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ALETH / AI-BRIEF / 2026-01-17 / APPLE PICKS GEMINI TO UNDERPIN SIRI

Apple picks Gemini to underpin Siri

Also this week: Washington eases H200 licensing as Beijing restricts purchases, Taiwanese firms commit $250bn to US capacity & OpenAI tests ads in ChatGPT.

The Aleth Briefs trace each story to its original source and show how the week unfolded.

The week in five lines:

Browse by day:

Weekend (10-11 January)

Indonesia became the first country to block Grok, Malaysia followed a day later.

Indonesia cut access on Saturday over the risk of AI-generated sexual images, with a minister calling deepfakes “a serious violation of human rights, dignity, and the security of citizens in the digital space“. Malaysia imposed its own block on Sunday.

Anthropic launched Claude for Healthcare.

The release lets healthcare organisations run Claude on protected health information, with connectors into the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) coverage database for prior-authorisation and coding work, alongside an expansion of its life science products. It follows OpenAI’s healthcare push last week.

Monday 12 January

Apple picked Google’s Gemini to power a rebuilt Siri.

Apple and Google entered a multi-year collaboration for the next generation of Apple Foundation Models, which will be based on Gemini models and Google Cloud, helping power a more personalised Siri this year. The deal answers the long-running question of which external model provider Apple would use for Siri, while giving Google a major role in the AI infrastructure behind Apple’s default assistant.

Nvidia and Eli Lilly committed up to $1bn over five years to a new San Francisco Bay Area AI lab focused on drug discovery.

The facility will bring Lilly biologists and chemists together with Nvidia researchers working on its BioNeMo platform, marking an unusually direct move by a chipmaker into pharmaceutical R&D. Work is due to begin this year.

The UK’s Ofcom opened an Online Safety Act investigation into X, and the government moved to criminalise creating non-consensual intimate images.

Ofcom is examining if X breached its duties by running a tool capable of generating image-based abuse and child sexual abuse material. Separately, science secretary Liz Kendall told the Commons the offence of creating such images, under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, would be brought into force under the Online Safety Act.

Anthropic opened a research preview of Cowork, extending its Claude Code agent from the terminal to general knowledge work.

Cowork gives Claude access to local files and lets it carry out multi-step tasks through the desktop app, moving the agent beyond coding into broader office and research workflows. Its main unresolved risk is prompt injection, where malicious instructions embedded in documents or other content could influence the agent’s actions.

Tuesday 13 January

The US eased H200 export licensing as Beijing reportedly restricted purchases.

The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) shifted H200 chip exports from denial to case-by-case review, on conditions that include independent security testing of each shipment and proof the sale will not cut US supply. Beijing pushed the other way: sources said China told domestic firms to buy the H200 only in special circumstances.

The US Senate passed the DEFIANCE Act, giving deepfake victims a right to sue.

Passed by unanimous consent, the bill lets people sue those who create or distribute non-consensual sexually explicit forgeries, with damages of up to $250,000. It moved amid the furore over images generated with Grok and now goes to the House.

Anthropic expanded Labs into an incubator for experimental products at the frontier of Claude’s capabilities.

The team will prototype new ways of using rapidly improving models, test rough products with early users and pass successful ideas to Anthropic’s main Product organisation to scale. Anthropic says the same approach previously produced Claude Code, MCP, Skills, Claude in Chrome and Cowork.

AI chip startup Etched reported to raise $500m at $5bn valuation led by Stripes.

Etched develops transformer-specific chips designed to outperform general-purpose GPUs on a defined class of AI workloads. Peter Thiel and Ribbit Capital also reportedly participated, taking total funding close to $1bn. Etched has not confirmed the round.

Google released MedGemma 1.5, an open-weights medical model that reads 3D CT and MRI scans, alongside the MedASR speech model.

The 4bn-parameter model extends earlier 2D image work to volumetric scans and histopathology, published on Hugging Face/Vertex AI. Google reports MedASR making 82% less errors than OpenAI’s Whisper large-v3 on general medical dictation.

