According to insiders, the board of OpenAI has approached Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, a major language model developer and competitor, regarding the possibility of a merger between the two companies. Last Friday, OpenAI's board fired CEO Sam Altman, as part of their efforts to convince Amodei to take over as CEO. It is unclear if the merger proposal has sparked serious discussions. Due to his position at Anthropic, Amodei quickly declined the invitation to become CEO of OpenAI. (The Information)

Google is increasing its investment in Anthropic, the creators of Claude AI, with a $2 billion commitment. The investment will be made in two payments of $500 million and another of $1.5 billion. This is a significant increase from the $400 million Google invested in Anthropic in February. Amazon has also committed to investing $4 billion in Anthropic. The investment is part of the ongoing AI arms race between Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.

Universal Music Group (UMG) is leading a lawsuit against AI developer Anthropic for unauthorized use of its music to train AI models, seeking $75 million in damages. Other publishers, including Concord Music Group and Worship Together Music, are also joining the lawsuit. The publishers accuse Anthropic of feeding the songs of artists they represent into its AI models dataset without permission, violating established copyright laws. The lawsuit demands that Anthropic pay the publisher's legal fees, destroy all infringing material, and disclose how its AI model was trained, among other penalties.