GenAI Daily - February 7, 2026: OpenAI's Frontier Platform, Big Tech's $650B AI Spending Spree, Major AI Funding Rounds
Top Story
OpenAI launched Frontier, a new enterprise platform designed to help companies build, deploy, and manage AI agents, marking the company's most aggressive push into corporate markets.
The platform connects enterprise systems - data warehouses, CRM tools, and internal apps - so AI agents can work with the same information people do, while providing explicit permissions and agent identities to scope access exactly to what each task requires.
Dozens of companies have already adopted Frontier, including Intuit, Uber, State Farm and Thermo Fisher.
A global financial services firm using the technology got 90% more time back for their client-facing team, while another customer in tech saved 1,500 hours a month in product development.
OpenAI declined to share pricing details, though Frontier is compatible with agents that OpenAI has built, agents that enterprises build themselves, as well as agents from third parties like Google, Microsoft and Anthropic.
Why it matters: This positions OpenAI to compete directly with Salesforce's Agentforce and Anthropic's enterprise offerings by becoming the "operating system for AI agents" across enterprises, potentially disrupting traditional SaaS per-seat licensing models.
Key Developments
Big Tech Commits Record $650 Billion to AI Infrastructure
Four of the biggest US technology companies together have forecast capital expenditures that will reach about $650 billion in 2026 - a mind-boggling tide of cash earmarked for new data centers and all the gear housed within them.
The spending planned by Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, all in pursuit of dominance in the still-nascent market for AI tools, is a boom without a parallel this century, with each company's estimates for this year expected either near or surpass their budgets for the past three years combined.
Amazon's shares plunged 10% after it unveiled a $200bn surge in spending on AI infrastructure, with CEO Andy Jassy saying the company expects to invest about $200 billion in capital expenditures across Amazon in 2026.
The announcement came a day after Google said its AI spending would double to $185bn.
Impact: This unprecedented infrastructure spending signals enterprise AI adoption acceleration but raises questions about ROI timelines and market sustainability.
Anthropic Updates Claude Opus 4.6 with Extended Context
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6, which it says can scrutinize company data, regulatory filings and market information to come up with detailed financial analyses that would normally take a person days to complete.
The company expanded Opus' context window from 200,000 tokens to one million, with tokens being a unit of measurement referring to how AI models understand text.
A research preview feature called agent teams allows multiple coordinated agents to divide project tasks, with Anthropic emphasizing output quality, speed, and enterprise safety testing, including expanded cybersecurity probes and refusal evaluations.
The release comes after software stocks cratered this week following the release of plugins for Anthropic's Cowork tool last Friday, with these plugins sparking fears that the tech could replace specialized research and financial analysis software.
Impact: Multi-agent workflows and stronger document generation expand AI from content drafting to end-to-end execution, directly challenging traditional enterprise software providers.
Marketing Enters "Operational Era" of AI
Marketing has entered what Jasper calls the operational era of AI, where artificial intelligence is no longer a side experiment but embedded infrastructure, with a survey of 1,400 marketers finding 91% now use AI, yet only 41% can confidently prove ROI.
Governance, legal review, and brand standards have become the primary blockers to scale, with a widening CMO-IC divide showing leaders see strategic value while frontline teams struggle with execution.
High-maturity organizations embed governance into workflows, assign clear ownership, dedicate at least 10% of budget to AI, and report higher job satisfaction alongside measurable returns.
Impact: AI maturity now hinges on governance, measurement, and operating model redesign rather than technology adoption alone.
Funding & Deals
- Goodfire - $150M Series B:
AI research lab using interpretability to understand and design models raised $150 million at $1.25 billion valuation, developing methods to efficiently retrain models by precisely targeting parts of their inner workings, with one application reducing hallucinations by half in a large language model - Led by B Capital (PR Newswire)
- Fundamental AI - $255M Series A:
AI lab emerging from stealth with $255 million funding at $1.2 billion valuation, building foundation model called Nexus specifically for structured data like tables, claiming to have built "the best foundation model to handle that type of data" - Led by Oak HC/FT, Valor Equity Partners, Battery Ventures, Salesforce Ventures (TechCrunch)
- Accrual - $75M Series A:
AI-native accounting platform launched with $75 million to automate manual accounting workflows for firms, with preparation time dropping by more than 85 percent and review time falling by up to 60 percent, with every 50 complex returns effectively adding the capacity of one accountant - Led by General Catalyst (Business Wire)
- Lawhive - $60M Series B:
AI-powered law firm raised $60 million led by Mitch Rales, cofounder of Danaher Corp, enabling it to provide legal services more efficiently and at lower cost than traditional firms, with annual revenue now exceeding $35 million and growing sevenfold in the past year - Led by Mitch Rales (Fortune)
Related reading: Check out this week's [Deep Insights analysis] for strategic context on these developments.
