OpenAI Issues Its first Certified Skills-Driven Course, 'AI Foundations'

OpenAI announced its first certified course, titled AI Foundations, as part of its OpenAI Certifications and the OpenAI Jobs Platform initiatives – the latter in collaboration with Indeed and Upwork. This course is designed to help users learn core, practical AI skills that apply across roles and industries. It intends to be a hands-on, real-world training experience in using today's AI tools. The course is available within ChatGPT, a single environment where the bot acts as a tutor, providing practice questions and a feedback loop in context. There is also a version of this class for K-12 teachers, ChatGPT Foundations for Teachers, available on Coursera. This class is designed to help educators build AI expertise and put it to work in the classroom and administrative tasks. It will be brought directly into the ChatGPT environment in early 2026. OpenAI stated that its goal is to certify 10 million Americans by 2030. The company said that AI Foundations is launching through pilot programs with firms such as Walmart, John Deere, Lowe’s, Boston Consulting Group, Hearst, Russell Reynolds Associates, Upwork, Elevance Health, Accenture, and the Office of the Governor of Delaware. "Coursera, ETS, and Credly by Pearson will help ensure our courses and certifications meet high standards for learning design, psychometric rigor, and real-world impact, allowing learners to earn high-value and portable evidence of their skill development." "We are also piloting certifications with Arizona State University and the California State University system staff, faculty, and students to create pathways for students to hone their AI skills and showcase them to employers as they enter the job market."

Google Improves with Gemini 3 Its AI-Powered Design Tool 'Stitch'

Coursera Merges with Udemy, Owning 59% of The Combined Company, Valued at $2.5B

Google Says that 1,000 U.S. Higher Ed Institutions Are Using Gemini for Education and NotebookLM

OpenAI Prioritizes Agentic Commerce, Launching More AI Tools For Shopping

OpenAI is prioritizing Agentic commerce, that is, the use of AI tools to do shopping research and make purchases on a user’s behalf. This year, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has launched integrations with apps such as Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Expedia, Figma, Spotify, and Zillow. It has also announced further partnerships with Target, Intuit, and others. With Instacart’s built-in search app, OpenAI is launching a grocery shopping experience inside of ChatGPT, allowing customers to brainstorm meal ideas, make a grocery list, and check out, all without leaving the chat interface. These agentic commerce tools can give OpenAI another way of making money, since it’ll take an undisclosed “small fee” when it helps merchants make a sale. Adobe has predicted that AI-assisted online shopping will grow by 520% this holiday season.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block Form of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF)

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block announced this week the creation of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), an open-source organization to promote standards for AI agents, created under the Linux Foundation. Beyond these three members, other companies, such as Google, Microsoft, AWS, Bloomberg, and Cloudflare, signed on. The three founding companies are donating to the foundation ownership of some of their agentic technologies, which were already free to use and now will be available for others’ development as open standards. As a neutral home, the Linux Foundation will provide legal and technological support. These technologies include: – Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for connecting AI applications to external systems. – OpenAI’s Agents.md, which lets programs and websites specify rules for coding agents; – Block’s Goose, a framework for building agents With AI, agents use the web and negotiate with one another to power applications and manage customer interactions. Working to the same open-source standards will help ensure those interactions happen seamlessly. Currently, several Chinese AI companies, including DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and Z.ai, provide open source models that have become popular with developers, startups, and AI researchers. As the open standards managed by ICANN and W3C shaped the evolution of the web, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block believe that openness will remove barriers to the deployment of agentic AI, benefit their businesses, and determine how this technology gets used daily worldwide. In 2024, Anthropic introduced MCP, and, currently, there are over 10,000 active public MCP servers, with the leading companies (ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Visual Studio Code, etc.) as adopters, and support from cloud organizations (AWS, Cloudflare, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure). Anthropic now has a directory with over 75 MCP-powered connectors. The Linux Foundation has decades of experience stewarding the significant open-source projects, including The Linux Kernel, Kubernetes, Node.js, and PyTorch.

