From the archive
AI policy sets the rules for how artificial intelligence is developed, deployed and held accountable. Follow AI regulation, copyright disputes, privacy, surveillance and government decisions affecting the technology. Our coverage explains who a proposal applies to, whether it is law or still under discussion, and what it could mean for developers, businesses and the people using AI.
Lead story
Google DeepMind, NVIDIA and EMBL-EBI have expanded the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database with AI-predicted protein structures covering thousands of viruses. The useful point is practical rather than cinematic: researchers can now start with hypotheses about viral protein shapes before laboratory work catches up, although the predictions still need…
Read the report & discussion ↗Geoffrey Hinton Watch
Geoffrey Hinton has urged governments to put stronger safeguards around artificial intelligence, comparing the technology to a fast car without brakes or a steering wheel. His warning matters because the same discussion is now widening from laboratory safety to global inequality, public services and who gets to shape…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft says its internal AI challenge has changed: getting people to use the tools is no longer the main obstacle, while governing agents that can act on their behalf is becoming the harder job. That matters beyond Redmond because the company is offering a practical picture of what…
Meta AI Watch
Meta is opening early access to two AI-assisted tools that let people create games for its Horizon social platform from a phone or browser. The bigger move is distribution: games made with the tools will also be recommended on Facebook and Instagram, where people can play them.
Cohere Watch
TD Bank is putting up to $25m into a three-year collaboration with Cohere, bringing the Canadian AI company’s engineers alongside TD’s Layer 6 team in Toronto. The practical point is that this is aimed at building and testing AI inside a major bank, including agents and enhanced workflows,…
Watch Desk
Docker and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation are proposing an open specification that packages an AI agent, its tools and its requested permissions inside a portable container image. The practical promise is unusually clear: an agent’s authority could travel with it across conforming runtimes, rather than being rebuilt…
AWS AI Watch
Tech Mahindra and AWS have launched an Agentic Process Transformation Centre of Excellence aimed at moving enterprise AI agents beyond pilots and into operational business processes. The first joint deployment, a collections tool used by UK financial-services outsourcer Target Group, is reported to have delivered anticipated efficiency gains…
AWS AI Watch
AWS has published a GPU-ready SageMaker container for WhisperX that can transcribe audio, identify speakers and add word-level timestamps. The practical appeal is straightforward: teams can turn messy conversations into searchable, captionable and analysable records without building the whole speech pipeline from scratch.
Cohere Watch
Canada’s AI sovereignty debate is shifting away from the tidy idea of building everything at home. Cohere and Microsoft Canada argue that the more useful question is which parts of the international AI supply chain the country cannot afford to lose control over.
Watch Desk
Stakk has completed its US$63 million acquisition of ParaScript, combining AI-powered document processing with identity and behavioural data to target fraud in regulated industries. The deal matters because it turns a specialist document technology business into part of a much larger digital-trust operation, with more than 300 enterprise…
Watch Desk
Employees at Anthropic, OpenAI and Google DeepMind are pouring millions into US political campaigns and political action committees that support AI regulation, according to The San Francisco Standard. The movement is becoming an organised counterweight to more than $100m in industry spending aimed at shaping the debate, making…
Watch Desk
EPC Group has published TAR-8, a framework for testing whether Microsoft 365 and Azure environments are actually ready for Copilot, AI agents and approved external models. Its useful idea is refreshingly concrete: do not ask only who has an AI licence, ask what the system can find, change,…
Watch Desk
As AI takes on more programming work, one new essay argues that programming languages should stop treating human-friendly syntax as the main design target. The proposed shift is towards stronger guarantees and richer program databases, a provocative idea with practical consequences for the tools people use to build…
Watch Desk
Brahma AI, the artificial-intelligence unit of VFX company DNEG, has raised $150m at a post-money valuation of $2bn, according to CNBC. The funding gives a relatively clear signal about where generative video is heading next: enterprise production, not just viral clips and prompt contests.
Watch Desk
Canada, France and Norway are forming an emerging alliance around a global supervisory regime for artificial intelligence, according to The Wall Street Journal. The proposal matters because it shifts the AI-governance argument from broad warnings about risk towards a specific question: who gets to watch the watchers?
DeepSeek Watch
China’s cyberspace regulator is investigating DeepSeek and Moonshot AI after Anthropic alleged that Chinese developers redirected user queries through its Claude model, according to The Information, as reported by ForkLog. The immediate significance is that a dispute over model distillation has become a data-governance and national-security matter too.
Meta AI Watch
Meta researchers have proposed MaD-RL, a reinforcement-learning framework designed to control the distribution of an AI model’s outputs rather than simply maximise the score of each individual answer. The practical promise is broader and more useful than another leaderboard number: models could be trained to preserve a chosen…
Watch Desk
Geordie has launched Cost Intelligence, a monitoring tool that links enterprise AI spending to the agents, tools, models and workflows generating it. The useful idea is simple: an AI bill can reveal a broken agent even when every conventional service still appears to be working.
Watch Desk
Researchers at MIT’s Senseable City Lab are arguing that visual AI could help planners understand traffic, pollution, public space and greenery across entire cities, while warning that the same systems can deepen surveillance and social bias. The useful point is not that computers can now look at more…
AWS AI Watch
Amazon Web Services has hosted Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 on Bedrock, creating a new commercial route for a Chinese open-weight model and testing whether cloud platforms can monetise openness without swallowing it whole. The practical shift is bigger than another model appearing in a catalogue: AWS and Moonshot…
