AI News Today

Verity Harding tells WIRED that the US government’s nationalistic attitude toward AI is evidence that a worst-case scenario is taking shape.

<p>From repainted walls to imaginary lawns, estate agents say modified photos help buyers ‘visualise the potential of a property’. But how much AI enhancement is too much? Agents, viewers and trading standards experts tell all</p><p>It is twilight on a desirable street in Chiswick, or it could be Hampstead, Wilmslow or Hove. A spectacular sunset has left a vivid stripe of orange fading into a violet sky. Against this saturated backdrop, a large Victorian house is clearly outlined despite the dar

A key delay from a state agency means robotaxi rides in the company’s new Ojai vehicle might be free for a few more months.

OpenAI is launching GPT-5.6 on Thursday after the U.S. government lifted its release ban following additional testing. Binding standards for future model approvals still don't exist. OpenAI says the Sol model beats Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 on coding benchmarks at about half the cost. The article OpenAI's GPT-5.6 launches Thursday after a delay forced by the U.S. government appeared first on The Decoder .

AI chip maker SambaNova has raised at an $11B valuation months after Intel was rumored to be trying to buy it for about $1.6 billion.

"HalluSquatting" weaponizes LLMs' inability to say "I don't know."

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<p>Report finds widespread overbidding as rapid AI growth generates increased wealth in city where housing is scarce</p><p>San Francisco’s AI boom has buyers spending unprecedented amounts of money on homes – much more than sellers are asking for.</p><p>A new analysis from real-estate brokerage Compass, found that in the first half of 2026, <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/sf-homes-over-asking-22334362.php">more than 140 homes</a> in the city sold for at least $1m above th

As part of Meta’s Muse Image model rollout, Instagram users with public accounts need to opt out to block AI generations of their content.

Joshua Achiam spent nearly nine years at OpenAI researching AI safety and made a memorable appearance in the Musk v. Altman trial.

Meta is launching the first AI image generation model made by its Superintelligence Labs division. The Muse Image model now powers the image-making tools across the Meta AI app, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and it's coming soon to Facebook and Messenger, according to an announcement on Tuesday. It's part of the growing Muse family of AI […]

Open source models’ success isn’t coming at the expense of frontier labs. Instead, they each seem to capture two phases of the same life cycle.

Microsoft is the latest Silicon Valley giant to cut back on its AI spending.

Microsoft is replacing AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic with its own MAI models in products like Excel and Outlook. Tens of thousands of queries per week already run through them. AI chief Mustafa Suleyman wants to "ultimately eliminate" the cost of external models. For Copilot customers, that could mean less performance for the same price. The article Copilot goes cheap as Microsoft phases out OpenAI and Anthropic models to cut costs appeared first on The Decoder .

Cohere has released Transcribe Arabic, an open-source model for Arabic speech recognition that the company says outperforms Whisper and OmniASR on dialects, code-switching, and bilingual Arabic-English speech. The 2-billion-parameter model is available on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 license. The article Cohere Transcribe Arabic is an open-source model built for Arabic's toughest transcription problems appeared first on The Decoder .

Starting Tuesday, Anthropic's Claude Cowork AI platform will be available on mobile and web for the first time. The expanded access is rolling out first to Max subscribers and coming to Claude users on other plans "in the coming weeks." Claude Cowork was previously only accessible through the Claude desktop app for macOS and Windows, […]

Anthropic is rolling out its AI agent Claude Cowork to mobile and web. Until now, the feature was limited to the desktop app. The agent keeps working in the background even when the laptop is closed and pings users on their phone when it needs a decision. The move blurs the line between Chat and Cowork even further. The article Anthropic's Claude Cowork AI agent is now available on mobile and web appeared first on The Decoder .

With this update, users can start a task from their desk, get status updates on their phone, and pick up the finished output later — even if their laptop is closed.

It's early, but the plan is to reduce dependency on Nvidia and Huawei.

According to Reuters, Chinese authorities are looking into restricting foreign access to the country's most powerful AI models. Alibaba, Bytedance, and Z.ai would all be affected. The move means both superpowers now treat AI as a strategic asset. For Europe, the convenient shortcut of relying on cheap Chinese open-source models could close much faster than expected. The article China eyes export curbs on its top AI models, and Europe is caught in the middle appeared first on The Decoder .

Claude Cowork now keeps working on tasks even after you close your laptop. It’s part of a larger push toward smartphone-controlled agents.

