South Korea bets $880bn to win the AI era
South Korea bets $880bn to win the AI era

South Korea has placed its biggest bet yet on the AI era. The plan commits at least $880bn over a decade to chips, data centres and robots. It is the boldest South Korea AI investment to date, and the government says speed is now the only way to surviv…

Trump threatens 100% tariffs over digital services taxes
Trump threatens 100% tariffs over digital services taxes

The ink was barely dry. The EU had just signed a trade deal with Washington. A day later, Trump threatened to blow a hole in it. On Friday, the president posted the threat on Truth Social. Any country that imposes a digital services tax on US firms, he…

Nearly 400 local newspapers sue OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright
Nearly 400 local newspapers sue OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright

A coalition that owns nearly 400 local US newspapers has sued OpenAI and Microsoft. The publishers call AI training on their reporting a death knell for local journalism. It is the largest copyright case the local press has brought yet. Local newspaper…

Australia moves to double Big Tech fines and arm its regulator over the under-16 ban
Australia moves to double Big Tech fines and arm its regulator over the under-16 ban

Six months after Australia became the first country to bar under-16s from social media, the government has concluded that the platforms are not taking the rule seriously enough, and is preparing to make the consequences of ignoring it considerably more…

California will tax downloaded software for the first time as part of a $351.7 billion budget deal
California will tax downloaded software for the first time as part of a $351.7 billion budget deal

California Governor Gavin Newsom and top Democratic legislators agreed on a $351.7 billion state budget that will extend sales tax to prewritten software downloaded from the web. The tax is expected to raise $900 million for the state and another $1.1 …

Silicon Valley backed Trump to kill AI regulation, now the industry is begging for rules
Silicon Valley backed Trump to kill AI regulation, now the industry is begging for rules

The AI industry that donated heavily to elect Donald Trump on the promise he would leave the technology alone is now asking for formal regulation, Politico reported on Friday. Executives at frontier AI companies told the outlet they view the administra…

A Tokyo startup and a Beijing security firm just launched AI tools to fill the gap Anthropic’s export ban created
A Tokyo startup and a Beijing security firm just launched AI tools to fill the gap Anthropic’s export ban created

Two Asian AI companies launched products this week that position themselves as alternatives to Anthropic’s suspended Mythos and Fable 5 models. Tokyo-based Sakana AI released Fugu, an orchestration model it says matches Fable 5 on key benchmarks, while…

Apple wants US approval to buy chips from CXMT as memory prices quadruple
Apple wants US approval to buy chips from CXMT as memory prices quadruple

Apple has been lobbying Commerce Department officials and other members of the Trump administration for approval to buy memory chips from ChangXin Memory Technologies, according to the Financial Times. CXMT is China’s largest DRAM manufacturer and sits…

US clears Anthropic to restore Mythos 5 to a small group of cyber defenders, but Fable 5 stays dark
US clears Anthropic to restore Mythos 5 to a small group of cyber defenders, but Fable 5 stays dark

The US government has cleared Anthropic to restore access to Mythos 5, its most powerful cybersecurity model, for a select group of trusted partners. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote in a letter to Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown that the company…

OpenAI releases its most powerful AI model to just 20 partners, each one approved by the US government
OpenAI releases its most powerful AI model to just 20 partners, each one approved by the US government

OpenAI has released GPT-5.6 Sol, its most powerful model, to roughly 20 partners whose names were individually approved by the US government. The release is the first time an American AI company has launched a frontier model under a government-managed …