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
Shopify is rolling out Canvas, a visual workspace where merchants can work with its Sidekick AI to build and redesign online stores. The notable shift is that Sidekick can make coordinated changes to a theme while merchants see the interactive result across the whole store, rather than judging…
Read the report & discussion ↗Watch Desk
SpaceX’s AI unit has become a major cloud-computing business, with billions of dollars a month in commitments from AI firms, The Information reports. Talks about leasing capacity to Microsoft show how far the company’s ambitions have shifted, though the status of those discussions is unclear.
OpenText Watch
OpenText’s Fortify Agent Skills give coding agents access to security findings and defined workflows, so they can prepare fixes with more context than source code alone. The important boundary: an agent can propose the repair without becoming the authority that signs it off. For teams already letting agents…
Cloudflare Watch
Cloudflare has made AI Search generally available, adding native image retrieval, OCR for PDFs and support for larger files. The biggest change is that image search can now work from the pixels themselves, rather than only from a generated description. There is a budget date to mark, too:…
Watch Desk
Universities adopting AI assistants may be outsourcing more than computing, argues Hugging Face community writer Vasileios Stergiou: they may also be handing a private company influence over how students encounter difficult questions. His proposed alternative is to run open-weight models on infrastructure the institution controls, and make the…
Watch Desk
A bipartisan Senate permitting bill would prevent utility ratepayers from bearing the costs of new power and grid upgrades needed for AI data centres, Axios reports. The proposal also reaches far beyond AI, changing how infrastructure projects and environmental reviews are handled.
Watch Desk
Eight vision-language models, one consumer GPU and a useful warning for anyone shopping by benchmark: a model’s tokens-per-second figure may tell you more about its serving setup than its underlying speed. A Hugging Face community article by Aakash Gupta compares ranking accuracy and throughput for video-question-answering workloads on…
NVIDIA Watch
NVIDIA’s data-centre strategy combines cooling and power-management software with partner-led construction, including a planned Australian buildout of up to 2GW by 2027. The useful shift is from selling chips to shaping the facilities and infrastructure needed to run them at scale.
Anthropic Watch
Broadcom has agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to help finance infrastructure spending, Reuters reports, citing Anthropic’s IPO prospectus. The arrangement ties a major chip supplier more closely to Anthropic’s ability to secure the computing capacity its models need, and the filing flags potential conflicts of…
NVIDIA Watch
Nvidia’s plan to use its chips as collateral for AI infrastructure loans is meeting a more cautious response from lenders, Reuters reports. Banks are seeking stronger guarantees, putting the company’s view of chip value to a practical test: will financiers treat AI hardware as durable collateral, or demand…
NVIDIA Watch
NVIDIA has announced a reference design for securing autonomous AI agents, pairing a sandboxed runtime with a separate hardware watchdog, according to Moor Insights & Strategy. The design shifts some safety controls out of the model itself and into the systems that run it, a practical change for…
Meta AI Watch
Meta’s Muse can take on tasks such as buying groceries and negotiating bills, but a BBC report argues that AI agents doing this at scale could strain the websites and services they use. The question is no longer only what an agent can do for its owner, but…
Mistral AI Watch
Mistral is expanding its Canadian business, planning offices in Montreal and Toronto while hiring researchers, developers and customer-facing engineers. The move shows how the French AI company is turning interest in sovereign AI into a push to build and customise systems for local organisations, though most of its…
Microsoft AI Watch
Emperor Financial Services says it has deployed Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 customer-service tools and Copilot Studio across customer support. The setup includes chatbots for common enquiries, call summaries for staff and automated speech features, giving a concrete look at how one financial-services company is putting AI into customer interactions.
Watch Desk
Companies are reporting financial gains from AI, yet only 13% are on track to scale their initiatives, according to a BearingPoint study reported by Crypto Briefing. The gap between promising pilots and AI woven into everyday operations is still the story behind the story.
Watch Desk
The Trump administration has unveiled America.gov, an AI-powered portal intended to help people find federal information and services through ordinary-language questions. Its initial role is navigation, not completing applications: a useful distinction when the destination is a passport or Medicare service, not a restaurant recommendation.
