Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI reporter Sharon Goldman. On this version, a brand new startup is tackling AI impersonation…authorized AI startup Harvey raised $160 million at an $8 billion valuation…VC ‘kingmaking’ is going on sooner than ever with AI startups…Why AI writes like that…Microsoft lowers gross sales workers’s development targets for newer AI software program.
A 12 months in the past, I spoke to a number of cybersecurity leaders at firms like SoftBank and Mastercard who have been already sounding alarms about AI-powered impersonation threats, together with deepfakes and voice clones. They warned that fraud would evolve shortly: The primary wave of scams have been about scammers utilizing deepfakes to pretended to be somebody . However attackers would quickly start utilizing AI-generated video and audio to impersonate strangers from trusted sources, comparable to a help-desk rep out of your financial institution or an IT administrator at work.
A 12 months later, that is precisely what’s taking place: The Id Theft Useful resource Middle reported a 148% surge in impersonation scams between April 2024 and March 2025, pushed by scammers spinning up faux enterprise web sites, deploying lifelike AI chatbots, and producing voice brokers that sound indistinguishable from actual firm representatives. In 2024 alone, the Federal Commerce Fee recorded $2.95 billion in losses tied to impersonation scams.
Now, a brand new startup is stepping straight into the breach. imper.ai goals to cease AI impersonation assaults in actual time, and right now introduced its public launch and $28 million in new funding. Redpoint Ventures and Battery Ventures led the funding spherical, with participation from Maple VC, Vessy VC, and Cerca Companions.
As an alternative of attempting to identify visible or audio anomalies—an method that’s quickly turning into nearly inconceivable—imper.ai says it analyzes the digital breadcrumbs attackers can’t faux. These embrace system telemetry (the background knowledge your system provides off, like location, working system, {hardware} particulars, and community habits), community diagnostics, and environmental alerts. Its platform runs silently throughout techniques together with Zoom, Groups, Slack, WhatsApp, Google Workspace, and IT help-desk environments, flagging dangerous periods earlier than a human ever will get deceived.
CEO Noam Awadish, a veteran of autonomous-driving pioneer Mobileye and a longtime member of Israel’s 8200 cyberwarfare unit, mentioned AI has supercharged traditional social-engineering ways—the type of assaults that manipulate folks into giving up delicate data or approving actions that compromise safety. Whether or not by impersonation, faux urgency, or psychological stress, attackers are more and more utilizing AI to trick victims into revealing passwords, monetary particulars, or distant entry.
A current instance is Jaguar Land Rover. Final month hackers used faux credentials to hold out coordinated phishing and “vishing” (voice-phishing) campaigns impersonating JLR’s IT assist workers to reap credentials and acquire entry. The assault compelled the automaker to close down vital IT techniques and finally its manufacturing strains, leading to estimated losses of $1.5 billion up to now.
That’s why imper.ai avoids attempting to out-detect AI impersonation straight from the AI-generated content material itself. “We don’t want to get into an AI arms race,” Awadish mentioned. As an alternative, the startup focuses on what attackers can not faux—principally metadata.
As the corporate’s traction has accelerated, so has investor curiosity. “We want to build a platform that safeguards the entire communication space,” Awadish mentioned. “ It’s not something small, it’s not like a plugin that one of the giants is going to build.” With the brand new funding, he mentioned that the corporate can double its R&D headcount and triple its go-to-market group within the US.
“At the moment, there is really high traction, so we need to keep up with the pace, so we need to grow,” he mentioned.
Observe: I’m super-excited to be headed to San Francisco for Fortune Brainstorm AI on Monday and Tuesday! I’ll be interviewing Prakhar Mehrotra, SVP and world head of AI at PayPal, and Marc Hamilton, VP of options structure and engineering at Nvidia, on the primary stage. I’ll even be moderating a spicy roundtable session all about AI knowledge facilities. Plus, I’m wanting ahead to seeing a number of the different audio system, together with actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap, and Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks.
