The Morning Download: OpenAI, Apple and AI’s Third Phase

Good morning. Sam Altman said yesterday that OpenAI is entering its third phase, and he might as well have been writing about the entire AI ecosystem.

In a blog post published yesterday, the same day that the company confidentially filed for an IPO, Altman and OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki outlined those three phases.

The first phase of OpenAI was about doing research toward AGI. The second phase began when our research became relevant to the real world and we became a product company …

Now we are entering the third phase. The economy is beginning to reshape around AI. The central question now is how to make advanced AI abundant, affordable, safe, useful, and easy enough for every person and organization to benefit from it. Frontier capability is only part of the job. The bigger task is turning that capability into tools people can actually use to thrive.

The shift is broader than just one company. AI itself is entering a third phase as it scales out. The impending IPOs of OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX is a turning point of one kind, as leading venture-backed AI labs move to the public markets with their masses of investors and capital.

This is evident in the debt markets, too. As the WSJ reports, AI hyperscalers have issued $159 billion in bonds globally this year, up from $17 billion in 2024, to finance data centers, and spreads of CoreWeave’s bonds have tightened, enabling the company to raise more than $20 billion through sales of stock and debt in 2026.

Apple also made a big move in AI yesterday, unveiling a new AI version of its Siri chatbot that technology developed with Google. It’s designed to make AI more accessible to users through easy access on their devices. 

The question now is when AI moves into Phase Four, in which the impact of ubiquitous AI truly scales up. There are hints of that future everywhere in the way that people live and work, but they are in the early stages. The scaling of AI’s impact will be here soon, though.

• OpenAI in a written statement Monday said that it confidentially filed IPO paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission, adding that “it may be a while” until it goes public because there are “things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company.” The company recently completed the largest funding round in the history of Silicon Valley, raising $122 billion from Amazon.com, Nvidia, SoftBank and other investors.

• Apple on Monday showed off a new, Google-assisted AI version of its Siri chatbot that will draw on user data to help answer more complicated questions and complete tasks, the WSJ reports. 
  
  3: The number of times "agents" or "agentic" were mentioned during Monday's WWDC keynote, according to Barron's.
  21: The number of times "privacy" or "private" were mentioned.

• The Pentagon on Monday updated its list of Chinese businesses the U.S. has identified as aiding Beijing’s military, designating around two dozen new companies, including tech giants Alibaba Group and Baidu, WSJ reports. A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington said the Pentagon was “overstretching the concept of national security and making discriminatory lists to go after Chinese companies.”

• A federal judge on Monday invalidated the Trump administration’s new fees for H-1B visas, saying officials overreached in applying a $100,000 charge for new applicants. The fee sparked concern and chaos when it was rolled out last fall, especially among the biggest tech companies that frequently use the visas to hire skilled workers.

• Shares of Corning gained 5.7% Monday after Amazon.com said it entered a multibillion-dollar agreement with the company to get optical fiber, cable and connectivity solutions to support its data centers, WSJ reports. Corning in January struck a deal worth up to $6 billion with Meta and last month notched a $500 million investment from Nvidia.

AI agents at the doctor’s office? Shez Partovi, the chief innovation officer and chief business leader of enterprise informatics at Royal Philips—better known as Philips—has a vision for how AI agents will play a role in delivering healthcare.

Partovi sat down with WSJLI’s Isabelle Bousquette and I on Monday to discuss what “the nursing station of the future” will look like, and how AI agents will play a role. Here are lightly edited excerpts from our conversation:

WSJLI: If regulatory issues weren’t a barrier, what do you imagine the future of healthcare looks like?

Partovi: These reasoning models in healthcare can become essentially hybrid team members and really part of the team. The workforce of the future in healthcare will change, just like it is right now in software engineering—essentially you have a swarm of agents doing a swarm of things.

AI agents will become team members, and they will be assigned to do things that are clinically oriented.

WSJLI: How is this vision already happening?

Partovi: There’s a health system in the East Coast, where I was meeting with the chief nursing officer, and she said, “Here’s my problem. I have nurse roles that I haven’t filled for the past eight months. Will Philips partner with me? Let’s identify the jobs to be done, and I want to find out how we can build AI agents that can do those jobs.”

That’s at the edge of regulatory acceptance, so we agreed to work together and then see how we can take it through regulation.

We’re going to have completely hybrid teams: AI agents that are AI nurse extenders, physician extenders, virtual residents that are part of the team members in a hospital.

— Belle Lin

The WSJ Tech Council brings together CIOs, CTOs and CISOs advancing innovation and shaping the future. Join this trusted community where tech executives connect with peers to explore emerging trends and gain the perspective they need to stay ahead of disruption.

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Follow Isabelle Bousquette on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and TikTok for more behind the scenes on her tech and AI coverage, and lately, her contributions to the WSJ Leadership Institute's new Executive Resilience series, where she's profiling America's top execs about their fitness and wellness habits.

Follow Belle Lin on LinkedIn and X for her latest reporting on enterprise technology and AI.

Steven Rosenbush is chief of the enterprise technology bureau at the WSJ Leadership Institute. He also has a column. You can follow him on LinkedIn.

Tom Loftus is the editor of The Morning Download. He suggests following Isabelle, Belle and Steve on their various social channels. But if you insist, here's his LinkedIn.