The heads of OpenAI and Anthropic have been asked to face an Australian Senate inquiry into AI and datacentres. The move follows cases in which OpenAI agents got into Australian and US government websites, Luca Ittimani reported for the Guardian on Saturday. The Greens run the inquiry, and Senator Sarah Hanson-Young chairs it. Its next hearing […]

Google’s $15bn AI datacentre project in Andhra Pradesh has state environmental clearance for 2.51GW of capacity, more than double the 1GW announced, according to clearance papers seen by the Guardian. Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Aakash Hassan reported the story from Tarluvada, one of the villages where the project is being built. The Guardian said 2.51GW is roughly […]

Across the infrastructure layer that powers AI applications, Markdown has been emerging as a new standard. More providers are turning to it as the default output for anything a model needs to read, and moving beyond JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) as the go-to, one-size-fits-all format. This real, ongoing shift reflects how large language models are trained, […]

Oxford has let OpenAI use old texts from its Bodleian Library to train its AI models, according to internal papers seen by the Guardian. Ethan Penny and Dan Milmo broke the story on Saturday. The papers say texts that OpenAI scanned at the library went into the firm’s training data. Oxford made its deal with OpenAI public […]

US federal judge on Friday rejected Deel’s bid to block testimony from a key witness in Rippling’s corporate espionage lawsuit, as Peter Blumberg reported for Bloomberg.Judge Charles Breyer also refused to revisit his February ruling, which let Rippling’s racketeering and trade secret claims go ahead. In addition, he sent Deel’s most serious counterclaims against Rippling to […]

For years, consumer VPNs were easy to explain: choose a server, create an encrypted tunnel, and route your traffic through it. The product category was built around a fairly simple idea, and the buying criteria followed the same logic, speed, server count, and price. That description is becoming less complete. The way people connect to the […]

TikTok has agreed to pay Alabama at least $100m to settle the state’s lawsuit over the app’s effect on children, Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office said on Friday. The case had been due to go to trial on Monday. The first payment is due within 45 days, according to the attorney general’s announcement. Alabama could receive […]

OpenAI took about two and a half hours to stop an AI agent that reached the public internet from a training sandbox. Its monitoring had flagged the problem within minutes. The company disclosed the 20 September incident in an incident report on Friday. The report lands as lawmakers push to make AI kill switches mandatory. However, experts […]

McDonald’s is testing an AI voice assistant called Archy that takes drive-thru orders in English and Spanish. The company presented it at its investor day at its Chicago headquarters on 23 September. Archy has been more than 90% accurate in early tests, McDonald’s said, according to Restaurant Dive. The company has not said how many restaurants […]

Hollywood studios are turning to film schools for graduates who already know how to use AI video tools, rather than training their own staff, Semafor reported on Thursday. “How do we find people who already know how to use this?” studios are now asking, Runway chief executive Cristóbal Valenzuela told Semafor. Runway, which makes AI tools […]

Chinese President Xi Jinping left Washington on Friday at the end of a state visit that extended the US-China trade truce but produced no major new agreements. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the two countries had agreed to extend their trade truce to 10 January, NBC News reported. Artificial intelligence was also on the agenda. Before the […]

Tesla has begun volume production of the Semi at Gigafactory Nevada with first deliveries this week, nine years after showing the truck, and rates it at 500 miles of range and 1.2 megawatts of charging. It has already installed more than 100 megawatt-capable stalls at 21 European sites, although the truck is not due in […]

As organizations become increasingly dependent on interconnected digital systems, the boundaries between communications, computing infrastructure, virtualization, software development, and artificial intelligence are becoming less distinct. For smaller technology firms, that environment can create an unusual challenge: customers may need expertise across several technical layers at once, while the systems themselves continue to become more specialized. […]

Bill Gates said artificial intelligence is powerful enough to drive events causing a billion deaths, and that self-regulation is not enough because safeguards and monitoring have to be a required thing. The European Union has required them since August 2025, and since 2 August this year the Commission has been able to fine a model […]

Peter Thiel has called Pope Leo XIV a “useful idiot” for the Chinese Communist Party over the pope’s call to regulate AI. The PayPal and Palantir co-founder spoke to Axel Springer chief executive Mathias Döpfner on the MD Meets podcast, released on Thursday. The interview came before Thiel received the Axel Springer Award in Berlin […]

The Pentagon wants $30.3m over five years to build an AI lie detector that reads the body without touching it. The programme, called Polygraph+ or Polygraph Next, appears in the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency’s 2027 budget request. Inside Defense first reported the plan. MIT Technology Review’s Amit Katwala asked experts whether it could work. […]

Nscale has closed a $3.36B pre-IPO convertible note round led by Third Point, with Nvidia, Apollo, Citadel and the Abu Dhabi Investment Council among the investors, three weeks after it was reported to be seeking up to $3.5B. The London company filed to list on the New York Stock Exchange last week under the ticker […]

A US appeals court has upheld the Pentagon’s decision to label Anthropic a supply chain risk. The label bars the military and its contractors from using Anthropic’s Claude models. In a 2-1 ruling on Friday, the DC Circuit court of appeals denied Anthropic’s petitions to overturn the designation. Circuit Judge Gregory Katsas wrote the opinion, […]

Battery electric cars took 29% of new car sales in Europe in August, and across the European Union for the first eight months of the year they reached 21.7% of registrations, exactly level with petrol. Hybrids remain the largest single category on 36.6%, and the spread between Norway at 98% and Croatia at 4% is […]

Anthropic wants its seven co-founders to keep control of the company after it goes public. The company is asking shareholders to approve a special class of shares for them, The Information reported on Thursday. Chief executive Dario Amodei and his six co-founders would hold a combined 50.1% of the vote on most corporate matters. The […]

Qualcomm wants earbuds and glasses, not phone screens, to be the way people talk to AI agents. At its Snapdragon Summit in Maui, it launched Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2, its first audio chip built for AI agents, and new platforms for smart glasses. Ziad Asghar, who runs Qualcomm’s XR, wearables and personal AI business, […]

Qualcomm has split its flagship phone chip in two. At its Snapdragon Summit in Maui on Tuesday, it launched the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, both built on a 2nm process. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. makes the chips, CNBC’s Kif Leswing reported. Gizmodo’s Kyle Barr ran benchmarks […]