OpenAI just paid $7bn to its own staff without asking outside investors

OpenAI used its own cash, not a fresh round of SoftBank-style outside money, to buy back roughly $7 billion of employee shares at an $852 billion valuation, Bloomberg reports. That's a deliberate choice: control the register yourself rather than let new buyers set the tone ahead of a potential IPO, as CNBC notes. It follows a $122 billion raise in March and an earlier October tender that let more than 600 staff cash out $6.6 billion, capped at $30 million a head. Separately, OpenAI is expanding its Daybreak cyber-defense programme with a new cyber-trained model built for defenders rather than attackers. Two different bets on the same idea: that OpenAI wants to look indispensable to enterprises and unshakeable to employees before it ever faces public shareholders.