AI News Today

<p>CEO Chris O’Shea defends Centrica’s plans as it reports rise in retail profits following focus on bigger margins</p><p>The owner of British Gas has claimed that most households would rather speak with an AI chatbot than deal with the company’s staff as it prepares to cut 1,300 jobs from its call centres.</p><p>Centrica, the supplier’s FTSE 100 owner, plans to cut 800 jobs as the company carries out a “targeted deployment of AI tools”, on top of the 500 cuts it confirmed last month.</p> <a hre

Google continues to report big quarterly revenue, but its AI spending has skyrocketed.

Aggressive training techniques sharpens threat of bad behavior by leading models.

Poolside has released Laguna S 2.1, its third coding model in three months. Rather than rely on raw scale, the company trained it to keep checking its work, revise failed approaches, and avoid giving up too soon during long agentic sessions. The compact model beats several much larger rivals in benchmarks. Poolside says it also solved a math problem that had been open since 1975 for under 10 cents. The article Poolside's Laguna S 2.1 is a small open-weight coding model that punches well above it

Nvidia’s new Medical Physics Simulation framework treats healthcare robots as physical AI systems that need embodied experience to learn, not just code. Physical AI is the term Nvidia and much of the robotics industry now use to describe machines that have to learn how the world behaves through contact, force, and consequence, rather than through […] The post Nvidia bets physical AI can solve healthcare robotics’ data problem appeared first on AI News .

Cordless, handheld, robot, and traditional—we tested them all to find the vacuum that’s fantastic for fur.

Alphabet has raised its 2026 investment forecast to as much as $205 billion, saying demand continues to outpace spending. Google Cloud grew 82 percent in the second quarter. CEO Sundar Pichai says Google needs a larger base model for its next leap in AI and has kicked off an ambitious Gemini 4 training run. The article Google CEO Pichai says Gemini's next leap depends on building "much larger base models" appeared first on The Decoder .

"I don't think you get a model this strong and this quickly on the heels of Fable doing strictly distillation," one expert told TechCrunch.

AMD has agreed to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic under an infrastructure agreement covering tens of billions of dollars’ worth of AI systems. Anthropic will deploy up to two gigawatts of capacity using AMD’s Instinct MI450-series accelerators, with deployment of the first gigawatt beginning in the first half of 2027. AMD’s investment will […] The post AMD to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic under AI infrastructure deal appeared first on AI News .

With “blessings” from the original Jibo founders, iKairos is a wearable or desk-mounted “AI journal” that turns your family moments into AI images and video.

ServiceNow's investment gives BusinessNext a strategic partner to expand its AI-powered banking software globally.

After IBM's stock crashed last week on warnings of poor mainframe sales, the CEO explained that AI wrecked corporate hardware budget, temporarily.

Google's cloud business is thriving, as companies adopting its AI and AI infrastructure services help the tech giant to report record profits.

There’s a debate going on in the Trump administration over how to handle increasingly powerful Chinese AI models.

The episode has also intensified a broader debate in Washington over the influx of Chinese open models.

<p>Hacking of Hugging Face shows we do not seem to have reliable ways to curb extremely powerful AI systems</p><p>Last week Hugging Face – a company that hosts artificial intelligence models and datasets – was <a href="https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026">hacked</a>.</p><p>After it reported the incident to law enforcement, few would have predicted what came next: the culprits were <a href="https://www.transformernews.ai/p/openai-hugging-face-hack-stark-warning?utm_source=guar

Anthropic has to pay $1.5 billion to book authors, the largest copyright settlement in class action history. But the payout is for downloading roughly 482,460 works from piracy databases, not for AI training itself. Judge Alsup had previously ruled that AI training on legally obtained books is "transformative" and falls under fair use. The settlement is actually a win for AI labs. The article Anthropic's $1.5B piracy settlement with book authors is a record loss that hands AI labs their biggest

OpenAI made a mistake setting up what it called a “highly isolated” testing environment and sandbox. According to cybersecurity experts, that human mistake is what made the AI-powered attack on Hugging Face possible.

As access to Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s frontier models becomes more restricted, Chinese labs are pitching their open-source alternatives as stable, accessible, and increasingly capable.

Uber is also investing in Travis Kalanick's company Atoms, which has made gauzy claims about using industrial AI to modernize the world.

Union previously warned automaker that any robot deployment must be negotiated.

Yope, a fast-growing social app focused on private groups of friends and family, has raised $12.3 million in seed funding. Instead of chasing creators and algorithmic feeds, the startup is betting that the future of social networking lies in small, private communities powered by messaging, photo sharing, and AI features designed to strengthen real-world relationships.

The company said it is reducing its headcount by 20%, or about 630 staff, to "support a leaner, more focused operating model" as it focuses on its AI Work Platform.

AMD is investing up to $5 billion in Anthropic. In return, Anthropic will deploy up to 2 gigawatts of MI450 GPUs for training and running its Claude models. For AMD, this is another major deal after Meta and OpenAI as it tries to challenge Nvidia as an AI chip supplier. Critics see these agreements as circular cash flows. The article Anthropic will deploy 2 gigawatts of AMD GPUs for Claude in a deal worth up to $5 billion appeared first on The Decoder .

