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
Geoffrey Hinton has backed a proposed rulebook for independent AI evaluators, calling for access inside companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, protection from interference and the freedom to publish uncomfortable findings. The important point is that this is not another general plea for “more safety”. It is a…
Read the report & discussion ↗Cohere Watch
Cohere and Germany’s Aleph Alpha have signed a definitive merger agreement that would combine Cohere’s models with Aleph Alpha’s compliance and orchestration platform on Schwarz Group’s STACKIT cloud. The proposed Toronto-Berlin business is a serious attempt to give regulated buyers an AI stack outside US cloud jurisdiction, not…
AWS AI Watch
AWS has launched Amazon Connect Talent, a service in which AI agents conduct job interviews and assessments at scale. The important point is not simply that interviews can now happen around the clock. AWS says recruiters receive transcripts, competency scores and evidence for each assessment, while retaining final…
NVIDIA Watch
A University of Manchester team has adapted NVIDIA’s Earth-2 generative AI tools to forecast air pollution across the UK at a resolution of 2–3 square kilometres. The practical promise is sharper local warnings and faster testing of pollution policy, although the results and future benefits described here remain…
Watch Desk
Former US antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter says frontier AI labs do not need an antitrust exemption to cooperate on safety. In a Decoder interview, he argues that companies can share threat intelligence lawfully, while any pact to slow competition could trigger the very rules they want waived.
Watch Desk
The campaign to slow frontier AI has collided with the industry’s favourite counterargument: China. A Guardian analysis shows how Dario Amodei, Donald Trump and a wider circle of technology leaders invoke strategic competition when deciding how much restraint the United States can afford. That matters because a safety…
Watch Desk
OpenAI is more likely than Anthropic to become an enterprise's primary AI agent platform, according to an August survey reported by VentureBeat. The more interesting wrinkle is that Anthropic has the stronger pipeline of organisations considering a switch or addition, so the platform race is not quite the…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft has a new playbook for what it calls the Frontier Firm, and its central wager is blunt: generic AI output is a convincing average of everything a model has seen, and averages do not make anyone distinctive. The edge, it argues, now lies in teaching AI the…
Cohere Watch
The story that Chinese AI progress is mostly borrowed homework has an official version in Washington and, as of Friday, a prominent sceptic inside the US industry itself. Cohere chief executive Aidan Gomez called Chinese AI models "world-class", said the advantage held by the leading American labs is…
AWS AI Watch
Amazon Connect Talent, AWS's agentic AI hiring solution, is now generally available, and its agents do far more than sift applications. They analyse the role, draw up an interview plan, invite candidates to book a slot at any hour, run voice interviews around the clock and hand the…
Anthropic Watch
Anthropic is letting outsiders through the lab door. The company announced on 18 September a partnership with Accenture to embed independent evaluators inside Anthropic with access comparable to an employee's, and each side expects to invest at least $1 billion in building that capacity over the next five…
Google DeepMind Watch
AI has made scientific ideas cheap, and the queue behind them keeps growing. A report by Google, Google DeepMind and MIT FutureTech finds that 44% of surveyed scientists say their main research bottleneck has shifted over the past two years toward physical experimentation and data collection, while 41%…
OpenAI Watch
OpenAI is hiring robot-builders at up to $500,000 a year in base salary, and the shape of the roles says this is a hardware company in the making. The robotics team's open jobs have grown from 11 in May to 27 today, covering everything from the motors that…
Watch Desk
Europe's AI companies have publicly broken ranks with the US frontier labs' call to slow down, and they are not being polite about it. Mistral, the region's leading AI developer, accuses US incumbents of using the safety moment to "consolidate their market position", while Proton's chief operating officer…
Watch Desk
A Beijing startup called Naive AI has been valued at more than $1.4bn without releasing a model anyone can download. Founded in February by a Tsinghua University professor, the company has raised $400m across three funding rounds, with Tencent among the investors, and its first large language model…
