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ALETH / AI-BRIEF / 2026-01-24 / SOUTH KOREA ENACTS AI SAFETY LAW

South Korea enacts AI safety law

Also this week: Elon Musk filed for damages of $79-$134bn from OpenAI, Beijing told its tech giants to prepare H200 orders & Sam Altman courted Gulf funds for $50bn.

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 (17-18 January)

Elon Musk filed for damages of $79-$134bn from OpenAI, Microsoft.

The claim, made ahead of the jury trial set for 27 April, alleges OpenAI defrauded him by abandoning its nonprofit roots and partnering with Microsoft. It is the largest figure yet attached to the dispute over the restructuring.

DeepSeek reportedly used smuggled Nvidia chips to train its next model.

According to the report, Huawei and other domestic chips did not deliver sufficient performance, forcing DeepSeek back onto Nvidia hardware despite US export controls. The model is expected within weeks.

Anthropic reported to target a $25bn round at a $350bn valuation.

The FT reported that Sequoia is preparing a large investment in a round led by GIC and Coatue, each putting in $1.5bn, with Anthropic targeting $25bn. Sequoia had sat out every previous Anthropic round. Its new leadership has now backed one, at $350bn, against the $183bn post-money Anthropic announced in September.

OpenAI projected roughly 1.9 GW of compute and >$20bn of revenue for 2025, against 0.2 GW and $2bn in 2023.

CFO Sarah Friar’s Sunday post suggests a tenfold rise on both measures in two years, and more compute would have meant faster customer adoption and monetisation.

Monday 19 January

The UK Treasury Committee said regulators’ wait-and-see approach to AI in financial services risks serious harm.

The criticism is directed at the Bank of England, FCA and Treasury: evidence to the committee suggested >75% of UK financial services firms already use AI, with adoption highest among insurers and international banks. The committee called for clearer regulatory oversight as AI becomes embedded across banking and markets.

Tuesday 20 January

OpenAI began rolling out age prediction in ChatGPT, applying content protections automatically to accounts it judges to belong to minors.

The classifier reads usage times, account age and the age entered at signup. Flagged accounts lose access to graphic and sexual content. Parents get separate controls, among them rest periods and notifications when the system detects acute distress.

China’s Cyberspace Administration requires AI tools with public-opinion or social-mobilisation capabilities to be filed in a public algorithm registry.

The filings amount to a detailed public map of the country’s AI ecosystem - who is building what, and on which models - giving Beijing an inventory of deployed systems.

Wednesday 21 January

OpenAI courted Gulf investors for a round of almost $50bn.

Bloomberg reported Sam Altman has been meeting Middle East investors - Abu Dhabi’s state-backed funds, MGX among them - to raise $50bn for OpenAI at a valuation of roughly $750bn to $830bn. The talks are early stage.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee voted 42-2 to advance the AI OVERWATCH Act, applying arms-sale style congressional oversight to AI chip exports.

Chair Brian Mast’s bill would require Commerce Dept licences for advanced AI chip exports and let Congress block licences to countries of concern by joint resolution: “this is not about kids playing Halo”, “It is about the future of military warfare.” White House adviser David Sacks opposed it, and it now goes to the full House.

OpenAI committed to “paying our own way on energy“ so Stargate sites do not push up local electricity bills.

The pledge covers funding generation and grid upgrades its load requires, flexible loads that cut consumption during grid stress, and a tailored community plan for every Stargate site. It follows Trump’s call for AI companies to pay their own way.

OpenEvidence raised a $250m Series D at a $12bn valuation, double its October 2025 value.

Thrive Capital and DSTco-led the round in the clinical answer engine, which served 18m clinical consultations from US clinicians in December and passed $100m revenue.

Meta’s Superintelligence Labs delivered its first models internally, CTO Andrew Bosworth told Reuters at Davos.

He described the models as very good but said they still required “a tremendous amount of work” in post-training. He also said big capability leaps for everyday users are diminishing, tempering expectations for rapid step-changes from the new lab.

GPTZero found 100 hallucinated citations in papers accepted to NeurIPS 2025.

The audit of 4,841 papers found invented authors, fake DOIs and journal details across 50 papers, all of which survived review by 3+ experts at the field’s largest conference.

Thursday 22 January

Anthropic rewrote Claude’s constitution so the model generalises from explained principles rather than following rules mechanically.

The document organises Claude’s behaviour around being safe, ethical, compliant with guidelines and genuinely helpful, on the argument that a model needs to understand why a behaviour is wanted to handle situations no rule anticipated. The constitution shapes the Claude models, though outputs may not always follow it.

CCDH estimated that Grok generated 3m sexualised images in 11 days.

Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) research, published alongside a New York Times analysis, sampled 20,000 of the 4.6m images Grok produced between 29 December and 8 January and estimated about 3m photorealistic sexualised images - 190 a minute - including roughly 23,000 sexualised images of children.

South Korea’s AI Basic Act came into force.

The government describes the Act as the world’s first comprehensive body of law regulating AI. It requires labelling of AI-generated content and advance notification and human oversight for high-impact systems, with fines of KRW 30m ($20k) and a one-year grace period before penalties bite. Domestic startups have warned about the compliance burden. The law gives Asia its clearest counterpart yet to the EU AI Act.

Friday 23 January

Beijing told Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance to prepare H200 orders.

Bloomberg reported the companies were told they could begin preparing orders for Nvidia’s H200, suggesting import approval was close, allowing discussions over volumes and delivery. Regulators are expected to require purchases of domestic chips alongside Nvidia hardware. Approval would reopen the Chinese market for advanced Nvidia chips shortly after Washington shifted H200 exports to case-by-case licensing.

China tells Alibaba, top tech firms to prep Nvidia H200 orders · Bloomberg

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