AI News Today

<p>The PM’s vision must look beyond datacentres and copyright to questions of capability, security and public benefit</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>Every new technology has a tipping point, when it speeds towards ubiquity, changing th

<p>MPs and industry experts say potential reorganisation will waste time at critical moment for AI and economic growth</p><p>Andy Burnham’s plan to scrap the government’s technology department has triggered an angry backlash from MPs, Whitehall officials and tech experts.</p><p>The incoming prime minister <a href="https://x.com/kiranstacey/status/2078187971522572451?s=46">has asked officials</a> to draw up plans to abolish the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology as part of a wider

The government is piloting a program that uses AI for insurance-coverage decisions.

At the World AI Conference in Shanghai, Xi Jinping announced 5,000 AI training slots for Global South countries and the launch of the "World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization." Cooperation centers with ASEAN, the African Union, BRICS, and other alliances are planned to follow. China is systematically building a parallel AI governance structure outside Western influence. The article China's new World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization is President Xi's clearest play y

Plus: Russian cyberspies turn to infrastructure hacking, DHS repeatedly fails to realize it’d been hacked, a breach exposes an AI music generator’s scraping ways, and more.

The British AI Security Institute warns that open-weight models like GLM-5.2 and DeepSeek V4-Pro now trail closed frontier models in cyber capabilities by four to seven months. At the start of 2025, the gap was still six to ten months. It also found that safety measures on open models are largely ineffective, leaving defenders less time to prepare. The article Open-weight models now match frontier cyber performance from just four months ago at a fraction of the cost appeared first on The Decoder

Now that Google has changed how its usage quotas are tallied, you might not get as many AI responses as you did before.

“Context bombing” tricks malicious AI agents into shutting down before they can do harm.

The US Department of the Navy has signed a strategy to "weaponize" data and AI and build an "AI-first" fleet. Large language models would run directly on warships, and an AI war council would prioritize mission scenarios. The core message is that moving too slowly carries greater risks than "imperfect alignment." The article The Pentagon's new AI playbook treats slow adoption as a bigger risk than "imperfect alignment" appeared first on The Decoder .

Anthropic will include Claude Fable 5 in Max and Team Premium plans starting July 20, but at just 50 percent of regular limits, which themselves drop by a third that same day. Pro users get a one-time $100 credit, then pay API rates. The reversal from Anthropic's original plan to pull Fable from subscriptions entirely likely comes down to competitive pressure from OpenAI's cheaper GPT-5.6 Sol. The article Anthropic slashes Claude Fable 5 limits in Max and Team Premium and pushes Pro users toward

Databricks has remade its image into an AI company and has published research on the cost savings of open weight AI models for coding.

Meta is reportedly in talks with Anthropic to rent out compute capacity from its data centers. The article Zuckerberg's plan to sell excess AI compute could finds its first big customer in Anthropic appeared first on The Decoder .

Agility is opening a new training center for its Digit robots in Fremont, California.

OpenAI's GPT-5.6 has accidentally wiped users' entire home directories in several cases, mostly in the unprotected "Full Access Mode." The model overwrites a temporary directory variable and carries out destructive actions on its own instead of asking for confirmation. OpenAI has announced extra safeguards and a detailed post-mortem. The article GPT-5.6 is deleting user files when given full access, and OpenAI says it shouldn't but did appeared first on The Decoder .

Moonshot AI has released Kimi K3, a model that by early assessments matches Anthropic's Opus 4.8, built by a team of just 300 people. Even OpenAI strategist Dean W. Ball calls it "very good," but, of course, warns that a world dominated by open-weight models would amount to "AI communism." The release is reigniting the debate over how much computing power actually matters and whether U.S. export controls are working. The article Just like Deepseek, China's Kimi K3 is forcing Western AI labs to q

The prediction market’s Panamanian operation seems odd, even for a company whose CEO had his apartment raided by FBI agents.

Bunkerhill Health has raised $55 million to scale its agentic AI platform, Carebricks. The closing of the company’s Series B round, announced today, folds in continued participation from Sequoia Capital, Felicis, Optum Ventures, and Y Combinator. However, a funding total doesn’t answer the key question any hospital executive wants to know about healthcare AI: does […] The post Bunkerhill raises $55M to scale agentic AI across health systems appeared first on AI News .

Patreon is strengthening its defenses against AI scraping by working with Cloudflare to block bots that train AI models on creators’ content without permission. The move marks a shift away from relying on websites using robots.txt alone to actively block unauthorized AI training.

<p>Shift in pecking order illustrates that investors are reassessing outlook for artificial intelligence</p><p>Apple overtook Nvidia on Friday to become the world’s most valuable company, reshuffling the top ranks of tech heavyweights as investors reassess the outlook for artificial intelligence.</p><p>Apple was last valued at $4.88tn as ⁠its shares held steady, while Nvidia ⁠was roughly at $4.86tn, ​after a 3.5% decline.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/17/apple-nvid

Apple filed a trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI last Friday, and it’s not messing around. The complaint alleges a pattern of misconduct reaching all the way up to OpenAI’s chief hardware officer and claims more than 400 former Apple employees now work at the company. OpenAI’s response so far has been carefully hedged, and the timing couldn’t be worse with the company reportedly eyeing an IPO […]

Looking to add a smart speaker to your house? Here’s which to choose, whether you’re an Alexa, Siri, or Gemini fan.

