OpenAI has acquired the team behind Crossing Minds, an AI startup specializing in real-time recommendation and personalization platforms for e-commerce. Crossing Minds, which raised over $13.5 million from investors including Index Ventures, Shopify, Plug and Play, and Radical Ventures, developed technology to enhance personalized product and content suggestions. This acquisition is expected to bolster OpenAI's capabilities in e-commerce personalization and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for its AI models, potentially improving ChatGPT's shopping features with smarter, privacy-conscious recommendations. Concurrently, OpenAI has significantly tightened its security measures in response to foreign espionage threats, particularly after the Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a rival AI model suspected of copying OpenAI's technology. The company has implemented biometric fingerprint scanning for office access, isolated sensitive computer systems by default, introduced strict information tenting policies, and enhanced physical data center security. Additionally, OpenAI has hired new security personnel and engaged military experts to safeguard its intellectual property and model weights. These measures reflect the growing importance of protecting AI innovations amid increasing international competition and security concerns as OpenAI prepares for the launch of GPT-5.