From the archive
Follow the latest AI news and artificial intelligence developments across models, agents, robotics, research and the wider industry. Explore new AI tools, advances in computing, business moves, safety and policy, with clear reporting and useful sources. Read the stories, catch up with News in Brief and join the conversation.
Lead story
OpenAI says it banned Russian and Iranian accounts that used ChatGPT in influence campaigns across several countries. NPR’s account describes a striking split: Russian operatives mostly used the chatbot to report their work to superiors, while Iranian operatives used it to help produce material for publication.
Read the report & discussion ↗Watch Desk
CIQ has made Fuzzball 4.3 generally available, a release designed to help organisations run open-weight AI models and agents on infrastructure they already operate. Its practical pitch is less hand-built integration: start a model, connect an agent and let the platform manage the GPU fleet underneath.
Watch Desk
Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, argues that the immediate danger from AI lies in careless use, including in intelligence and military settings, rather than machines turning against people. She also says Signal would leave any country that forced it to weaken its encryption, putting a clear…
Watch Desk
Huawei says its OceanStor M900 can give AI inference clusters a shared pool of context memory at petabyte scale, with terabyte-per-second performance. The pitch is aimed at a growing infrastructure problem: long-context AI systems need somewhere to keep the KV cache when GPU memory is too small and…
Firecrawl Watch
Firecrawl has published results comparing company-enrichment APIs, with Apollo scoring highest in its benchmark of four common fields. The post also describes how Firecrawl Alexandria lets AI agents call several enrichment providers through one connection, a practical pitch for teams tired of wiring up every API separately.
Watch Desk
Researchers at the Alan Turing Institute’s DARe centre and the University of Birmingham have built an AI model that identifies parts of satellites in orbital radar images. The work could help track what is happening to objects in increasingly busy orbits, though it remains research, not an operational…
Watch Desk
AI is helping some workers get more done, but McKinsey North America chair Eric Kutcher says the gains have yet to translate into broad productivity growth for companies. The gap matters: giving people AI tools is not the same as redesigning work around them.
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft is changing its Microsoft 365 Family and Premium plans so Copilot benefits can be shared with up to five other people. The trade-off is a shift from 1TB of OneDrive storage per person to 2TB shared across the plan, with that storage change due after a subscriber’s…
Geordie Watch
AI safety is not just a question of which model an organisation approves. In a new article, Geordie.ai argues that an agent’s tools, access and surrounding software can shape what it does just as decisively, with practical consequences for how teams should secure and oversee deployed agents.
Watch Desk
The UK’s £500m Sovereign AI fund is being measured against an industry request for at least £20bn over five years. The comparison is not like-for-like, but it puts a sharp question on the table: how much money and leverage will it take to build AI businesses that stay…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft has made Execution Containers generally available on Windows 11, giving developers and IT teams a way to enforce limits on what AI agents and the code they run can access. The notable shift is that the boundary is enforced outside the agent itself, rather than left to…
Watch Desk
Thread AI has agreed to work with the US Army on AI reasoning tools for research into Fire Control Systems, using the company’s Lemma platform. The project will help defence personnel search dense technical records, with the Army’s Armaments Center and Thread AI aiming to make answers traceable…
Meta AI Watch
Meta is giving its business assistant a longer memory and the ability to generate creative, adjust targeting and move campaign budgets in response to chat prompts. TikTok is also adding an AI shopping assistant with in-app checkout, putting more advertising and buying decisions inside conversational tools.
Google DeepMind Watch
Google is pursuing recursive self-improvement not just by asking AI to improve itself, but by using AI across the research and engineering systems that build future models. A 36Kr account describes a strategy spanning agents, code, chips and data-centre operations, with a central challenge: proving that each improvement…
Watch Desk
AI companies train models to refuse harmful requests, but those safeguards can fail in both directions: dangerous answers may slip through, while legitimate questions get blocked. A new MIT Technology Review essay argues that refusal is an uncertain technical control and a consequential question of who gets to…
AWS AI Watch
UOB and Amazon Web Services have signed a memorandum of understanding to explore hybrid cloud and AI projects for banking across five ASEAN markets. The plan puts data residency and regulatory controls alongside customer-facing ideas such as conversational banking, but it is an exploration, not a confirmed rollout.
Watch Desk
AI investment is pulling capital towards the companies and infrastructure behind the boom, with possible knock-on effects for government borrowing and developing economies. Bloomberg’s documentary also links the AI build-out to rising trade imbalances and bond yields, making the question bigger than whether the next data centre earns…