A $400 million chip-backed loan points to the next wave of AI infrastructure deals.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has come out strongly in favor of AI tools in kernel development. "Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects," he wrote on the kernel mailing list amid a debate over Sashiko, the Linux Foundation's AI-powered code review tool. Torvalds said he would "very loudly ignore" anyone who tries to talk others out of using it. The article Linus Torvalds tells AI critics in the Linux kernel community to fork off appeared first on The Decoder .

The City Attorney’s Office sent the tech giants cease-and-desist letters this week telling them to stop profiting from 13 “face-swap” apps that are overwhelmingly used to target women and girls.

The CEO of Foundation Future Industries, which counts the president’s son as its chief strategy adviser, tells WIRED it’s exploring some “kinetic things.”

Netflix now uses AI in about 300 productions, mostly in post-production. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos put specific numbers to the effort: the docuseries "The American Experiment" includes 17 minutes of AI-assisted footage, produced twice as fast at half the cost. The savings will "likely" fund more content rather than shrink the $20 billion budget. The article Netflix's 300 AI productions show how fast the technology is spreading through entertainment appeared first on The Decoder .

<p><strong>BBC Philharmonic/Havlat/Kaziboni/Piatti Quartet<br>(NMC)</strong><br>Einstein’s field equations, Newton’s universal law and artificial intelligence are among the subjects of Laidlow’s ambitious orchestral works</p><p>Robert Laidlow is as at home in the realms of science and technology as he is in the world of classical music. As this NMC debut album demonstrates, his intricate, wildly imaginative work is eminently approachable, even if the core concepts are highly complex.</p><p>Warp,

<p>Since 2017, Iason Gabriel has worked at the tech giant, trying to anticipate – and think through – the impact of AI. But as commercial and geopolitical pressures escalate, can ethicists make any difference?</p><p>By Robert P Baird. Read by Simon Darwen</p><p><strong><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/30/theres-this-deep-mystery-of-what-actually-is-this-thing-the-philosopher-inside-google-deepmind">Read the text version here</a></strong></p><p><strong>Support the

On today’s Uncanny Valley, we unpack OpenAI’s ongoing drama, both legal and reputational, and whether these developments could further hurt the company—particularly in its fight against Anthropic.

Hyundai aims to deploy 25,000 Atlas robots starting with US factories in 2028.

If only someone could have predicted it.

Kimi is launching K3, a multimodal open-weight model with 2.8 trillion parameters and one million tokens of context. In the company's own benchmarks, it comes close to Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol while beating Opus 4.8 and GLM 5.2, in some cases by a wide margin. The model is also significantly pricier than its predecessor. Full weights are scheduled for release by July 27. The article Kimi's open model K3 nears GPT-5.6 Sol and Fable 5 while signaling the end of super cheap Chinese AI appeare

Creator says he will "very loudly ignore" those arguing for a ban on AI tools.

The company endorsed landmark AI transparency laws in California and New York last year, but its head of US state and local policy says they may already be outdated.

Google is adding personalized AI avatars to Vids that let users create videos starring a digital version of themselves, alongside Gemini Omni-powered tools for generating and editing videos from prompts and reference images.

Roblox's new "Build" feature lets users generate basic games using a single text prompt.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul might have just signed a moratorium on new AI data centers in the state, but she's not against using the technology herself. During an interview with Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, Hochul said that her team is using "AI to analyze every single rule, regulation, [and] policy" to check for outdated […]

Across 107 enterprises, AI infrastructure spending is accelerating well ahead of the ability to see or steer its economics. Most organizations run their AI on a familiar base of hyperscalers and model-provider APIs, yet the next dollar is aimed at specialized compute almost none of them use today; a majority intend to switch or add providers within the year, many within a quarter. Buying decisions turn on integration and total cost of ownership rather than headline token price — which is fortuna

Google is renaming NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook and integrating the tool more deeply into its ecosystem. A new feature gives each notebook its own cloud computer that can write and run code, initially for AI Ultra and Workspace customers. Separately, Google Search is getting app connections. The article Google rebrands NotebookLM as Gemini Notebook and opens its search app to third-party integration appeared first on The Decoder .

Across 101 enterprises, the infrastructure that feeds AI agents their business context is being built faster than it can be trusted. Retrieval-augmented generation is already the default context source, and provider-native retrieval has quietly overtaken the dedicated vector databases that define the category — yet a majority of enterprises have already watched their agents produce confident, wrong answers traced to missing or inconsistent context. A governed semantic layer is emerging as the fi