The US is paying an AI startup $500M to break China’s grip on chip materials

The US government has just become a shareholder in an AI startup, in exchange for a bet that artificial intelligence can break China’s hold on the materials inside every chip factory. The Department [...]

The bottleneck in geothermal moved from the drill to the turbine. This SpaceX alum raised $22M to fix it

The race to power artificial intelligence has a problem that solar panels and wind turbines cannot fix on their own: the electricity has to be there at 3am, in still air, under cloud. Critical Energy, [...]

Anthropic and Google DeepMind called for a US-led AI coalition at the G7, and Canada said yes

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis used a closed-door lunch at the G7 summit on Wednesday to call for a US-led coalition that would shape international rules and standar [...]

ECB’s Lagarde says AI could trigger financial crises and calls for Cold War-style non-proliferation governance

ECB President Christine Lagarde warned on Wednesday that artificial intelligence could trigger dangerous financial crises and called for global AI governance modelled on the Cold War-era non-prolifera [...]

Retailers want AI-generated ads exempt from EU transparency rules

Europe’s retailers would like the law to make an exception for them. AI-generated advertising should be carved out of the European Union’s incoming transparency rules, a retail association has arg [...]

a16z has raised $1.1bn to invest in the physical layer of AI

Andreessen Horowitz has closed a $1.1bn fund that will invest exclusively in hardware. The Machine Age Fund, announced on Friday, covers the physical layer artificial intelligence runs on, from chips [...]

Obsidian Security hits a $1.1bn valuation as AI reshapes the threat

Obsidian Security has become the latest cybersecurity company to be repriced upward by artificial intelligence. The SaaS-security firm has raised a fresh funding of $85 Million Series D at a $1.1bn va [...]

Researchers introduce Self-Harness, a framework that lets AI agents rewrite their own rules, boosting performance up to 60%

Not every company can or should build their own frontier AI language model. However, the harness controlling the model is something that most enterprises can and should customize for their specific pu [...]

BP, Walmart and 7-Eleven sued over AI-set petrol prices in California

A group of California drivers has sued six of the country’s biggest fuel retailers, accusing them of using an artificial-intelligence pricing tool to coordinate the cost of petrol and keep it artifi [...]