SoftBank seeks $100B from Gulf investors for an AI fund
Three moves today point the same direction: the money, the politics, and the price of speed all got more expensive.
SoftBank is reportedly seeking up to $100 billion from Gulf investors for a fund that would buy companies and run them with AI. The Financial Times reported the raise, citing people familiar with the matter, and says Masayoshi Son has held discussions in recent weeks with senior figures including in the United Arab Emirates; Reuters and Bloomberg both carried the report but neither could independently confirm it, and SoftBank has not commented. At that size the vehicle would match the original Vision Fund — arriving one week after SoftBank closed its $30 billion investment into OpenAI and just over a month after a $11.1 billion high-yield bond sale to help pay for it. The pattern is the story: Son keeps opening new pools of capital to fund the same bet, and the Gulf is the deepest one left. We tracked the earlier debt leg — SoftBank plans record yen bond sale to fund its AI push.
Anthropic is hiring a political programs lead to run a "presidential engagement" program for the 2028 US election. The posting, live on Anthropic's careers site, promises to "map the prospective fields in both parties" and offer AI policy education to candidates and their advisors "on equal terms," covering the platform, convention and transition periods; the role is Washington-based and pays $295,000–$345,000. Senator Alex Padilla drew the line critics will push: "education and influence are not the same thing," while election-law watchdog Bruce Freed said he had not seen such a formalized engagement through a presidential cycle. With a mega-IPO in the works, this is relationship-building with a job description — the Amodei-Trump dinner era, made permanent.
OpenAI shipped an Ultrafast tier for GPT-6.1 Sol: up to 8x faster generation, at six times the price. The tier is live in the API at $12 input and $60 output per million tokens against the standard model's $2 and $10, with OpenAI promising up to 300 tokens per second in Codex. The catch is the base model's speed: Artificial Analysis measured 54.9 tokens per second at max reasoning, some users report 20–30, and the announcement posts filled up with people calling the tier a disguised price increase — the read being that OpenAI shipped a slow cheap model and is now selling the fix. It also isn't open to the $200 Pro plan in ChatGPT or Codex, only Pro 500, enterprise and credit-based education plans, which blunts the "8x for everyone" framing. Zhidx documented the backlash in detail; we've been tracking the price war since the first cut — OpenAI's price war gambit: GPT-5.6 Sol tokens get 20% cheaper for 90 days.
What to watch: whether SoftBank's Gulf fund gets a first close before year-end, and whether OpenAI widens Ultrafast to the Pro 200 tier or just keeps it as an upsell.
Is unbinding speed from a model and selling it back as a premium tier fair pricing, or is a slow base model the real bug? Tell us in the comments.
