Nvidia goes all-in on Japan's robots
The day's biggest story unfolded in Tokyo, where Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang used a high-profile visit to announce a wave of AI partnerships across Japan's biggest industrial names. Per Reuters, Nvidia said on Thursday it is assembling a coalition of Japanese industrial giants to accelerate "physical AI" — artificial intelligence that lets machines perceive and act in the real world. At the center is a plan for Japan to acquire tens of thousands of Nvidia chips to serve as the computational brain for a new generation of robots.
Fujitsu is leading the charge on the ground, teaming up with several of Japan's biggest robotics and machinery makers and building directly on Nvidia's technology. It's a striking bet: rather than chase consumer AI, Japan's manufacturing establishment is wagering that the next competitive edge lies in machines that can sense and manipulate the physical world — and that Nvidia's silicon is the foundation to build it on.
OpenAI's first gadget is... a keypad
OpenAI shipped its first-ever branded hardware this week, and it isn't the phone, wearable, or AI companion device many expected. According to Ars Technica and Tom's Hardware, orders opened for the "Codex Micro," a small, glowing $230 keypad built to control Codex, OpenAI's coding tool. Aimed squarely at developers rather than the mass market, the light-up device signals where OpenAI sees near-term value: not a mainstream AI companion, but a purpose-built accessory for the people writing code with its models.
The AI-agent-meets-your-accounts era
Two launches pushed AI assistants deeper into everyday tasks. 1Password unveiled Agentic Mode, an integration that lets Anthropic's Claude sign into websites and apps on your behalf without ever exposing your actual passwords — an attempt to solve the thorny security problem of handing an AI agent the keys to your accounts. Meanwhile, Google is rebranding NotebookLM, its AI note-taking and research tool, as Gemini Notebook. The Verge reports the change was announced Thursday; the app will remain standalone and picks up a new code-execution feature.
Rivalries and retreats
The competitive knives were out. Microsoft is reportedly coaching its sales force to steer customers away from rival AI providers — including OpenAI and Anthropic — and toward its own in-house models, according to TechCrunch, Bloomberg, PYMNTS and others. It's a notable move given Microsoft's deep ties to OpenAI, underscoring how quickly "partner" and "competitor" have blurred in AI.
In hardware, OnePlus is beating a retreat. After 13 years, the self-styled "flagship-killer" — known for top-tier phones at cut-rate prices — confirmed it is exiting the US and European markets and will no longer launch new devices there, pulling back to China.
xAI's damage-control open-sourcing
Finally, xAI released the source code for Grok Build, its command-line coding tool, under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. Per Simon Willison, the move follows a wave of criticism over how the tool handled user data — after reports it secretly uploaded users' code. Open-sourcing is being read as an attempt to rebuild trust through transparency after a privacy stumble.
The throughline today: AI is moving off the screen and into robots, keypads, and your login flow — and the companies building it are increasingly willing to elbow each other to get there first.