From the archive
AI business news tracks how companies adopt artificial intelligence and how that changes products, competition and work. Follow enterprise deployments, partnerships, company strategy and the effects of AI on jobs and skills. Our reports separate announced ambitions from demonstrated results, with sources and context to help you judge where adoption is useful, costly or still unproven.
Lead story
Anthropic has published a study estimating which US job tasks today’s robots can perform, and where they can do them. Its central finding is a useful brake on automation headlines: robots can perform an estimated 74% of physical tasks, but are cost-competitive with people for just 0.3% of…
Read the report & discussion ↗OpenAI Watch
OpenAI is planning to raise at least $30bn from investors, while pushing back its plans for an IPO, Bloomberg says. The reported fundraising scale makes this a consequential change in how the company may finance its next phase, not just another date slipping on a calendar.
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft says healthcare organisations are putting AI into everyday workflows, with examples ranging from drafting clinical notes to helping staff search research and business information. The useful detail is that these are specific deployments, not just another promise that healthcare will be transformed shortly after lunch.
Watch Desk
A new AI lab focused on healthcare has launched with a $500 million commitment from investment firm Thoreau, Fierce Healthcare reports. Ortet plans to build a full-stack platform spanning computing infrastructure, research and health-focused models, aiming to connect information across a patient’s care.
Watch Desk
Metaview has raised a $60 million Series C to expand its AI-agent recruiting business, Axios reports. The round brings the company’s total funding to $110 million, a sizeable bet on automating work across hiring.
Watch Desk
MIT’s Transit Lab will develop an AI platform to bring transit control-room information together, with $2.1 million in support from Google.org. The three-year project is designed to help staff make decisions during disruptions, not make those decisions for them.
Microsoft AI Watch
Whitbread is extending Microsoft Copilot to 1,650 support-centre colleagues and multi-site hotel managers after a pilot in which staff reported saving an average of 24 minutes a day. The hotel group is also using a Copilot-built agent to assess potential locations for new hotels, with people still responsible…
ElevenLabs Watch
ElevenLabs says a $300 million employee share sale has valued the voice-AI company at $22 billion, while its enterprise agent business has grown sharply. The announcement puts a price on the company’s momentum, but its deployment figures offer the more useful clue to what is driving it.
TSMC Watch
Samsung’s foundry business is filling more of its existing capacity and raising prices on some new orders, just as AI demand is straining TSMC’s advanced chipmaking lines. The opportunity is real, but winning repeat customers, not merely a first order, will show whether Samsung can turn the squeeze…
Watch Desk
Carnegie Mellon University says a $3 billion gift from Ken Griffin will fund a new Miami campus and put $500 million into its School of Computer Science. The scale is extraordinary; the consequential question is what the money will build for computing and AI research, and who will…
Watch Desk
Carnegie Mellon University says its planned Miami campus will organise research and teaching around societal challenges, with AI and other emerging technologies part of the approach. Its four initial areas include health, national security, advanced manufacturing, and energy and climate resilience.
Watch Desk
Former Google DeepMind alignment researcher Ramana Kumar says current methods cannot reliably ensure advanced AI systems pursue the goals people intend. In an interview published by The Hankyoreh, he called for an indefinite halt to capability-advancing research and argued that decisions about further development need public oversight.
Watch Desk
China accounted for 41% of the elite AI researchers tracked in 2025, compared with 34% in the US, according to a Carnegie China study reported by VnExpress International. But the talent story is not a simple handover: the US still recorded a net gain of researchers, while China…
DeepSeek Watch
DeepSeek has released DeepEP-Ascend, a communication library for training and running machine-learning models on Huawei Ascend chips. The project says its tests reached up to 95% of physical payload bandwidth on Ascend 950DT processors, a claim that puts a useful number on an effort to make AI workloads…
Fireworks AI Watch
A Fireworks AI report argues that reinforcement-learning runs can go off course when the system generating training examples and the system learning from them calculate probabilities differently. In two company experiments, the mismatch either destabilised a run or exposed a subtler problem in how a mixture-of-experts model combines…
Watch Desk
Nvidia and AMD are reportedly pressing the Trump administration to ask Congress to change China-related chip export restrictions in the annual defence policy bill. The dispute concerns who sets the limits on advanced AI-chip sales, and how far they should reach.
OpenClaw Watch
OpenClaw has opened development of an enterprise platform for running AI agents on an organisation’s own infrastructure. It is available now for internal pilot workloads, with multi-tenancy, security boundaries and governance controls aimed at a familiar obstacle: cautious IT teams banning agents outright.
Watch Desk
China has built an AI governance system spanning recommendation algorithms, synthetic media and generative AI services, and a new framework extends its attention to risks across AI’s lifecycle. The Conversation’s account makes a useful counterpoint to calls in the US for rules that, in some areas, China has…
Anthropic Watch
Anthropic has opened a week-long study asking some Claude users what they want from AI, with an unusual condition: participants can choose to publish their full interview for anyone to read. The invitation offers a chance to put personal experience into the public record, but sharing may be…
AWS AI Watch
Condé Nast says an AI-powered search system built with AWS cut the time its editorial teams spent finding video from an average of 250 minutes to about two minutes per task. The system searches across more than 140,000 videos by what is seen, said and heard, returning relevant…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft Research has introduced Quine, an experimental AI research system designed to connect biological data, scientific tools, literature and researchers. In work with the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Microsoft says Quine helped prioritise compounds for lab testing in pancreatic cancer research, with several highly ranked candidates…
Watch Desk
Investors appear to have priced in a 32.6% lasting productivity boost for software engineering from AI, according to a working paper by economists at UC Berkeley and the London School of Economics. That is a measure of market expectations, not proof that engineers are already getting 32.6% more…
