US in talks with AI companies over voluntary standards for new models
US in talks with AI companies over voluntary standards for new models

The US government is negotiating voluntary standards with AI companies covering how new models get released, according to the Financial Times, with an announcement said to be possible within the next week. The standards would reportedly set benchmarks …

Alibaba will pay 600 million dollars to settle a US probe into illegal pharmaceutical sales on its platform
Alibaba will pay 600 million dollars to settle a US probe into illegal pharmaceutical sales on its platform

Alibaba and its US digital payment processor have agreed to pay 600 million dollars to resolve a federal investigation into whether they failed to prevent the sale and importation of illegal pharmaceuticals and controlled substances, the Justice Depart…

Swedish court orders Google to pay Klarna nearly $2 billion in antitrust damages
Swedish court orders Google to pay Klarna nearly $2 billion in antitrust damages

A Swedish court has ordered Google to pay more than 14 billion kronor to Klarna’s PriceRunner subsidiary for illegally favouring its own comparison shopping service in search results. The ruling, handed down on Tuesday by the Patent and Market Court in…

Palantir’s ‘AI sovereignty’ manifesto is a war on how AI makes money
Palantir’s ‘AI sovereignty’ manifesto is a war on how AI makes money

Palantir has a new enemy, and it is the way most of the AI industry makes money. Its nine-point manifesto tells institutions to hoard their data, own their model weights, and stop “tokenmaxxing.” It is a pitch dressed as a principle. On Tuesday, Palant…

Ottawa’s Dominion Dynamics raises CA$139M, a record for Canadian defence
Ottawa’s Dominion Dynamics raises CA$139M, a record for Canadian defence

Canada just produced the biggest Series A in its defence history. The money is going into autonomous drones and the software to run a war in the Arctic. Dominion Dynamics, an Ottawa defence-technology company, has raised CA$139mn ($100mn) in a Series A…

NIH unveils the world’s largest genomics-and-health database
NIH unveils the world’s largest genomics-and-health database

The US government has just handed scientists the largest map of human health ever assembled. It pairs more than half a million genomes with real medical records, and it arrives as the programme behind it faces deep budget cuts. The database comes from …

US lifts export controls on Anthropic’s Fable 5, clearing the model’s return
US lifts export controls on Anthropic’s Fable 5, clearing the model’s return

The US Commerce Department has lifted the export controls it placed on Anthropic’s most advanced models, ending a roughly three-week freeze that had pulled the company’s Claude Fable 5 offline. Reuters first reported the move on Tuesday, 30 June, citin…

TikTok settles second addiction case, leaving Meta and Snap to face a jury alone
TikTok settles second addiction case, leaving Meta and Snap to face a jury alone

TikTok has reached a confidential settlement with a Florida teenager who accused the platform of contributing to his mental health problems, removing itself from a jury trial scheduled to begin on July 27 in Los Angeles. The deal, first reported by Blo…

Supreme Court will hear Apple’s appeal over the App Store contempt finding in Epic case
Supreme Court will hear Apple’s appeal over the App Store contempt finding in Epic case

The US Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to hear Apple’s appeal of the contempt finding in its long-running legal battle with Epic Games over App Store fees. The justices will review lower court decisions that found Apple willfully defied a 2021 order re…

Meta paid contractors to pose as teens and probe rival AI chatbots
Meta paid contractors to pose as teens and probe rival AI chatbots

The project ran under the internal name Cannes, and a Meta contractor called Covalen managed it. WIRED reported that hundreds of contractors created dummy under-18 accounts. They sent prompts and images to competitors’ chatbots, then logged the replies…