Skip to content
Source · Daily Brief

AI Daily Brief — 4 February 2026

Wednesday is a heavy money day. ElevenLabs closes a $500M Series D at an $11B valuation (3× year-on-year, Sequoia-led, $330M+ 2025 ARR). Bedrock Robotics raises $270M Series B at $1.75B for autonomous construction, co-led by CapitalG and Valor Atreides. OpenAI quietly restores GPT-5.2 Thinking’s Extended depth after an inadvertent January reduction. Pre-launch coverage of Claude Opus 4.6 — Anthropic’s first Opus-class model with 1M-token context and new “agent teams” — sets the stage for Thursday.

Top stories

  • ElevenLabs — $500M Series D at $11B. Sequoia leads (Andrew Reed joins the board); a16z quadruples down, ICONIQ triples down; Lightspeed, BOND, and Evantic join as new investors. 2025 ARR exceeds $330M. Funds aimed at the ElevenAgents enterprise voice / conversational-AI platform. via ElevenLabs
  • Bedrock Robotics — $270M Series B for autonomous construction. SF-based, ex-Waymo team. Co-leads CapitalG and Valor Atreides AI Fund, with NVentures (NVIDIA), 8VC, Eclipse, Emergence and Xora. Valuation $1.75B; total funding past $350M. Targeting first fully operator-less excavator deployments in 2026. via Bedrock Robotics
  • OpenAI restores Extended thinking for GPT-5.2. Yesterday’s release note ships a follow-up: OpenAI rolls back an inadvertent January reduction in the Extended thinking-time setting on GPT-5.2 Thinking, returning it to its prior depth so users can again allocate more compute to hard problems. Standard / Light tiers stay where the January tuning left them. via OpenAI
  • Anthropic — Claude Opus 4.6 on deck. Pre-launch coverage circulates ahead of Thursday’s release: first Opus-class model with 1M-token context (beta), new “agent teams” that split larger tasks into segmented jobs, top of the Finance Agent benchmark, same pricing as Opus 4.5 ($5 / $25 per M tokens). Day-zero availability on claude.ai, the API, Bedrock, Vertex AI and Foundry. via TechCrunch

Policy & safety

The International AI Safety Report 2026, published Tuesday, dominates Wednesday’s policy-press digest. The report’s headline finding: Frontier AI Safety Frameworks have more than doubled since 2025, but sophisticated attackers can still bypass current defences. Pre-summit positioning ramps toward the India AI Impact Summit (16-21 February, Bharat Mandapam, Delhi) — the first AI summit hosted by a Global South nation, anchored on People / Planet / Progress “Sutras,” and on track to draw a 92-country Declaration and the New Delhi Frontier AI Impact Commitments from 13 frontier model developers. via International AI Safety Report

Money & infra

Tuesday’s Cerebras $1B Series H at ~$23B post-money keeps trending into Wednesday’s infra coverage. With ElevenLabs, Bedrock and the Cerebras news in the same 48-hour window, February 2026 is on track for what Crunchbase will eventually log as the largest global venture-funding month on record at $189B, with AI taking ~90%.

Quiet corners

No first-party shipping from Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Microsoft AI, xAI or Thinking Machines Lab. Chinese labs (DeepSeek, Qwen, Moonshot, Zhipu, Tencent) continue the pre-Lunar New Year hold; the wave of Chinese model launches is queued for the 16-17 February window.

By the numbers

  • ElevenLabs: $500M Series D · $11B valuation (3× YoY) · $330M+ 2025 ARR
  • Bedrock Robotics: $270M Series B · $1.75B valuation · total funding >$350M
  • Claude Opus 4.6 on deck: 1M tokens (beta) · agent teams · $5 / $25 per M tokens · day-zero on Bedrock, Vertex AI, Foundry
  • India AI Impact Summit: 16-21 February · Bharat Mandapam Delhi · 92-country Declaration target

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from publicly reported announcements on 4 February 2026.