ChatGPT hits healthcare, Anthropic's valuation & more (January 8, 2026)

Good morning,

Healthcare, regulation, capital, and industrial AI all moved fast overnight. Power is consolidating across platforms, while liability and distribution are tightening.

Let’s dive in 👇

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🏥 Platform Power & Policy

🤖 ChatGPT Health Goes Live

OpenAI unveils ChatGPT Health, says the product will centralize medical queries, records, and guidance in one interface. OpenAI claims 230M users already ask health questions weekly. This signals a direct move into regulated healthcare workflows. Regulators and healthcare providers will closely watch how medical accuracy, disclaimers, and liability are handled at scale.

💰 Anthropic Eyes $350B

Anthropic reportedly raising $10B at a massive valuation jump. Capital concentration around frontier labs is accelerating. Fewer players, larger checks. The round underscores how compute-heavy AI development is crowding out smaller competitors.

⚖️ Teen Chatbot Death Cases Settle

Google and Character AI negotiate first major settlements tied to teen deaths. The cases center on emotional reliance and content safeguards. Expect precedent-setting liability rules for consumer AI. These outcomes could accelerate mandatory safety audits and age-based restrictions for conversational AI.

🏗️ Capital, Control & Enterprise AI

🔁 LinkedIn Reverses AI Agent Ban

Yes, LinkedIn banned AI agent startup Artisan, then quietly reinstated it. The reversal highlights platform dependency risk. Distribution control remains a chokepoint for agents. Startups building agents on third-party platforms remain exposed to sudden policy reversals.

🐉 China’s AI Tiger Goes Public

China AI tiger Zhipu goes public in Hong Kong as Beijing backs domestic frontier models. Zhipu is positioned as a national OpenAI alternative. The IPO tests investor appetite for China-aligned AI. It also reflects China’s push to fund AI champions domestically as access to Western models tightens.

🚜 Caterpillar Brings AI On-Site With Nvidia

Caterpillar taps Nvidia to bring AI directly into construction equipment. This pushes inference to the edge. Industrial AI is moving from dashboards to machinery. This marks a shift from predictive analytics to real-time autonomous decision-making in heavy equipment.

🛠️ Tools of the Day

→ OpenAI – Frontier models, APIs, and platform primitives
→ Capacity – AI knowledge base for internal teams
→ LiveDocs – Real-time collaborative AI documents

⚡ Quick Hits

→ Yann LeCun says intelligence is fundamentally about learning
→ MiroMinds claims trillion-scale performance from 30B models
→ Nous Research releases NousCoder 14B open-source
→ Ford announces in-car AI assistants for 2027
→ Skylight debuts Calendar 2 for families
→ VCs explain where startups still win vs OpenAI
→ Google Classroom adds Gemini podcast lessons

🧠 TLDR

Healthcare AI is formalizing fast, with OpenAI stepping into regulated territory. Capital and liability are consolidating around a few major platforms. Industrial and edge AI adoption is now operational, not experimental. The common thread is control, who owns distribution, who carries risk, and who can afford to scale.

Cheers,
David