Welcome to the newest edition of ID Tech’s AI Update. Here’s the latest big news on the shifting landscape of AI and identity technology:
South Korea has now emerged as an AI player thanks to the launch of Solar Pro 2 from Seoul-based startup Upstage. It’s the first Korean LLM to reach “frontier model” status as determined by the benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis, and it outperforms relatively recent high-performance models like Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 and OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 across multiple benchmarks. Notably, Upstage built it with a “Depth-Up Scaling” technique that enabled its high performance with only 10 percent of the chip usage that would normally be required.
Meanwhile, in Canada, Cohere has raised $500 million in a new funding round, and hired Joelle Pineau, Meta’s former VP of AI Research, as its new Chief AI Officer. The startup is focused on enterprise AI, often training its models on clients’ private data. The funding round was led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital, with participation from previous investors including AMD Ventures, Nvidia, PSP Investments, and Salesforce Ventures, and brings Cohere’s valuation to $6.8 billion.
The Trump administration is in talks to take a financial stake in Intel, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The talks come in the wake of President Trump’s recent demand for the resignation of CEO Lip‑Bu Tan over alleged investments in tech linked to the Chinese military – though a subsequent meeting seems to have dialled down tensions. Intel’s foundry business has been struggling and a planned $28 billion Ohio chip complex has faced delays; the proposed financial stake is ostensibly aimed at shoring up America’s global AI position.
Anthropic is offering access to its AI platform to agencies in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches for $1 per agency for one year, under a new GSA OneGov agreement. One of its offerings, Claude for Government, is FedRAMP High-certified for sensitive unclassified workloads; and Anthropic’s tech is reportedly already being used at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab and the D.C. Department of Health. The move follows OpenAI’s offer of ChatGPT Enterprise to federal agencies on similar terms.
Apple is reportedly planning a bunch of AI-powered consumer devices in its bid to regain its footing in the artificial intelligence space. The planned flagship offering has been nicknamed the “Pixar Lamp” – an iPad-like touchscreen on a mechanical arm that can move and follow users around. But the company is also thought to be working on home security cameras equipped with facial recognition, and possibly a video doorbell with built-in Face ID.
A US provider of chip-making tools is being sued by a Chinese company for misappropriating trade secrets related to plasma sources and wafer surface treatment technologies. The lawsuit was filed in Beijing’s Intellectual Property Court, and alleges that Applied Materials hired two former employees of Mattson Technology – a company that Beijing E-Town acquired in 2016 – and named them as principal inventors on a patent application filed in China. Beijing E-Town says the filing disclosed proprietary technology co-developed with Mattson, and is seeking 99.99 million yuan, or about $13.94 million, in damages.
The hotly anticipated sequel to DeepSeek’s R1 model has been delayed due to persistent technical failures stemming from the use of Huawei’s Ascend chips. The Chinese government has been pressuring domestic firms to reduce their reliance on chips from American companies like Nvidia due to ongoing trade tensions and intensifying sanctions directed at the AI arms race, but the DeepSeek team has now reverted to Nvidia GPUs to train their R2 model after missing a launch that had initially been planned for May.
The chatbot’s take: GPT-5 has finally rolled out, so we took it for a test drive.
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By Alex Perala
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