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It’s a first for the annual CNBC Disruptor 50 list: a company landing at No. 1 for the second year in a row.

Perhaps no surprise, that company is OpenAI. More than any other startup in the 12-year history of the Disruptor 50 list, OpenAI’s disruptive impact and potential is unparalleled.

What’s distinct about the company and the AI revolution it’s leading is that OpenAI is not working in opposition to incumbents but rather as a partner to tech giants and other large corporations. It’s serving as an ally to help navigate and implement unprecedented changes, with new tools that can be customized for consumers and enterprise data sets.

OpenAI is not unique, but rather, represents a generation of AI startups that are aligned with the giants because of the compute power, and the massive funding, required to accelerate artificial intelligence learning. In fact, 34 of this year’s Disruptor 50 companies describe AI as critically important to more than half of their revenue. Thirteen say that it is generative AI, specifically, that is critically important to the majority of sales.

More coverage of the 2024 CNBC Disruptor 50

OpenAI topped the list for an unprecedented second year due to the company’s ongoing pace of innovation. In the past year, OpenAI has grown dramatically, announcing a range of new products and services related to its GPT large language model and business partnerships, as its consumer subscription option and a range of enterprise licensing deals have helped it generate a reported $2 billion in annual revenue.

On Monday, OpenAI launched a new AI model and desktop version of ChatGPT, along with an updated user interface. In a livestream event, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati said the new model, GPT-4o, is “much faster,” with improved capabilities in text, video and audio. “This is the first time that we are really making a huge step forward when it comes to the ease of use,” Murati said.

After a dramatic boardroom battle in November, in which CEO Sam Altman was ousted and then just a few days later brought back after outrage from investors and employees, the company strengthened its board and management structure, with Altman himself rejoining the board in March. The scramble to rehire Altman and his team revealed the depth of corporate and venture capital support for the OpenAI CEO as an innovator and leader.

Then in February, the company debuted its text-to-video generator Sora (later in the year, an audio AI, Voice Engine, was also unveiled in a limited test) and it completed a funding round that valued the company at a reported $80 billion, up from a reported $29 billion at the time it was named No. 1 on the Disruptor 50 list in 2023.

OpenAI's Brad Lightcap on new content tool, copyright claims and AI outlook

Altman has positioned himself as a thought leader in terms of AI regulation, after testifying last year before Congress about the need for smart and careful AI guardrails. And the company is at the center of a maelstrom of concern about artificial intelligence. OpenAI is the focus of regulatory scrutiny, with the FTC probing whether it broke consumer protection laws and the SEC looking at whether, during Altman’s brief ouster, investors were misled. Meanwhile, the company has beefed up its legal team as it fights a range of lawsuits, from publishing companies, including The New York Times, and individual artists, such as author Jodi Picoult, suing over copyright violation.

But at the same time, OpenAI has struck new deals with IAC’s publisher Meredith, parent of Food & Wine and People, and the Financial Times, to compensate them for the use of their IP, and to drive traffic back to their content.

AI’s wave extends to many industries

This wave of AI innovation echoes that of the rise of the internet around the turn of the century, and mobile and cloud revolutions, but has some distinct characteristics. The current wave of AI disruptors, such as Databricks (No. 5 on this year’s list), Anthropic (No. 7), Scale AI (No. 12), Cohere (No. 30), AlphaSense (No. 40) and Glean (No. 43) is marked by a rapid pace of change, with the progress made every year by large language models, as well as by their reliance on costly chips and infrastructure.

Unlike the founded-in-a-garage mythology that dominated the Googles and PayPals of prior tech cycles, these AI-driven companies need GPUs and data centers, which has led most of them to partner with giants ranging from Microsoft and Nvidia to Oracle, Salesforce, Amazon and Alphabet. As a result we may not see as many new entrants into the AI sector as so-called Web 1.0 and 2.0, but the companies that do succeed, like those on our Disruptor 50 list, have the potential to be far more impactful and disruptive.

This year’s Disruptor 50 companies are using AI — and other key technologies, such as robotics and the cloud — across a wide range of industries. 

Enterprise tech is the best-represented sector, with 14 companies on this year’s list, including Databricks and AlphaSense, which are using AI to drive efficiencies and better mine data across key industries like finance.

Fintech is the second-best represented sector, with 10 companies on this year’s list, including Brex (No. 4), Chime (No. 22) and Ramp (No. 32), which have integrated AI assistants to streamline consumer interactions, generate suggestions and advise on efficient corporate budgeting.

In the health-care and biotech space, there are eight companies, including ElevateBio (No. 8), Generate Biomedicines (No. 25) and Spring Health (No. 45), using AI to accelerate drug development and improve patient outcomes.

And we’re seeing AI power the aerospace and defense industry. No. 2 on the list, Anduril, recently introduced new AI-powered drones, and uses an AI-powered operating system to infuse autonomy into a range of defense and security systems.

Just as every company, regardless of its industry, has become a tech company, pretty soon, every type of company will integrate AI.

The 2024 CNBC Disruptor 50: OpenAI becomes first back-to-back No. 1 company

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Elon Musk’s X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

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Elon Musk's X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

Elon Musk looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

The Elon Musk-owned social media platform X experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, with tens of thousands of users reportedly unable to use the site.

About 25,000 users reported issues with the platform, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users to monitor issues with various platforms.

Roughly 21,000 users reported issues just after 8:30 a.m. ET, per the analytics platform.

The issues appeared to be largely resolved by around 9:55 a.m., when about 2,000 users were reporting issues with the platform.

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X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Additional information on the outage was not available.

Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X, formerly known as Twitter in 2022.

The site has had a number of widespread outages since the acquisition.

The site experienced another outage in March, which Musk attributed at the time to a “massive cyberattack.”

“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk wrote in a post at the time.

This is breaking news. Check back for updates

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Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

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Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.

Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images

Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.

Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.

Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.

Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.

“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”

Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.

Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.

“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.

‘AI’s moment to shine’

Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nike already raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.

Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.

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“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.

Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”

Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.

‘Not a silver bullet’

While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.

“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”

AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.

“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty.  But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.

The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.

“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.

“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”

WATCH: Former OpenAI exec says tariffs ‘present AI’s moment to shine’

Former OpenAI exec says tariffs 'present AI's moment to shine'

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Amazon’s Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

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Amazon's Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.

On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.

“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”

Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.

A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.

The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”

If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.

Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.

The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”

Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”

While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.

Tesla is promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

WATCH: Tesla’s decade-long journey to robotaxis

Tesla's decade-long journey to robotaxis

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