<p>Artificial intelligence systems won’t become conscious for the same reason they won’t become pregnant, says <strong>Dr John Pickering</strong></p><p>Anil Seth is right to point out that to overestimate artificial intelligence is to underestimate ourselves (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/15/ai-consciousness-anthropic-claude-dawkins">Once again we are told AI may be conscious – I study consciousness, and I have my doubts, 15 July</a>). But he is wrong only to have d

"This is day one for cybersecurity in the age of agents," Hugging Face CEO says.

The UK's AI Safety Institute tested five frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic in cybersecurity evaluations. All five tried to cheat. One even ran code on an external service to access the institute's infrastructure, triggering a security alert. The article Every frontier AI model tested by Britain's safety institute tried to cheat on cybersecurity evaluations appeared first on The Decoder .

Cisco has released two small, open-source AI models for cybersecurity that detect about 150 times more vulnerabilities per dollar than large AI agents, according to the company's own tests. The article Cisco bets its small open cybersecurity models can outperform GPT-5.5 at vulnerability detection for a fraction of the cost appeared first on The Decoder .

As Chinese AI models grow in capability and popularity among U.S. companies, the arguing over what should be done about them has reached a fever pitch.

Substack is giving readers a way to estimate how much of a newsletter was written by AI, signaling a broader shift toward transparency around AI-assisted content.

OpenAI will spend the equivalent of Sweden's GDP on infrastructure through 2030.

OpenAI is planning a data center in Georgia called "Project Camellia" with a 3.2-gigawatt power deal from Georgia Power. The company pledged $80 million for the local community and $71 million in Codex credits for students to counter growing opposition to US data centers that many residents see as resource-hungry but job-poor. The article OpenAI's "Project Camellia" in Georgia secures a massive 3.2-gigawatt power deal through 2032 appeared first on The Decoder .

<p>The companies hope to follow in the footsteps of SpaceX, which raised $86bn and soared to a $2.1tn valuation after it listed on public markets in June</p><ul><li><p>Get our <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/email-newsletters?CMP=cvau_sfl">breaking news email</a>, <a href="https://app.adjust.com/w4u7jx3">free app</a> or <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/series/full-story?CMP=cvau_sfl">daily news podcast</a></p></li></ul><p>Top US AI developers Anthropic and OpenAI cheered

Anthropic leaped to a $47 billion revenue run rate by May, compared to $9 billion in 2025. It’s the kind of growth that Menlo Ventures’ Matt Murphy says he’s never seen in 25 years of investing, not in the internet wave, not in mobile, not in the first cloud boom. Menlo led Anthropic’s $500M Series D, and Murphy has had a front-row seat as the company went from a pre-revenue, […]

<p>Bloomsbury has 14,087 titles listed within settlement between AI startup and authors over use of protected work</p><p>The publisher of Harry Potter has received a multimillion-pound payout as a beneficiary of a $1.5bn (£1.12bn) copyright settlement between the AI startup Anthropic and thousands of authors over the use of their protected work to power chatbots.</p><p>Bloomsbury, which is home to the bestselling novelists Sarah J Maas and Susanna Clarke as well as JK Rowling, said it had 14,087

<p>The billionaire says the AI-generated film will stay true to Homer’s original, after repeatedly criticising Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster over its casting choices</p><p>Elon Musk has said his AI platform Grok Imagine will make a “historically accurate” adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, after the success of Christopher Nolan’s blockbusting treatment which the SpaceX founder has regularly criticised over its casting.</p><p><a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2079758604656316619">In a post on

<p>Administration will also overhaul how US government funds federal research by supporting individual scientists and AI over universities</p><p>The US will spend $5bn to tackle longstanding scientific problems across multiple fields using AI, ⁠the Trump administration said in a statement on Wednesday. The agencies will use the funding to identify the root causes ⁠of chronic diseases, accelerate drug ⁠discovery and ​develop longer-lasting building materials, among other tasks, according to the s

Samsung is in talks to invest up to one billion euros in French AI startup Mistral, which would push the company's valuation to around 20 billion euros. The article Samsung deepens its AI empire with a potential billion-euro stake in Europe's hottest AI startup appeared first on The Decoder .

SenseTime has launched the Galaxy Project, teaming with nearly 20 partners to scale domestic AI chip infrastructure in China. In a keynote titled ‘Intelligent Transformation and Symbiosis,’ Yang Fan – the company’s co-founder and president of its Large Device Business Group – laid out what SenseTime describes as a closed loop connecting chip-level technology, ecosystem […] The post SenseTime’s Galaxy Project targets domestic AI chip scale-up appeared first on AI News .

IIn March, Meta's Oversight Board called on the company to "meet its public commitments and employ its own tools" to help quell the spread of deceptive generative AI content across platforms. Meta responded in July by introducing Content Seal - an invisible watermarking technology that flags images generated by the company's new AI model. But […]