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AI News September 12, 2026
Today's AI headlines: Mecka AI nears $500M valuation in Sequoia-led deal amid rush for robot training data, So you want to use OpenRouter?, Y Combinator’s Garry
·1 min read
Mecka AI nears $500M valuation in Sequoia-led deal amid rush for robot training data
The round for the two-year-old startup is coming together months after Mecka announced its Series A.
So you want to use OpenRouter?
Y Combinator’s Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to ‘distill’ frontier models, too
Tan wants smaller, American open-weight AI labs to use the same kind of training techniques on American frontier AI labs, giving the U.S. a more robust set of open-weight options that aren’t Chinese.