Proximal Hits $200M Revenue in 10 Months on AI Data Demand

Snorkel AI, a seven-year-old startup focused on data-as-a-service for AI training, raised $350 million in Series E funding, tripling its valuation to $3.5 billion. The funding reflects surging demand for high-quality training data as AI model development accelerates. The capital will support expansion of Snorkel's platform for generating and managing labeled datasets.

China's internet regulator is investigating DeepSeek and Moonshot AI following allegations by Anthropic that both companies routed sensitive user data to Claude models without authorization. Anthropic published a 154-page report on September 10 detailing how seven Chinese companies were using Claude illicitly at scale, including an example where DeepSeek relayed requests from engineers building a police surveillance system to Claude. The investigation marks a significant escalation in scrutiny of data practices among Chinese AI firms and raises questions about the security of proprietary AI systems.

Alibaba unveiled the Zhenwu V900, a new AI chip for model training and inference, at its annual Apsara conference on Tuesday. The chip delivers three times the performance of its predecessor, demonstrating progress in China's domestic semiconductor capabilities. The announcement was accompanied by a data center expansion plan, though specific details on scale and investment were not fully disclosed.

The United Nations has partnered with Google to restructure its global development data for use by AI agents, following a UNICEF assessment that found leading AI models struggled to accurately retrieve global development statistics. The initiative addresses a critical gap where AI systems cannot reliably access or interpret UN data at scale. This partnership aims to make UN datasets machine-readable and optimized for AI-driven queries and analysis.