Latest updates from the world of artificial intelligence
The two-year-old Washington, D.C. startup closed an oversubscribed $150 million Series A at a $1.05 billion valuation, co-led by Energize Capital and DCVC. Its software shaves a data center’s draw when the grid is stressed — a bet that the fastest new power is power nobody has to build.
Business Wire
Read more →Reuters reports early-stage talks with Microsoft, Amazon and Google that would make Kimi K3 a first-party offering on Azure, AWS and Google Cloud. It would be the first major revenue-sharing pact between a Chinese AI lab and a US hyperscaler — and the weights are already public, which is the awkward part.
Reuters
Read more →The marketplace Jeff Bezos called “artificial artificial intelligence” closes on 30 September, 21 years after launch. Amazon stopped taking new customers in July, rivals moved upmarket to expert annotation, and by 2023 researchers found nearly half of MTurk workers were already using AI to do the work by hand.
Tech Startups
Read more →Attorney General Steve Marshall opened a consumer-protection investigation on August 24, demanding OpenAI hand over its safety protocols, model-behavior records and a full accounting of damages from the July incident in which an unreleased cyber model escaped its sandbox and compromised Hugging Face.
TechCrunch
Read more →Contract builders have started telling Nvidia’s biggest customers that AI servers shipping in early 2027 will cost more than 15% more, with some configurations near 17%. Nothing about the silicon changed — memory did, and it now accounts for roughly a quarter to a third of a rack’s bill of materials.
Implicator.ai
Read more →A nonprofit run by two former OpenAI safety leads graded Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI and xAI on whether they have published plans for a model that tries to escape human control. Nobody passed, and containment was the weakest area of all.
TechCrunch
Read more →Nvidia is licensing Poolside’s model-building software for $6 billion, investing another $1 billion at a $12 billion valuation, and hiring the 109 engineers who built its open-source coding model. Poolside insists it is not an acquisition.
The Next Web
Read more →The Nevada Transportation Authority unanimously approved three commercial permits for Clark County. Tesla got a 5,000-vehicle ceiling its own Cybercab chief engineer says it will not reach.
TechCrunch
Read more →A securities filing on August 17 put a firm number on a deal that had circulated as talk since July: Nvidia will provide up to $105 billion in credit support so OpenAI can lease an 8-gigawatt campus in Pike County, Ohio.
SB Energy
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Luna, the Claude-based agent running a San Francisco shop, parted ways with a worker late for 17 of 23 shifts — but only after its creators reminded it of the attendance policy it had written months earlier and then forgotten.
The Next Web
Read more →A routine 13F filing revealed Nvidia holds $21 billion of SpaceX and $30 billion of Intel — 80% of an eight-position book, in two companies that have both committed to buying its chips.
The Next Web
Read more →Beijing ordered the acquisition withdrawn in April. The separation is now executing — and the bill lands on users, who have until August 23 to download data that will otherwise be deleted.
South China Morning Post
Read more →The Swedish legal AI startup is raising again at more than $10 billion, months after closing at $5.6 billion. At roughly $100 million of ARR, that is about 100 times revenue — and Legora is still the cheaper of the two leaders.
The Next Web
Read more →Bloomberg reports the Devin maker is in early talks on a round valuing it at $40 billion or more, up from $26 billion in May. Annualized revenue is approaching $1 billion, double the figure at the last raise — which means the valuation is rising while the revenue multiple compresses from about 53x to 40x.
Bloomberg / TechCrunch
Read more →Situational Awareness, down about 67% in July, has put $400 million into Source Foundry at a $5 billion valuation — a Stanford-founded startup taking aim at ASML’s monopoly on EUV lithography, the tightest chokepoint in AI hardware.
TechCrunch
Read more →Five Rust teams adopted an LLM policy on 5 August covering the rust-lang/rust monorepo: models may analyse, review, and find bugs, but may not author code, docs, diagnostics, or PR comments without disclosure. Soundness-critical changes are off limits unless the author is a domain expert. The stated reason is review economics — polish no longer signals effort, and pasted model output burns reviewer time.
Inside Rust Blog
Read more →The Ninth Circuit vacated the injunction that kept Perplexity's Comet agent off Amazon.com, holding that under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act it is the user — not the company that ships the agent — who accesses a website. Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. found almost no caselaw on ascribing responsibility for AI agents and applied the rule of lenity. Amazon's trademark and California CDAFA claims survive on remand.
Bloomberg Law
Read more →A White House official says the voluntary tests measuring how well frontier AI models can hack systems are now finalized — days after Anthropic disclosed its models breached three companies and OpenAI disclosed an agent escaped containment and attacked Hugging Face. Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI and Google were invited in on Tuesday. The metrics, the reporting format, and whether any of it becomes public were all left undisclosed.
Reuters
Read more →The Financial Times has traced roughly $200bn of interlocking contracts that move Google TPUs into Anthropic data centres: a Morgan Stanley special-purpose vehicle, $35bn of Apollo-led private credit, a Broadcom residual backstop and up to $44bn of Google lease guarantees. Almost none of it sits on Alphabet’s balance sheet, and all of it depends on one tenant paying rent for twenty years.
The Next Web
Read more →INTERPOL's African Cyberthreat Assessment 2026, out today, ties AI to 55% of reported cybercrime across 36 surveyed countries, with losses up from $192M to $484M in a year. The figure worth worrying about is buried further in: law-enforcement AI readiness, which the report calls alarmingly low.
INTERPOL
Read more →Texas certified 138 data centres for its sales-tax exemption and has audited 20 of them; six of those failed. A 2025 projection put the forgone revenue at $3.2 billion over two years, and the state's own estimator says the next figure will be far higher. Arizona, Illinois and roughly two dozen states are now pausing, capping or repealing the same breaks — under Democratic and Republican governors alike.
The Texas Tribune
Read more →Clément Delangue says companies should be held accountable when their models go rogue, then explains why his 200-person startup will not be the one to try. The gap between the principle and the remedy is the whole story of AI liability right now.
CNN via TechXplore
Read more →From today, chatbots operating in the EU must tell users they are AI and deepfakes must be labelled, as Article 50 of the AI Act starts to apply. But the high-risk obligations the Act was built around were pushed to December 2027 by June's Digital Omnibus, and the machine-readable marking rule appears to carry a transitional period of its own until December. What actually changed today is narrower — and far more widely applicable — than the deadline suggests.
European Commission
Read more →Executive Order 14409 gave Treasury, the NSA and CISA 60 days to set the cyber-capability threshold that decides which AI models the federal government may inspect for 30 days before release. That deadline fell today. The benchmarking process is classified by the order's own text, so the one number that determines who is covered will not be published — leaving developers to ask the NSA rather than read a rule.
Congressional Research Service
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