OpenAI AI Updates: March 28, 2026

1. SoftBank Secures Record $40B Bridge Loan to Fund $30B OpenAI Investment

SoftBank secured a $40 billion unsecured bridge loan from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Mizuho, Sumitomo Mitsui, and MUFG to fund a $30 billion follow-on investment in OpenAI as part of a $120 billion funding round valuing the company at $850 billion. The 12-month loan is intended to bridge until OpenAI’s anticipated late-2026 IPO. SoftBank shares fell sharply on the news, with the stock down nearly 45% from October 2025 highs; Jefferies downgraded to “Underperform” and S&P revised SoftBank’s outlook to “Negative,” citing extreme concentration risk in a single pre-profitable entity. Source

2. Codex Ships Broad Release with First-Class Plugin System

OpenAI launched a plugin system for Codex, its cloud-based coding agent, five months after Anthropic shipped similar functionality for Claude Code. Plugins bundle skills (reusable workflows with natural language instructions and scripts), MCP server integrations, and team-synced configurations into installable packages. OpenAI provides over a dozen prepackaged integrations including Slack, Figma, Notion, Gmail, and Google Drive, working across the Codex app, CLI, and IDE extensions. Sub-agents now use readable path-based addresses for structured inter-agent messaging in multi-agent workflows. Source