US defence secretary Pete Hegseth said Grok will be given access to classified Pentagon networks this month.

Putting a commercial frontier model into classified US defence systems would extend the Pentagon’s AI push into sensitive operational infrastructure, raising questions around security, procurement and dependence on private vendors.

Wednesday 14 January

Z.ai released GLM-Image, an image-generation model trained on Huawei chips.

The roughly 16bn-parameter model combines an autoregressive generator with a diffusion decoder, and Z.ai released its weights publicly. The company says GLM-Image was trained entirely on domestic Huawei hardware, making it a notable test of how far Chinese AI developers can reduce their dependence on Nvidia.

OpenAI and Cerebras signed a multi-year agreement to deploy 750 MW of Cerebras systems for OpenAI customers, beginning in 2026.

The deal gives the wafer-scale chipmaker an anchor customer at unprecedented scale and is focused on inference rather than model training. OpenAI is diversifying the hardware used to serve its models, and Cerebras has won a major role in inference by offering an architecture fundamentally different from Nvidia GPUs. According to Cerebras, this will become the world’s largest high-speed AI inference installation.

Skild AI raised $1.4bn at a valuation above $14bn, led by SoftBank.

NVentures, Macquarie and Bezos Expeditions joined the round with existing investors Lightspeed, Coatue and Sequoia. Skild is developing a general-purpose robotics foundation model, the Skild Brain, designed to work across different robot types and tasks rather than being built for a single machine. The company will use the new capital to expand training data, foundational research and real-world deployments.

Three senior Thinking Machines researchers returned to OpenAI, including co-founder Barret Zoph.

Zoph, fellow co-founder Luke Metz and researcher Sam Schoenholz left Mira Murati’s heavily funded AI startup less than a year after its launch. Thinking Machines raised $2bn at a $12bn valuation in July 2025 and released its first product, the model fine-tuning platform Tinker, in October. The departures followed co-founder Andrew Tulloch’s move to Meta and represented a significant early loss of technical talent.

Thursday 15 January

Qatar and UAE join US-led Pax Silica technology pact.

Qatar and the UAE joined the US-led Pax Silica initiative during the week, signing on Monday and Wednesday respectively. The non-binding pact aims to strengthen AI, semiconductor and other critical technology supply chains among aligned countries, bringing two major Gulf investors and data-centre markets into the US-led framework.

The US and Taiwan struck a deal committing $250bn to US chip plants.

The Commerce Department said Taiwanese chip and technology firms would make at least $250bn of direct investment in US semiconductor, energy and AI capacity, backed by a further $250bn in credit guarantees, in exchange for reciprocal tariffs capped at 15%. The commitment covers semiconductor, energy and AI capacity.

TSMC reported record Q4 net income of NT$506bn, up 35% on AI chip demand.

The foundry’s highest-ever quarterly profit and an eighth straight quarter of growth, came on revenue up 20.5% YoY, with 7nm-and-below nodes at 77% of wafer sales. TSMC guided Q1 2026 revenue to $34.6-$35.8bn, with FY2026 capex $52-$56bn.

AWS launched its European Sovereign Cloud, opening in Brandenburg with more than €7.8bn of planned German investment

The structure uses dedicated European governance, a new parent company with three German subsidiaries, EU-resident operations and controls designed to keep data and control within the EU.

Friday 16 January

OpenAI will test ads inside ChatGPT.

Arriving alongside the rollout of an $8-a-month ChatGPT Go tier, OpenAI will place sponsored results below replies for free- and Go-tier users in the US, matched to conversation topics, while pledging not to sell user data or expose chats to advertisers.

Micron broke ground in New York on what it says will be the largest semiconductor facility in the US.

The Clay megafab, first announced in 2022, is expected to involve up to $100bn of investment over two decades, moving a long-promised US memory project from announcement to construction as demand tightens across AI systems.

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