Anthropic has found that Claude developed an internal working memory on its own during training. The company calls it "J-Space" and can now read it using a new analysis tool called J-Lens. The working memory reveals that Claude recognizes contrived test scenarios before producing its first word. When the researchers disable those cues, Claude actually resorts to blackmail in some runs. A model trained on reward hacking shows words like "fake" and "fraud" in J-Space during normal coding tasks, ev

Insilico Medicine is advancing to Phase III human trials for testing a drug identified by AI targeting idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). This progression supplies the computational drug discovery sector with empirical test cases, advancing an AI medicine past early safety evaluations into late-stage efficacy validation. IPF destroys respiratory capacity through severe lung tissue scarring. Patients […] The post Insilico Medicine advances AI drug for IPF to Phase III trials appeared first on A

<p>Residents and council say creating affordable housing is more urgent than ‘high-frequency trading’ in nearby City</p><p>Campaigners in east London are opposing plans for a datacentre in Brick Lane that they say will worsen the area’s housing crisis and drive long-term residents away.</p><p>The road, famed for its curry houses and 24-hour bagel shops, is the latest flashpoint in the rapid rollout of datacentres across the UK that aims to meet demand created by artificial intelligence.</p> <a h

<p>Net-zero pledges of Google and Amazon slip out of reach, and struggling Meta makes frantic moves</p><p>Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, the Guardian’s US tech editor, writing to you after a rodeo in rural Texas, where I celebrated Independence Day. Today in tech, we’re discussing how tech giants’ investments in AI are hindering their pledges of climate neutrality, Meta’s frantic search for new lines of business, and Americans’ anger at tech’s political influen

The company just raised $7 million in seed funding, and is launching its app for iPhone and Android on Tuesday.

Chinese AI models are gaining ground with US companies because they cost far less than systems from OpenAI and Anthropic, CNBC reports. The article Chinese AI models regularly pass 30 percent on OpenRouter as cost gap widens appeared first on The Decoder .

Chinese startup Deepseek is building its own AI chip, Reuters reports. The article Deepseek is designing its own AI chip appeared first on The Decoder .

Top robotics researchers and founders explain how robot autonomy is evolving.

Top robotics researchers and founders explain how robot autonomy is evolving.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and major cloud providers are racing to outbid each other with free compute credits to pull startups into their ecosystems. Some individual offers top $3 million. At Y Combinator alone, OpenAI and Anthropic could hand out up to $800 million in credits per year combined. The discount war comes at a time when both companies need to improve their margins ahead of upcoming IPOs. The article OpenAI and Anthropic are giving away millions in computing power to attract startups appear

Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok sees no AI-driven margin gains outside tech. In regulated industries like healthcare, banking, or pharma, process overhauls and privacy rules could delay productivity boosts by years. If that takes five years instead of five months, many AI stocks face a painful repricing. The article Apollo economist warns AI profit gains outside tech could take "well beyond" what Wall Street expects appeared first on The Decoder .

Norwegian striker Erling Haaland isn’t just a footballer anymore. He’s become an internet character perpetuated by fans and AI.

L’Oreal is using AI to shorten product development timelines and identify new uses for ingredients already present in its portfolio. The French cosmetics group has applied AI in its laboratories for the past four years, with Fabrice Megarbane, president of L’Oreal’s consumer products division, telling Reuters that the technology helps the company predict how molecules […] The post L’Oreal, Mondelez, and Nestle use AI to speed product development appeared first on AI News .

The lab will beam back data to train AI models to predict how proteins behind age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s and certain cancers behave.

<p>Andrew Charlton says artificial intelligence ‘cheating, deceiving, going their own way’ – and time to get ahead of it is during testing </p><ul><li><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2026/jul/07/australia-news-live-penny-wong-china-missile-test-pacific-anthony-albanese-solomon-islands-defence-royal-commission-antisemitism-meta-ntwnfb">Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates</a></p></li><li><p>Get our <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/email-newsletter

<p>Large-scale datacentre projects around the world are being challenged or cancelled, as infrastructure’s energy demands ramp up</p><p>Datacentre planning proposals face all kinds of hurdles, from securing energy supply to high construction costs. But the 2,000 acre Prince William Digital Gateway site in the US state of Virginia had another problem: its proximity to a Civil War battlefield.</p><p>“If the development is allowed to proceed, the solemn nature of this historic site would become mar

<p>A Financial Times journalist ponders the future of labour in world increasingly dominated by AI and automation</p><p>It’s never been easy to land and keep a decent job. But it feels like it’s getting harder. In June, the number of job vacancies in the UK fell to a five-year low; headlines warn of a looming AI-employment shock. What might the future of work look like – and who or what will shape its terms? In her new book, Sarah O’Connor goes looking for answers in the modern collision of arti

<p>By selling AI glasses as aspirational, cool and fashion-forward, tech elites are trying to pacify their entry into the mainstream world</p><p>We have a habit of dismissing social media trends as inane and vapid while ignoring the disturbing undercurrent. A few weeks ago I was reminded of that when I saw an Instagram carousel by British fashion personality Alexa Chung. Shared with her 6 million followers, she showed different outfits through screenshots of herself entering and leaving her home

An AI agent carried out the technical execution of a real-world ransomware attack for the first known time, but new details show a human still chose the victim, set up the infrastructure, and supplied stolen credentials — meaning it wasn't quite the fully autonomous cybercrime debut that last week's headlines suggested.