The CEO of a flying car company backed by Larry Page has left the company.

Ken Karklin, who was Pivotal’s CEO for more than four years, left the role this week, according to a press release. Pivotal said Karklin is “pursuing new endeavors” but didn’t offer any other information about the executive’s departure from the electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) firm.

“Leading Pivotal has been the privilege of my career. Together, we’ve moved beyond the promise of light eVTOL and proved it out in practice,” Karklin said in a statement. “This industry has moved past prototypes and press releases; it’s now operating in the real world, under real constraints, with real consequences for the future of Advanced Air Mobility. As I turn to new endeavors, I do so knowing the foundation we built here will help carry this industry forward.”

Karklin will be replaced on an interim basis by Mike Ross, an aviation executive who joined Pivotal’s board of directors in November 2025. Karklin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Karklin’s departure comes two years after Pivotal started sales of Helix, its first lightweight electric personal aircraft. The single-seat aircraft doesn’t require a pilot’s license to fly and starts at around $200,000.

“Ken’s leadership over the past four years has been instrumental in bringing Pivotal to where it is today. Our team, our priorities, and our roadmap remain steady through this transition,” Ross said in a statement. “I’ve had the honor of working closely with Ken as a Board member and watching Pivotal’s disciplined approach to safety, engineering, and accessibility deliver on the vision of electric VTOL flight. I look forward to working with the team and guiding the company forward as we bring our fourth-generation Helix aircraft to market.”

Pivotal has also spent years developing an aircraft called BlackFly that is aimed at defense and first responder use cases. Last month, BlackFly was used to respond to an emergency in North Carolina for the first time ever. The company says it beat an ambulance responding in parallel to the call by 20 minutes. BlackFly has flown more than 10,000 times, according to Pivotal.

Pivotal is one of a number of companies in the space that was selected for the Federal Aviation Administration’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, which was created to increase testing of these types of aircraft around the country.

A social media account affiliated with Chinese state broadcaster CCTV has accused US AI labs of applying a double standard to monitoring and data collection, singling out Anthropic for criticism.

The critique comes amid reports that the two countries could hold talks on AI governance and deployment before Xi Jinping’s planned US visit on Sept. 24.

According to Bloomberg, the criticism was published through Yuyuan Tantian, a social media account affiliated with Chinese state broadcaster CCTV.

The commentators accused Anthropic of trying to shape global AI rules through lobbying and warnings about militarized AI development. The commentary said Anthropic has a “desire for control hidden in its saviour complex” and called on the US government to distinguish between genuine security threats and legitimate technological competition.

Anthropic has been one of the more accusatory AI labs when it comes to Chinese AI model development. It has accused Alibaba, DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax of “illicit model distillation.” This is a process that involves a developer using thousands of bot accounts to generate millions of exchanges with a larger AI model, in this instance Anthropic’s Opus or Fable, and then using those responses to train its own AI model.

Model distillation is a widely used training technique, including among US AI developers. Anthropic argues that using deceptive accounts to extract millions of Claude responses violates its terms and amounts to industrial-scale model theft.

Some AI leaders see an opening for cooperation

Anthropic has taken a particularly confrontational public position, while an industry coalition has urged US policymakers to avoid broad restrictions on open-weight AI models. Even Anthropic’s main rival, OpenAI, has argued for continued access and acknowledged that some of the AI models coming out of China are impressive.

“I have always believed US/China AI safety collaboration would be desirable but thought it was unlikely to happen,” said Dean Ball, OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, on X. “In the past few months, though, the ground has shifted. There is a window of opportunity.”

Interest in Chinese AI models has grown as developers and businesses pay closer attention to deployment costs. While Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google remain among the performance leaders, some Chinese open-weight models offer competitive results on particular tasks at less than one-tenth of the token price of some leading US models.

Chinese AI growth intensifies policy scrutiny

The growing adoption of Chinese models has also intensified policy scrutiny in both countries. In the US, several officials have warned of sanctions against Chinese AI labs if they continue to distill from frontier US AI models. The Chinese government has reportedly looked into export controls for its frontier models, using a similar tactic to the US government to delay releases and potentially block exports altogether.

At a time of increased tension between the two countries, the talks could turn down the temperature and allow both sides to reach some form of understanding. Similar tensions arose when the US government banned exports of Nvidia GPUs and other crucial data center technology, before an agreement was reached allowing Chinese companies to buy some advanced chipsets.

However, that still prevented Chinese companies from acquiring the leading-edge chipsets available to US AI labs. An agreement on AI governance and deployment that similarly favors US companies is unlikely to go as far, given China’s own leverage through its increasingly popular AI models.

For enterprise AI teams, the outcome could affect which models remain available across borders, how providers monitor access to their systems, and whether businesses can combine Chinese open-weight models with US commercial platforms. The talks could therefore help determine whether the two countries’ AI ecosystems remain largely separate or operate under rules that permit more cross-border access and development.

Read more: The White House has accused Chinese AI companies of using model distillation to close the gap with leading US systems, raising the prospect of further trade restrictions.

AI training-data startup AfterQuery has reportedly raised a round that valued it at $3.2 billion. This just five months after announcing its $30 million Series A at a $300 million valuation in April.

That’s more than a 10x increase in less than half a year and, according to Y Combinator partner Gustaf Alströmer, the fastest that any startup has gone from launch to unicorn status in the accelerator’s history. AfterQuery’s founders, today 22 and 23 years old, attended Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 cohort, just 18 months ago.

In April, the San Francisco startup said it had reached an annualized revenue run rate of $100 million and that it was working with many of the biggest labs. It has named companies including Nvidia, Legora and the Korean AI lab Motif Technologies, as customers.

AfterQuery is among the new crop of startups following in the footsteps of Mercor and Scale that employ knowledge professionals like doctors, lawyers, and other specialists, to do model training. However, rather than ensuring that models answer questions accurately, AfterQuery trains models and agents on how to work like professionals would to complete tasks — what the company describes as “encoding the patterns, decisions, and reasoning of the world’s best practitioners.”

Forbes first reported on the round. AfterQuery could not be immediately reached for comment.