OpenAI Expands into Software, Science, and Finance as AI Funding Soars

OpenAI expanded into software control, scientific reasoning, and financial services this week, while investors committed billions to AI companies and researchers issued public safety warnings. The company unveiled GPT-6 Astra for navigating software and solving scientific problems, plus a ChatGPT for financial services developed with Morgan Stanley and Evercore. OpenAI also claimed a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem using 10,000 AI agents, though outside researchers questioned the claim's originality. Global AI funding jumped from $56 billion in Q4 2025 to $242 billion in Q1 2026, with major rounds for Mistral, Harvey, and Positron, and NVIDIA's nearly $13 billion Hugging Face acquisition. Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned with warnings about recursive self-improvement, while genomics projects from DeepMind and others showed positive AI applications.