AI Native Weekly Newsletter: 07 September 2025
Meanwhile, AI’s growth momentum remains strong. Anthropic secured $13B at a $183B valuation, showing continued investor confidence, while GLM-4.5 delivers affordable Claude-level coding, Microsoft debuts its first in-house foundation and voice models, and Apple open-sources MobileCLIP 2 for real-time mobile AI. These advances reflect rapid progress across both infrastructure and applications alongside increasing legal oversight.
Contents
- Anthropic to Pay Record $1.5B in Authors’ Copyright Dispute
- Anthropic Raises $13B at $183B Valuation
- GLM-4.5 Coding Plan: ¥20/Month for Claude-Level AI Coding
- Microsoft AI Unveils MAI-1 and Voice Models
- Apple Open-Sources MobileCLIP 2: Fast On-Device AI
- World’s First Native 3D World Model Tops Rankings
- StepFun Releases SOTA Open-Source Speech AI Model
- Helix Masters Dishwasher Loading with Same AI Model
Anthropic to Pay Record $1.5B in Authors’ Copyright Dispute
Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5B to authors and publishers—the largest U.S. copyright settlement to date. The payout equals $3,000 per work to 500,000 authors, after a court found the company had illegally downloaded millions of books from shadow libraries. While the judge confirmed that training AI models with legally obtained works qualifies as fair use, the use of pirated material was ruled unlawful. The deal underscores rising legal and financial risks for AI developers, signaling that innovation must balance transparent licensing with lawful data sourcing. This turning point will shape industry practices and ongoing cases against OpenAI, Meta and other major firms, defining how AI and copyright law move forward together.
Anthropic Raises $13B at $183B Valuation
Anthropic secured $13B Series F funding led by ICONIQ, Fidelity, and Lightspeed, valuing the company at $183B. Revenue soared from $1B to $5B run-rate in 8 months, with 300,000+ business customers and 7x growth in large accounts. Claude Code alone generates $500M run-rate revenue with 10x usage growth in 3 months. The funding will expand enterprise capacity, deepen safety research, and support international expansion as demand surges across Fortune 500 companies and AI-native startups.
GLM-4.5 Coding Plan: ¥20/Month for Claude-Level AI Coding
GLM-4.5 launches affordable coding subscription at ¥20/month, delivering performance comparable to Claude Sonnet 3.5 at 1/7 the cost. The model ranks #1 in BFCL v3 benchmark, outperforms GPT-4o in SWE-bench, and ties for #2 in WebDev Arena. In real-world CC-Bench tests across 52 programming tasks, GLM-4.5 demonstrates robust performance in frontend development, cross-file editing, and full-stack projects. Now integrated with Claude Code, Cline, and other major coding tools.
Microsoft AI Unveils MAI-1 and Voice Models
Microsoft AI launches MAI-Voice-1 for ultra-fast, expressive speech generation in Copilot, and MAI-1-preview, its first in-house foundation model. This strategic move signals Microsoft’s shift toward proprietary AI development, reducing reliance on OpenAI while competing directly with Google’s multimodal offerings. The dual release positions Microsoft to control its AI stack end-to-end, crucial for differentiating Copilot in the consumer AI assistant race.
Apple Open-Sources MobileCLIP 2: Fast On-Device AI
Apple researchers released MobileCLIP 2 on GitHub and Hugging Face, delivering desktop-class AI performance on mobile devices. The smallest model runs 4.8x faster than OpenAI’s ViT-B/16 while matching accuracy. Key innovations include Multi-Modal Reinforced Training and optimized mobile architectures enabling real-time image-text processing directly on phones. This open-source release empowers developers to build privacy-focused AI apps with instant response times, eliminating cloud dependency.
World’s First Native 3D World Model Tops Rankings
Tencent’s HunyuanWorld-Voyager breaks new ground as the industry’s first world model supporting native 3D reconstruction and ultra-long scene navigation. Now open-source, it tops Stanford’s WorldScore benchmark, enabling real-time RGB-D video generation with spatial consistency. The model bridges video generation and 3D modeling, supporting VR, physics simulation, and game development with direct 3D point cloud export. Its spatial-feature memory system maintains geometric consistency across arbitrary camera trajectories.
StepFun Releases SOTA Open-Source Speech AI Model
StepFun’s Step-Audio 2 mini achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, surpassing GPT-4o Audio in most tasks. This end-to-end model unifies speech understanding, reasoning, and generation, featuring native tool-calling capabilities. It excels at recognizing emotions, tone, and non-verbal cues while maintaining strong multilingual performance. Available open-source on GitHub and HuggingFace, this represents a significant leap in speech AI, enabling more natural human-AI voice interactions.
Helix Masters Dishwasher Loading with Same AI Model
Figure’s Helix VLA model now loads dishwashers using the same architecture that previously folded laundry and sorted packages—no new algorithms, just new data. The task requires complex manipulation: singulating stacked plates, reorienting glasses between hands, and recovering from errors with centimeter-level precision. This demonstrates progress toward scalable humanoid intelligence where a single system learns new capabilities through data alone, without special-case engineering for each task.