Amazon is set to take creative control over the lucrative James Bond movie franchise from the Broccoli family, the company announced Thursday.

The James Bond films have long been produced by Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, who inherited the control from their father Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. Wilson and Broccoli will now give creative control to MGM Studios, which Amazon acquired for $8.45 billion in 2021.

Amazon gained distribution rights to the Bond franchise after the MGM acquisition, but not creative control.

As part of the deal, Amazon’s MGM Studios, Wilson and Broccoli formed a new joint venture to house the Bond intellectual property rights, and they will remain co-owners of the franchise.

“We are grateful to the late Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman for bringing James Bond to movie theatres around the world, and to Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli for their unyielding dedication and their role in continuing the legacy of the franchise that is cherished by legions of fans worldwide,” said Mike Hopkins, Amazon’s head of Prime Video and MGM Studios, in a statement. “We are honored to continue this treasured heritage, and look forward to ushering in the next phase of the legendary 007 for audiences around the world.”

Wilson and Broccoli said in a release that they are both stepping back from producing the Bond films to focus on other projects.

“Barbara and I agree, it is time for our trusted partner, Amazon MGM Studios, to lead James Bond into the future,” Wilson said.

In a nod to the deal, Amazon founder and Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos wrote in a post on X, “Who’d you pick as the next Bond?”

The Bond film franchise, which spans more than 60 years, is one of the highest-grossing series in history.

The valuable IP stands to be a boon for Amazon’s sprawling media and entertainment business, which includes the Prime Video streaming service. Prime Video is one of the key perks of Amazon Prime, the company’s mainstay subscription service that costs $139 a year. As of 2021, the company said it had more than 200 million Prime subscribers worldwide.

OpenAI appears to be growing quickly despite increasing competition. 

The San Francisco-based tech company had 400 million weekly active users as of February, up 33% from 300 million in December, the company’s chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, told CNBC. These numbers have not been previously reported.

Lightcap pointed to the “natural progression” of ChatGPT as it becomes more useful and familiar to a broader group of people.

“People hear about it through word of mouth. They see the utility of it. They see their friends using it,” Lightcap said in an interview, adding that it takes time for individuals to find use cases that resonate. “There’s an overall effect of people really wanting these tools, and seeing that these tools are really valuable.”

OpenAI is seeing that spill over to its growing enterprise business. The company now has 2 million paying enterprise users, roughly doubling from September, said Lightcap, pointing out that often employees will use ChatGPT personally and suggest to their companies that they implement the tool. 

“We get a lot of benefits, and a tail wind from the organic consumer adoption where people already have familiarity with the product,” he said. “There’s really healthy growth, on a different curve.”

Developer traffic has also doubled in the past six months, quintupling for the company’s “reasoning” model o3, according to Lightcap. Developers use OpenAI to integrate the technology into their own applications. OpenAI counts Uber, Morgan Stanley, Moderna and T-Mobile among some of its largest enterprise customers.

Lightcap likened this usage to cloud services, which Amazon Web Services pioneered two decades ago. While the consumer business may grow faster since people can adopt it at will, enterprise is in the “process of building up,” he said. 

“There’s a buying cycle there, and a learning process that goes into scaling an enterprise business,” Lightcap said. “AI is going to be like cloud services. It’s going to be something that you can’t run a business that ultimately is not really running on these very powerful models underneath the surface.”

Billionaire Elon Musk, a company co-founder, has sued OpenAI for breach of contract as it attempts to convert into a for-profit. Microsoft has poured billions into the company while SoftBank is close to finalizing a $40 billion investment that could value the company at close to $300 billion, according to sources familiar with the deal.

Musk and a group of investors bid to buy the nonprofit’s assets for $97.4 billion earlier this month. In a letter to Musk’s attorney, OpenAI’s lawyer said the company’s board determined that Musk’s “much-publicized ‘bid’ is in fact not a bid at all.” OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor said in a statement that the company “is not for sale.”

“The numbers tell the story,” Lightcap said. “We try to be very transparent about where we stand on all of this. (Musk) is a competitor. He’s competing. It’s an unorthodox way of competing.”

Chinese smartphone firm Oppo has unveiled its new flagship folding phone Thursday, touting a slimmer body and artificial intelligence-focused features in a bid to compete with high-end foldable devices from the likes of Samsung and Huawei.

The company’s Find N5 phone that can fold in half, will retail at a starting price of 2,499 Singapore dollars ($1,867.70).

When it’s folded shut, the Find N5 looks like a normal bar-shaped phone with a 6.62-inch display. The device can then be folded outward to show a larger, 8.12-inch tablet.

Most notably, the phone has an ultra-thin design. When closed, it measures 8.93 millimeters thick, while when opened out in tablet form, the Find N5 has a depth of 4.21 millimeters.

That’s slimmer than Samsung’s Galaxy Fold 6, which the South Korean tech giant released last year.

Inside the device is a razer-thin 5,600 milliampere-hour (mAh) battery that’s no bigger than a credit card. Oppo said the battery incorporates a silicon-carbon material, which enables high battery capacity despite its small size.

Oppo is hoping it can win business from the likes of Samsung and Chinese tech giant Huawei, both major smartphone players seeking to shake the market out of an innovation slowdown with flashy new models that can bend.

Samsung recently launched additional AI capabilities on its new flagship Galaxy S25 series, including the ability to carry out tasks across multiple apps when prompted and integration of Google’s Gemini AI assistant.

Samsung teased a trifold smartphone prototype at its January Unpacked event for the launch of the Galaxy S25. It’s not clear yet if the phone is a product Samsung will launch commercially anytime soon.