “forward deployed engineers” will form a new team within Google Cloud, the unit’s chief, Thomas Kurian, said on LinkedIn on Tuesday, without disclosing the size of the effort. Matt Renner, Google Cloud’s chief revenue officer, said in a separate post that the move would help Google “show up for our customers with more technical resources (vs just an ocean of salespeople).” The announcement is one of several in the industry in recent weeks as tech companies are deploying armies of humans—often described as “forward deployed engineers”—and partnerships with consulting companies to get customers using AI-driven technology intended
to automate work. On Monday, OpenAI launched the “OpenAI Deployment Company” in partnership with consulting and investment firms. Last week, Anthropic announced the creation of a joint venture with private equity firms to sell its AI to the PE firms’ customers. Google is also in talks with Blackstone, KKR and EQT to get their portfolio companies access to Google’s AI models. Last month, it announced a deal with Vista Equity Partners and a $750 million fund for consulting firms to speed up their customers’ AI adoption. The dueling announcements are signs of
the intensity of the race to win customers from competing AI labs. They also suggest that despite the skyrocketing enterprise revenue numbers for some frontier AI labs, particularly Anthropic, companies are still finding it difficult to implement AI, as Google Cloud customers said at the company’s conference last month. “The demand from customers and partners for Google enterprise AI products and Google engineers to help them embrace agent development is growing very rapidly,” Kurian wrote on LinkedIn.
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Junyang Lin, former lead researcher of Alibaba’s Qwen models who left the firm earlier this year, is seeking to raise several hundred million dollars for his new AI lab, The Information reported. Lin’s new AI lab will likely be valued at around $2 billion after the funding round, though the discussions are ongoing and the final valuation could change. Chinese venture capital firms Gaorong Ventures and HongShan are in talks to fund the lab. A $2 billion valuation for a brand new AI lab is
almost unheard of in China, where startups are typically valued far less than those in the U.S. The high target valuation reflects Lin’s accomplishments at Alibaba and growing investor euphoria for AI stocks. Lin departed Alibaba in a rare public fall-out with the Chinese tech giant in early March. He broadcast his resignation in a post on the X social media site, before any official announcements were made by Alibaba’s executives. He has been widely credited with building a team of researchers and taking Qwen to the forefront of the global open-source AI in his three years at Alibaba.
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Madison and Spencer Huang, the daughter and son of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, have quietly become rising forces inside the world’s most valuable company—and their paychecks reflect it. Madison, a senior director of product marketing, earned $1.2 million last year, according to Nvidia’s annual report, which was made public Tuesday. That was up from $1.1 million in 2024. Spencer, a director of product management who specializes in robotics, earned $1.3 million, up from $530,000 the year prior. Their compensation, which was disclosed in Nvidia’s related party transactions, was determined without their father’s involvement and was based on their qualifications and responsibilities, Nvidia said. While both siblings received an MBA degree, neither took a
conventional path to Silicon Valley, The Information previously reported. Madison attended culinary school and worked at French luxury conglomerate LVMH, while Spencer ran a cocktail bar in Taipei for seven years.
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SAP has been slower than some of its software rivals in embracing AI agents, but the German software giant’s executives spent the first day of its annual customer conference trying to change that perception. One of SAP’s biggest moves is a new agreement with Anthropic that will make it easier for SAP customers to build agents using the startup’s Claude models through a deeper integration between their respective products. Until now, SAP customers have had to build their own software to connect Claude to SAP applications and to Joule, the company’s AI assistant. The Anthropic agreement comes after SAP, in a policy document published in late April, suggested it would | | | |
