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
OpenRouter has launched a Batch API that cuts inference prices by half for users willing to let requests run asynchronously within a 24-hour window. The service is aimed at large, non-urgent workloads such as bulk text generation and embeddings, where immediate responses are less valuable than a lower…
Read the report & discussion ↗Watch Desk
A new proposal argues that AI systems could improve their capabilities without open-ended real-world action by restricting them to generating verified formal proofs for preselected mathematical problems. The idea is notable because it treats recursive self-improvement as a containment problem with an unusually narrow laboratory: fixed hardware, fixed…
Watch Desk
Yandex has released the weights for Alice AI Foundation, an 80bn-parameter language model that the company says is available for commercial and research use. It is a substantial open-model launch, but also a revealing bid to build a more self-sufficient Russian AI stack.
Anthropic Watch
Anthropic and OpenAI are urging Australia to soften its ban on using creative works to train AI models, putting copyright rules on a collision course with the country’s plans to attract data-centre investment. The companies want a narrower, conditional route to training rather than a broad exemption for…
Alibaba Qwen Watch
An exploratory study suggests Qwen models may contain internal representations of older language models, including GPT-2. The intriguing finding is not that Qwen can imitate GPT-2, but that its completions may track GPT-2’s hidden continuation more closely than Qwen’s own usual output.
Watch Desk
Vast Data has announced DataEnclave, a confidential-computing environment designed to let businesses run advanced AI models on sensitive information without exposing the underlying data or intellectual property. The service is due to ship in the first quarter of 2027 as part of the company’s Vast AI Operating System,…
Watch Desk
The United States is chasing AI leadership mainly through faster models and lighter regulation, while China is pairing serious technical competition with rules aimed at deployment and content transparency. Rest of World argues that the lasting advantage may belong to the country whose AI people trust enough to…
Watch Desk
StepFun has released Step 5 Preview, a large mixture-of-experts model offering a one-million-token context window, image input and API pricing of $1 per million input tokens and $2.70 per million output tokens. The practical significance is not merely that another frontier model has arrived. It is that long-context,…
Watch Desk
A new tool called Product Prover applies formal-verification ideas to ordinary product specifications, using an LLM to reconstruct state machines and flag missing rules before developers generate code. That makes it a useful AI engineering story because it targets one of software’s oldest problems: building precisely what nobody…
Hugging Face Watch
Hugging Face has hired Jun Kim, the creator and maintainer of oMLX, to support the MLX community and help move local AI development on Apple Silicon from promising side project to properly funded work. The important detail is continuity: Kim will keep leading oMLX, while Hugging Face says…
Watch Desk
Researchers have identified a shared geometric structure in independently trained vision and language models that could allow capabilities to be transferred in a single forward pass. The important point is not another marginal benchmark win, but a possible way to make models work together without retraining them from…
OpenAI Watch
OpenAI has proposed global safety standards for frontier AI, with particular attention to alignment research and recursive self-improvement, or RSI. The company says fully autonomous RSI should not be pursued until it can be developed safely, because systems that improve themselves could outpace meaningful human oversight.
Berkeley BAIR Watch
Stuart Russell, a Berkeley computer science professor, says warnings about advanced AI causing catastrophic harm should be treated as a serious safety question rather than dismissed as industry theatre. His practical argument is straightforward: if people build systems more capable than themselves without solving how to keep them…
OpenAI Watch
British Columbia has sued OpenAI in California over the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting, alleging the company failed to warn police about the shooter’s interactions with ChatGPT. The case matters because it brings a provincial government, a school board and private plaintiffs into a widening legal challenge over what…
Watch Desk
California has signed seven bills tightening oversight of its fast-growing data-centre industry, with new requirements covering electricity costs, water use and local control. The package matters because AI infrastructure is no longer just a Silicon Valley server-room question. It is becoming a public bill, a planning dispute and,…
Watch Desk
Samsung is putting up to $100 million behind Kairos Power’s plan to build a 50-megawatt demonstration reactor in Tennessee, with Google lined up to receive nuclear power for AI data centres by 2035. The deal matters because the AI infrastructure race is now reaching into the power system…
Watch Desk
A Hugging Face Community Article describes Jevini, a system for turning repeated business choices into versioned decision circuits rather than asking a large language model to improvise every time. The practical idea is simple but useful: let a larger reasoning model design the process, then use a smaller…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft is urging capital-markets firms to stop bolting AI onto isolated tasks and redesign their investment operations around governed data, reusable workflows and human accountability. The argument matters because it moves the AI conversation from clever document tools to the plumbing of decisions, permissions and institutional memory.
Watch Desk
A US congressman is calling for a national strategy to govern the rapid expansion of AI data centres, arguing that a state-by-state approach can leave local communities paying for the infrastructure. The proposal matters because it would move the argument beyond approving individual facilities and towards setting national…
