Artificial Intelligence News

In 2025, venture funding to AI reached $212 billion — up 85% year over year from $114 billion in 2024 — Crunchbase data shows. Funding to the AI sector in 2025 surpassed every year in the past decade, including the peak global funding year of 2021.

Inside the move

All told, nearly half of all global venture funding went to companies in AI-related fields in 2025, making artificial intelligence by far the leading sector for startup investment.

The momentum around AI shows no signs of slowing, either. Just two weeks into 2026, Crunchbase data shows more than 200 funding rounds to the sector totaling over $25 billion, but that amount includes the giant early-January $20 billion Series E for Elon Musk’s xAI.

On this page, we track all things AI news — from artificial intelligence news articles, to AI business news, to the trends driving this transformative technology forward.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, refers to the simulation of human intelligence by computers and other machines. Increasingly, there are AI applications that can problem-solve, understand and mimic human language, identify patterns, learn and reason.

Advancements in AI technologies in recent years have seen artificial intelligence adopted in industries ranging from health care to investing to manufacturing to national security and defense, and frequently put AI in the news.

But while AI systems have proven themselves adept at specific tasks, these systems have not (yet) become what researchers refer to as artificial general intelligence, or AGI — a hypothetical type of AI as smart and capable as a human that learns from experience, incorporates context into its understanding of the world, and adapts to new situations with acquired knowledge.

Large tech companies that operate in the AI space include:

There are hundreds of AI-related companies on The Crunchbase Unicorn Board. They include, among many others:

There are many concepts and categories within the broad realm of AI, including:

Large language models, or LLMs, are advanced computer programs designed to understand and generate human-like text based on the input they receive. They work using a combination of techniques from machine learning and natural language processing (NLP).

You can think of them as incredibly smart text generators that use vast amounts of data and complex math to understand and produce humanized text. They’re capable of a wide range of language-related tasks, from answering questions to composing short stories — even poems — and more.

The major LLMs on the market today include OpenAI’s ChatGPT; Google’s PaLM, used in its Bard assistant; Claude, developed by startup Anthropic; and LLaMa, developed by Facebook parent Meta.

The numbers behind the story

Here’s a simplified explanation of how these LLMs generally work:

More than $100 billion was invested globally into AI-related startups in 2024, per Crunchbase data. Through August, at least $118 billion in venture capital has gone to the sector in 2025, putting the year on track to hit a new annual record for funding.

For our search purposes we used the following parameters in the Crunchbase database: artificial intelligence, as well as the AI subsets of intelligent systems, machine learning, natural language processing and predictive analytics.

VCs have invested billions of dollars into AI startups on the belief that artificial intelligence could usher in a generational change — akin to the rise of the internet three decades ago. Specifically, investors who back AI are interested in the technology’s potential for scale — many believe AI could impact virtually every industry.

“Literally trillions of dollars of value gets created when you have these massive tectonic shifts,” Sameer Dholakia, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, told us previously, after his firm had earmarked $1 billion to be invested specifically in AI startups.

Large AI startups that have gone public in recent years include:

Large acquisitions of AI-related startups include:

AI’s proponents say it has the potential to vastly augment and scale human capabilities, giving almost everyone access to unparalleled knowledge, personalized technologies and enhanced decision-making powers.

The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has argued that “what AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence – and many others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the stars – much, much better from here.”

In medicine, AI could potentially analyze medical images like X-rays, MRIs and CT scans to assist doctors in identifying potential abnormalities, improving the accuracy and speed of diagnosis, or greatly accelerate the discovery of new life-saving drugs. In agriculture, AI-driven systems may be able to analyze satellite imagery and sensor data to monitor crop health, predict crop disease outbreaks, and optimize irrigation, leading to better crop yields, reducing malnutrition and starvation rates around the world. In education, children could have personalized AI tutors that evolve and adapt to their learning needs and challenges throughout their childhood and beyond.

Concerns about the development of AI range from worries about ethics and bias associated with artificial intelligence development, to fears about intelligent systems displacing humans in their jobs. AI critics worry that the technology will cause mass unemployment and greater economic disparity, while AI proponents argue the technology will spur the creation of whole new industries, creating more jobs than it destroys.

Many experts have also raised concerns about AI’s potential to rapidly generate and spread misinformation or be used by bad actors to gain political and social power. Still others are worried about national security risks and the potential for AI to cause more deadly wars.

What this changes

Some have also expressed concern that we could lose control of advanced AIs and that these systems could turn hostile toward humanity.

In an open letter in March 2023, the Future Of Life Institute, a nonprofit, called for a pause in new AI development: “Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?”

Signatories of the letter included Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang.

Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that have the ability to generate new content, such as text, images or other data, based on patterns and knowledge learned from existing data. These systems use algorithms and neural networks to create original output that can be indistinguishable from human-generated content.

ChatGPT, GPT-4 and DALL-E — all three owned by OpenAI — are examples of generative AI platforms. Other examples of generative AI platforms include Midjourney, Microsoft-owned Bing Chat, Stable Diffusion, Meta-owned LLaMA and Google-owned Bard.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) refers to a still-hypothetical form of artificial intelligence with human-like cognitive abilities that allow it to understand, learn and perform a wide range of tasks.

An AGI could theoretically adapt to various domains without specific programming. Unlike narrow or specialized artificial intelligence, AGI would have the potential to exhibit general intelligence and problem-solving capabilities comparable to human intelligence.

As of mid-2023, no AI system is advanced enough to be considered AGI.

In the Crunchbase dataset, AI companies are generally also tagged as providing the following:

All of Crunchbase News’ AI articles and news about the future of AI are added to this page as we report them. Check back here frequently for the AI latest news and news on AI.