AI Daily Brief — 31 January 2026

The month closes with monthly roundups. The consolidated themes: hyperscaler silicon — Maia 200 — chipping at NVIDIA dependence; Chinese open-source momentum across Kimi K2.5, Step 3.5 Flash, Qwen 3 Max and GLM-4.7-Flash; the Anthropic financial-and-ethical optics swing (revenue forecast up 20% to $18B, Project Panama exposed); the xAI media-generation push (Grok Imagine API at #1 on Artificial Analysis Video Arena); and mega infrastructure investments (NVIDIA × CoreWeave $2B, Humans& $480M seed).

January 2026 wrap

• Frontier & open-weight launches: Zhipu HK IPO (Jan 8) · Z.ai GLM-4.7-Flash (Jan 19) · Baidu ERNIE 5.0 (Jan 22) · Alibaba Qwen 3 Max Thinking (Jan 23) · Moonshot Kimi K2.5 with Agent Swarm (Jan 27) · StepFun Step 3.5 Flash (Jan 29)
• Infrastructure & chips: NVIDIA Vera Rubin in production at CES (Jan 5) · NVIDIA Alpamayo + Cosmos Reason 2 + Isaac GR00T N1.6 (Jan 5) · Microsoft Maia 200 (Jan 26) · NVIDIA × CoreWeave $2B (Jan 26)
• Enterprise + commerce: Google Universal Commerce Protocol + Pichai NRF keynote (Jan 11) · Anthropic Claude for Healthcare (Jan 11) · IBM Enterprise Advantage (Jan 19) · Mastercard Agent Pay × Microsoft + OpenAI (Jan 23) · Google Gemini 3 default in AI Overviews (Jan 30)
• Funding: Anthropic 2026 revenue forecast raised to $18B (Jan 27) · Humans& $480M seed at $4.48B (Jan 26) · Synthesia $200M Series E at $4B (Jan 26) · Torq $140M Series D at $1.2B (Jan 12) · NVIDIA × Eli Lilly $1B AI drug-discovery lab (Jan 12)
• Policy & ethics: California SB 53 in force (Jan 1) · Stanford copyrighted-books study (Jan 16) · Anthropic Project Panama (Jan 27) · Amazon ~16K + Dow ~4.5K layoffs (Jan 29)

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from publicly reported announcements on 31 January 2026.