"Enterprise AI Adoption Is Accelerating, Enabling People To Do New Kinds of Work"

Disney Will License Its Iconic Characters to OpenAI's Sora Video Generator

The Trump Administration Will Forbid State Laws that Conflict with Federal Policy on AI

Mistral Releases Its Latest Open-Source Coding Model, Devstral 2

French startup Mistral launched its latest open-source coding model, Devstral 2, yesterday. This announcement follows the recent launch of the Mistral 3 family of open-weight models and Mistral Vibe, a new command-line interface (CLI) for code automation through natural language. This announcement follows the recent launch of the Mistral 3 family of open-weight models and confirms Mistral’s Devstral 2 requires at least four H100 GPUs or equivalent for deployment, as it weighs 123 billion parameters. However, the model is also available in a smaller version, Devstral Small, which, at 24 billion parameters, is deployable locally on consumer hardware. Devstral 2, shipped under a modified MIT license, is currently free to use via the company’s API. After the free period, the API pricing will cost $0.40/$2.00 per million tokens (input/output) for Devstral 2. Mistral has partnered with the agent tools Kilo Code and Cline to release Devstral 2 to users, while the Mistral Vibe CLI is available as an extension in Zed for use within the IDE. Valued at $13.8 billion, this European unicorn [part of its team in the picture above] is aiming to close in on its larger American AI rivals and other coding-focused LLMs, such as Cursor and Supabase.

Dartmouth Will Implement Anthropic's Claude for Education and AWS's Bedrock Programs

Dartmouth University announced this month a partnership with Anthropic and AWS to implement AI solutions tailored for the academic environment, intended for students, faculty, and staff. Anthropic's Claude for Education and AWS's Amazon Bedrock models will be used to equip the institution for teaching and research across the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and creative disciplines, as well as for co-curricular activities such as career design and the use of AI technologies aligned with faculty's fields of study. "This is more than a collaboration. It’s the next chapter in a story that began at Dartmouth 70 years ago," says President Sian Leah Beilock. "This is the kind of partnership that makes me genuinely excited about AI’s role in education," explained Daniela Amodei, President and Co-Founder of Anthropic. The agreement is nonexclusive, and Claude will be a powerful addition to other AI models that Dartmouth provides access to, such as ChatGPT and CoPilot. As a research university, Dartmouth and its faculty began using AI in 1956, with the Dartmouth Summer Research Project. The institution also has a rich history of coupling the latest technological innovations with teaching and learning—from the invention of the BASIC programming language and one of the earliest email systems to universal computing access and campuswide wireless networking. Currently, a Faculty Leadership Group on Artificial Intelligence is working to define a principled, evidence-based strategy on AI. Dartmouth's staff is already utilizing AI to: Facilitating student access to AI-enhanced personalized career pathways, career coaching using Claude, including using AI services to evaluate job offers; articulating their strengths, interests, goals, and values; and refining resumes and cover letters; connecting students with applied learning events through AWS Skills to Jobs, designed in collaboration with employers to build industry-aligned skills; collaborating on student-led programs to create a culture of innovation and ethical use on campus and provide career readiness; and granting Dartmouth students access to learning and networking opportunities hosted by Anthropic. “As the workplace evolves and technology accelerates change, employers are seeking individuals who pair technical fluency with strong communication and problem-solving skills,” said Joe Catrino, executive director of DCCD. Across Dartmouth’s schools, findings already include key results in medical education, energy and the environment, computational social science, cybersecurity, and mental health and well-being. • Geography professor Justin Mankin’s team uses climate models to connect greenhouse gas emissions to extreme weather • The Polarization Research Lab, co-founded by government professor Sean Westwood, analyzes public opinion data to study political polarization and online misinformation. • Engineering professor Peter Chin’s lab is developing a learning algorithm and training framework to predict and defend against future cyberattacks. • Through the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health, Dartmouth is a leading partner in the National Science Foundation-funded AI Research Institute on Interaction for AI Assistants, spearheading research on AI-powered devices and wearables to support digital interventions for addiction, behavioral, and mental health disorders. • Through its Center for Precision Health and Artificial Intelligence, Dartmouth is also building AI tools to improve diagnostic accuracy and personalize treatments, especially in cancer care. Dartmouth will use Amazon Bedrock to build custom AI applications for campus operations and student services, with AWS’s Digital Innovation Team providing direct support using their “working backwards” methodology. Comprehensive training and support are also scheduled. “AWS is looking forward to empowering Dartmouth, in partnership with Anthropic, as they continue to approach AI ethically, strategically, and securely to provide transformational student experiences and operational excellence,” added Kim Majerus, vice president of global education and U.S. state and local government at Amazon Web Services.