Introduction
November 2025
Major events
November brought a new generation of frontier models in quick succession. OpenAI released GPT-5.1 and then GPT-5.1-Codex-Max for long coding tasks; xAI released Grok 4.1; Google launched Gemini 3 Pro across its products together with Antigravity, a workspace for supervising coding agents; and Anthropic closed the month with Claude Opus 4.5 at a third of the previous Opus price. Open models kept pace: Moonshot’s Kimi K2 Thinking, Ai2’s fully documented Olmo 3, and Meta’s speech recognition for more than 1,600 languages.
The money behind these models reached new scales. Nvidia became the first company worth $5 trillion and reported $57 billion in quarterly revenue. OpenAI signed a $38 billion computing agreement with AWS; Anthropic announced $50 billion for data centers and a $30 billion Azure commitment alongside investment from Microsoft and Nvidia; Meta pledged $600 billion for US infrastructure; and Amazon planned up to $50 billion for government computing.
Patterns and trends
Governments decided where the hardware could go: the United States licensed advanced Nvidia GPUs for Microsoft’s data centers in the UAE, and China was reported to bar foreign AI chips from state-funded data centers. Washington also set out a national program for AI-assisted science in the Genesis Mission, revised its patent guidance on AI-assisted inventions, and saw a bipartisan bill propose higher penalties for fraud using AI. Research looked inside the models and at their misuse: Anthropic tested whether Claude could notice changes to its own internal states and reported an espionage campaign it attributed to a Chinese state-sponsored group, OpenAI made some computations inspectable with sparse networks, and researchers showed that requests written as poems could slip past safety filters.
Long-term threads
November gathered up threads that ran through the year. Nvidia, which lost about $590 billion of market value in a day in January, was now worth $5 trillion. The $500 billion Stargate plan of January had become one of many commitments of tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. The action plan President Trump ordered in January, published in July, led to the Genesis Mission. The impersonation of Marco Rubio reported in July was cited in the fraud bill. And the frontier cycle turned a third time: Claude 3.7, GPT-4.5 and Gemini 2.5 in February and March, Claude 4 and GPT-5 between May and August, and now GPT-5.1, Gemini 3 and Claude Opus 4.5. December will close the year.