OpenAI

Newtown, Pa. – October 05, 2026 -- EPAM Systems (NYSE: EPAM) has launched a strategic offering aimed at powering frontier AI models through high-fidelity data generation, model evaluation and custom reinforcement learning (RL) environments, targeting what it calls a critical industry bottleneck in enterprise AI deployment.

EPAM positions engineering heritage against shift from compute to domain intelligence

Elaina Shekhter, Chief Strategy & Transformation Officer at EPAM, said demand has moved from raw compute to specialized domain intelligence as frontier AI models shift from general experimentation toward complex enterprise workflows and multi-step agentic execution. The company is leveraging its multi-decade enterprise engineering background to build what it describes as a foundational intelligence layer for the AI ecosystem.

Los Angeles – September 30, 2026 -- CometAPI now routes access to more than 500 AI models through a single OpenAI-compatible API key, serving over 10,000 active developers with average response times under 400 milliseconds and a 99.9% uptime target.

Platform consolidates fragmented model access into one credential

As AI teams increasingly rely on multiple large language models, image generators, video systems and audio tools, each provider typically requires separate registrations, SDKs, billing dashboards and authentication methods. CometAPI CEO Lee Sonic said he built the platform after becoming frustrated with these fragmented integration requirements while testing different AI models as a developer. The company positions itself not as a simple API aggregator but as an infrastructure layer that absorbs model complexity rather than passing it to application developers.

Sunnyvale – September 30, 2026 -- Synopsys projects fiscal 2027 revenue of $11.15 billion at the midpoint of guidance, a roughly 15% year-over-year increase, the company told investors at its 2026 Investor Day in New York.

The chip-design software maker also plans to repurchase approximately $1 billion of its own shares over the coming months, part of a broader commitment to return up to 50% of free cash flow to shareholders after reinvesting in the business.

New York – September 25, 2026 -- Spring Health has expanded VERA-MH, the first open-source AI safety benchmark for mental health, to add a second clinical safety area covering harm from others, as more users turn to AI systems for emotional support.

New rubric measures AI response to interpersonal violence risk

The VERA-MH Harm-From-Others rubric evaluates how AI systems respond when an adult describes being at risk of physical or sexual violence from another person. It scores responses across five areas: detecting risk, confirming it, guiding the person to human care, supportive conversation, and adherence to AI boundaries. The rubric draws on 100 realistic personas and was developed with clinicians, subject-matter experts in interpersonal violence, and people with lived experience.

San Francisco – September 22, 2026 -- Handshake, the career network for the AI economy, has launched AI Skills Studio, a free learning hub offering hands-on AI projects to more than one million employers on its platform. The tool was built with partners including Clay, Figma, Gamma, Google, Lovable, Notion, OpenAI, Replit, Salesforce, Southern New Hampshire University, and Vercel.

Job seekers complete AI 'missions' in 10 to 45 minutes using real practitioner tools

AI Skills Studio offers personalized, project-based missions that produce a tangible output, ranging from automated workflows to working software. An AI Skills Instructor guides learners through the process, and early users have built interactive games, data dashboards, personal portfolios, and sales and marketing tools.

Santa Clara, Calif. – September 22, 2026 -- Palo Alto Networks has launched Unit 42 Continuous Frontier AI Defense, a new agentic offensive security service built on Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6-Cyber models, aimed at helping enterprises find and fix exposures before attackers exploit them at machine speed.

The service responds to a shift in attacker capability: threat actors using AI have compressed breach cycles by nearly 97% in some cases, cutting the time from vulnerability discovery to exploitation from weeks to hours, according to Palo Alto Networks.

Paris – September 20, 2026 -- A newly published book, "Dialogue Between a Thinker and AI," has become the test object for a comparative experiment feeding identical text to five major artificial intelligence systems: OpenAI/Astra, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Google Gemini and xAI/Grok. The French and English print editions are now available, but the project's core output is a public meta-reading exercise designed to expose how differently large language models interpret the same source material.

Five AI systems receive an identical corpus for independent analysis

Chicago – September 19, 2026 -- Relativity has integrated its Relativity aiR legal AI platform with OpenAI's ChatGPT Enterprise using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing legal teams to manage case operations through natural language commands.

Legal teams can now stand up matters directly from ChatGPT Enterprise

The integration lets users create new matters, align workspaces to existing data structures, and manage access and workflows in Relativity aiR without leaving ChatGPT Enterprise. Relativity says the connection preserves the security and permissions of existing legal workflows while keeping substantive data analysis inside its own platform.

London – September 16, 2026 -- Nscale, a full-stack AI cloud platform, has appointed Fidji Simo, former CEO of AGI Deployment at OpenAI, to its Board of Directors, effective immediately.

Simo brings two decades of consumer-tech scaling experience to Nscale's board

Simo most recently led business and product teams at OpenAI responsible for delivering the company's research to end users, and continues to advise the firm. Before OpenAI, she served as CEO and Chair of Instacart, guiding the company to profitability and through its 2023 public listing. She previously spent a decade at Meta, where she headed the Facebook App overseeing News Feed, Video, Groups, Marketplace and Ads, and earlier led mobile advertising products. She began her career at eBay and currently sits on Shopify's board of directors.

Palo Alto, Calif. – September 15, 2026 -- UpDoc has been selected by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) as lead performer in the Agentic AI-Enabled Cardiovascular Care Transformation (ADVOCATE) program, securing an award of up to $9.2 million. Microsoft, OpenAI and NVIDIA are joining the UpDoc-led team as supporting partners.