It was a monster week for U.S. startup funding, with four companies each raising $1 billion or more. Elon Musk's tunnel-drilling company The Boring Co. led with a $3 billion Series D, followed by AI coding startup Cognition at $2 billion. Joining them near the top was fleet management software provider Motive, which landed $1.3 billion, while reusable rocket developer Stoke Space raised another $1 billion. 1. The Boring Co., $3B, transportation and infrastructure: Musk's Bastrop, Texas-based tunneling company raised a $3 billion Series D led by the United Arab Emirates, with participation from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Valor Equity Partners. The company is developing underground tunnel networks designed to move passengers and vehicles while reducing surface traffic, and already operates its Vegas Loop system beneath Las Vegas. The latest deal values it at $23 billion and brings its total funding to nearly $3.9 billion, per Crunchbase. 2. Cognition, $2B, artificial intelligence: San Francisco-based Cognition raised a $2 billion Series E led by Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Avenir, Founders Fund and General Catalyst. The company is best known for Devin, its autonomous software-engineering agent, and is part of a highly funded crop of startups betting AI agents will take over increasingly complex coding and development work. Cognition has raised nearly $3.9 billion to date and was valued at $48 billion in the latest round, our data shows....

This summer, the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing welcomed faculty from colleges and universities across Greater Boston, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Texas to campus for the inaugural AI Educators Pilot, a weeklong workshop aimed at expanding how artificial intelligence is taught across disciplines and learning environments. Inspired by MIT class C01/C51 (Modeling with Machine Learning), a course developed through the Common Ground for computing and AI education that focuses on helping students understand and apply foundational AI and machine learning concepts to problem-solving in their own disciplines, the workshop gave educators an opportunity to explore how its materials and teaching methods could be adapted for their classrooms. 'The broader goal is to expand AI education to more students by investing in training for instructors,' says Dan Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)....

' Hey, Linas here! Every day, I break down 3 stories shaping the future of FinTech & Artificial Intelligence - plus the money movements and trends worth tracking. First time here' 400k+ FinTech and AI leaders get this daily. Join them: Of course, we cannot really take this seriously, because it's like an oil CEO announcing that they've just discovered driving '. Researchers, commentators, and analysts also pushed back within hours, and this claim probably won't last until the next news cycle. The more useful number arrived three days earlier: in its September 3 evaluation, Artificial Analysis found Astra matched Claude Fable 5's score on its Coding Agent Index at less than half the cost per task. That cost result lands directly in a market Anthropic has dominated for quite some time. By the end of 2025, Menlo Ventures estimated Anthropic held 54% of enterprise coding against OpenAI's 21%, up from 42% six months earlier on the strength of Claude Code, and coding is arguably the largest category of enterprise AI application spending....

For the fifth year in a row, MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) have assembled an international panel of AI experts that includes academics and practitioners to help us understand how responsible artificial intelligence is being implemented across organizations worldwide. In previous posts this year, we have explored artificial intelligence's impact on the workforce, including why responsible AI requires more than training human experts to verify AI outputs. This time, we asked our panel to react to the following provocation: Responsible governance that treats agents as autonomous decision makers will fail. On the surface, there is broad consensus, with a clear majority (72%) of our panelists agreeing or strongly agreeing with the statement. But digging deeper reveals a more nuanced conversation about what autonomy means, the relationship between autonomy and accountability, and what's at risk when characterizing agents as 'autonomous.' The picture that emerges: Calling agents autonomous decision makers risks allowing the humans and institutions behind them to evade responsibility for their actions. Effective governance, by contrast, ties every consequential decision back to a responsible party that can be held legally and morally accountable, in the context of a broader sociotechnical system....