FORTUNE ON AI
Microsoft AI desires all its staff to be AI-native by the tip of the fiscal 12 months, says VP of design Liz Danzico–by Angelica Ang
China’s ByteDance might be compelled to promote TikTok U.S., however its quiet lead in AI will assist it survive—and possibly even thrive–by Nicholas Gordon
Anthropic considers IPO regardless of warnings that extra liquidity is blowing a bubble within the markets–by Jim Edwards
Sam Altman declares ‘Code Red’ as Google’s Gemini surges—three years after ChatGPT induced Google CEO Sundar Pichai to do the identical–by Sharon Goldman
ServiceNow’s president says buying identification and entry administration platform Veza will assist prospects monitor the whereabouts of AI brokers—by Jeremy Kahn
AI IN THE NEWS
Authorized AI startup Harvey raises $160 million at an $8 billion valuation. Harvey, one of many fastest-rising startups within the AI legal-tech increase, simply raised $160 million at an $8 billion valuation, in line with the New York Occasions. This greater than doubles its valuation since February and brings its whole funding this 12 months to roughly $760 million. The four-year-old firm, already utilized by about half of the Am Legislation 100, builds AI assistants that assist legal professionals draft and evaluation paperwork, reply case-law questions, and automate routine workflows. The spherical was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from T. Rowe Value, WndrCo, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and others, and alerts that investor enthusiasm for AI instruments constructed for white-collar professionals stays intense at the same time as broader tech markets wobble.
VC ‘kingmaking’ is going on sooner than ever with AI startups. AI ERP startup DualEntry raised a $90 million Sequence A at a $415 million valuation—regardless of being only a 12 months previous—as Lightspeed and Khosla Ventures wager {that a} next-generation substitute for legacy techniques like Oracle NetSuite can scale quick. However in line with TechCrunch, the scale of the spherical has revived questions on “kingmaking,” the more and more frequent VC tactic of pouring big sums right into a single early-stage firm to fabricate class dominance. Whereas one investor advised TechCrunch that DualEntry had solely round $400,000 in ARR final summer season—a determine the corporate disputes—the aggressive funding mirrors a broader shift: enterprise corporations are selecting winners sooner than ever.
Why does AI write like that? I undoubtedly needed to shout out this (lengthy) essay within the New York Occasions that’s effectively price a learn. It argues that AI-generated writing has quietly turn into the dominant voice of the web—shaping every part from pupil essays to political statements—with its now-familiar mixture of em dashes, ghostly metaphors, triplets, and overpolished sincerity. What’s unsettling, the writer writes, isn’t simply that AI prose is in all places, however that people are beginning to unconsciously imitate it, making a suggestions loop the place machine-bred language turns into the default cultural tone. Personally, I had heard about how AI chatbots love the phrase “delve,” however not that they love ghostly phrases and all issues “quiet”: “Everything is a shadow, or a memory, or a whisper. They also love quietness. For no obvious reason, and often against the logic of a narrative, they will describe things as being quiet, or softly humming.”
Microsoft lowers gross sales workers’s development targets for newer AI software program. Like each different Huge Tech firm, Microsoft spent a lot of 2025 loudly touting AI brokers as the subsequent large leap in enterprise automation, however because the 12 months ends the corporate is quietly dialing again expectations, in line with new reporting from The Info. After a number of gross sales groups missed aggressive development targets, Microsoft has relaxed quotas for sure AI merchandise—an unusually public acknowledgment that conventional enterprises are nonetheless hesitant to pay for superior automation. Prospects say the ROI stays exhausting to measure and the tech too error-prone for high-stakes workflows like finance and cybersecurity. Whereas AI has been a serious boon to Microsoft’s cloud enterprise—thanks largely to large spending from OpenAI and robust demand for instruments like Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot—getting mainstream firms to considerably improve their AI budgets is proving far harder than promoting to AI labs.
AI CALENDAR
Dec. 2-7: NeurIPS, San Diego.
Dec. 8-9: Fortune Brainstorm AI San Francisco. Apply to attend right here.
Jan. 7-10: Client Electronics Present, Las Vegas.
March 12-18: SWSW, Austin.
March 16-19: Nvidia GTC, San Jose.
April 6-9: HumanX, San Francisco.
EYE ON AI NUMBERS
221 Million
That is what number of YouTube customers subscribe to so-called “AI slop” channels, or these posting principally AI-generated content material, in line with a brand new report from cloud-based video modifying platform Kapwing.
The report analyzed 15,000 YouTube channels in 21 nations and recognized which of them are posting AI-generated content material. Then they examined their view counts, subscriber totals, and estimated earnings to seek out the place “AI slop” channels are competing most aggressively with human creators.
The report discovered these channels have already amassed a mixed 221 million subscribers, generated 63 billion views, and pull in additional than $117 million every year.
Some notable findings from the report:
- The U.S.-based “AI slop” channel Cuentos Facinates has essentially the most subscribers globally (5.95M).
- Spain has eight such channels of their prime 100 trending channels with a mixed 20.22M subscribers, essentially the most of any nation.
- These channels get essentially the most views in South Korea (8.45B views throughout 11 trending channels).
- India is dwelling to the most-viewed “AI slop” channel, Bandar Apna Dost, with 2.07B views and an estimated $4.25M in annual earnings.
