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AI Daily Brief — 2 July 2025

An OpenAI-vs-Robinhood Wednesday. OpenAI issued a public statement disowning Robinhood’s tokenized “OpenAI shares” for EU retail investors. Perplexity opened a premium-subscription front with a $200/month Max tier. xAI closed ~$10B at a ~$200B valuation. Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl from the previous day continued reshaping AI-vs-publisher economics.

Top stories

  • OpenAI publicly disowns Robinhood’s “OpenAI tokens”. OpenAI: “These OpenAI tokens are not OpenAI equity. We did not partner with Robinhood, were not involved in this, and do not endorse it.” Statement responded to Robinhood’s EU launch of tokenized OpenAI/SpaceX exposure and warned any equity transfer requires OpenAI’s approval, which it did not grant. via TechCrunch
  • CNBC: Robinhood tokens aren’t equity, says OpenAI. The tokenized shares Robinhood is offering EU retail investors via an SPV are not the same as direct OpenAI equity, escalating tension between OpenAI and Robinhood after the brokerage’s EU “OpenAI/SpaceX token” giveaway. via CNBC
  • Perplexity launches $200/month Max subscription. Joining a wave of premium AI subscriptions matching ChatGPT Pro, Claude Max and Cursor’s top tier. Max includes unlimited Labs queries on top of the existing $20 Pro and $40/user Enterprise Pro plans. via SiliconANGLE
  • xAI closes ~$10B at ~$200B valuation. Morgan Stanley confirmed Musk’s xAI had closed $10B of new financing — $5B in strategic equity plus $5B in term loans and secured notes — pushing valuation toward $200B and feeding the Memphis Colossus 2 supercomputer expansion ahead of the Grok 4 launch. via MLQ.ai
  • Cloudflare Pay Per Crawl marketplace live. The permission-by-default regime for AI crawlers announced July 1 continued dominating cycles as publishers and AI labs assessed the new “Allow / Charge / Block” marketplace across roughly 20% of the web. via Cloudflare

Who shipped

OpenAI shipped a press release, not a model. Perplexity shipped a price tier. xAI shipped capital. Robinhood‘s CEO Tenev defended the SPV-backed wrapper as legitimate indirect exposure.

Open-source pulse

Hugging Face Daily Papers showed strong velocity on July 2 — top paper landed 133 upvotes. A community write-up the same day catalogued four trends as the new battleground: RL, efficiency, agents and data. via Hugging Face

Money, infra & hardware

Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry rolled out Deep Research (o3-deep-research) preview, GPT-image-1 with input-fidelity and partial-streaming controls, Prompt Shields GA, Entra Agent ID, and Purview integration. via Microsoft Foundry blog Levelpath raised $55M Series B led by Battery Ventures for agentic procurement.

Quiet corners

Frontier labs (Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Mistral, DeepSeek) were largely quiet. EU AI Act GPAI Code of Practice publication was set for July 10 as the final pre-deadline sprint before August 2 obligations.

By the numbers

  • $200/month — Perplexity Max tier price
  • $10B / ~$200B — xAI raise and valuation
  • $5B + $5B — xAI equity / debt split
  • 20% — share of web Cloudflare flipped to block AI crawlers by default
  • $55M — Levelpath Series B

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 2 July 2025.