OpenAI rival drops 975B-parameter open model; Iran strikes Kuwait and Jordan

The AI race is splitting into two lanes this morning: one pushing frontier models into the open, the other wrapping them in bespoke hardware. Meanwhile, the US-Iran conflict is widening beyond the Gulf.

Inkling opens up. Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab has released “Inkling,” a 975-billion-parameter open-weights model that the company says is the largest American open model to date ^[1]. Released under an Apache 2.0 license, Inkling supports a one-million-token context window and is trained on 45 trillion tokens of text, images, audio, and video using Nvidia GB300 NVL72 systems ^[1]. The MoE architecture was inspired by DeepSeek-V3, but Thinking Machines claims it trained the model from scratch ^[1]. A quantized version can run on roughly half the GPU footprint of the native model, and the weights are available on Hugging Face ^[1].

OpenAI goes physical. OpenAI is officially entering the hardware market with a $230 light-up keyboard called the Codex Micro, co-designed with Work Louder ^[2]. The device features “Agent Keys” that display agent status, a joystick for workflows, and a dial to adjust how much reasoning a Codex agent applies to a task ^[2]. OpenAI told TechCrunch the Micro is a limited-run collaboration, but the move comes as Apple sues the company for alleged trade-secret theft related to a separate, still-in-development screenless smart speaker ^[2].

Iran conflict spreads. Iran’s military says it targeted US radar and defense systems in Kuwait and Bahrain, while the IRGC claimed missile strikes on Jordan’s Azraq airbase ^[3]. Jordan said it intercepted eight Iranian missiles ^[3]. The claims came after reported US strikes on northern Iran for the second time in a week, including Semnan’s civilian airport, and after the US disabled an Iranian oil tanker ^[3]. Iran also said it downed a US MQ-9 drone over Khuzestan province ^[3].

The through-line: powerful platforms are being packaged as products—whether as open weights, premium peripherals, or military escalations. We’ll keep tracking which of these stories holds.