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
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…
Read the report & discussion ↗Yoshua Bengio Watch
Yoshua Bengio says governments may be approaching a decisive turning point on AI safety, while his non-profit LawZero receives up to C$300m in announced Canadian and German government funding to develop a guardrail for autonomous systems. The important point is not another warning about AI in the abstract.…
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
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
The web is acquiring a price tag for AI use. Google, Cloudflare and Microsoft are testing different payment models for content that gets crawled, retrieved or meaningfully contributes to an AI-generated answer, and the differences could decide whether publishers opt in, opt out or accidentally trade search visibility…
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…
Watch Desk
US officials say overreliance on Palantir's Maven AI system was among the factors that contributed to a February missile strike in Iran that killed 123 children, according to a Bloomberg report published on Friday. Pentagon investigators, the report says, found that flawed intelligence, outdated imagery and an overreliance…
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%…
Watch Desk
California is drawing up plans to switch off AI. Governor Gavin Newsom has issued an executive order asking state agencies to recommend stronger independent reviews of the technology and to consider a shut-off function should it get out of control, while a convened panel of experts has two…
Meta AI Watch
Meta has answered a Polish report on deceptive advertising with both barrels, calling the work of the Instrat foundation "fiction" and countering with numbers of its own: 137,000 scam ads removed in a year, 88% of them before any user reported them, and an 83% fall in Poland's…
ASML Watch
Steve Eisman, the investor best known for spotting the subprime collapse, has a prescription for anyone nervous about picking winners in the AI buildout: stop betting on which chip designer swings the knife, and own the outfits selling it. The line is his: "In this knife fight you…
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…
Watch Desk
A model that cannot chat, cannot code and refuses to write a sentence has become the week's most argued-about release. TypeSafe, a San Francisco startup fresh out of stealth, has shipped Jev, a model with text generation stripped out entirely: hand it information and a predefined set of…
Anthropic Watch
Anthropic appears to be preparing to let Claude read your bank account. Leaked screenshots of the Claude app for iOS show an unannounced feature, reportedly called Claude Money, that invites people to link their bank accounts and ask the assistant about spending and financial plans. Nothing is confirmed…
DeepSeek Watch
DeepSeek open-sourced its agent execution framework, DeepSeek Harness, on 13 August, and per a 36Kr analysis published on 18 September it picked up nearly 100,000 GitHub stars within two days of its public open beta. The framework runs on a tidy equation, 'Model + Harness = Agent', with…
Mistral AI Watch
Mistral AI has publicly denied a claim of unauthorised access to its systems. In a statement issued on Friday morning, the French AI lab said it examined the allegation, found no evidence to support it, and can confirm its systems have not been compromised. The statement is short…
Watch Desk
Johns Hopkins University convened an evening on AI governance in Washington on Monday, and the exchange did something the week's op-ed war has not: it put an OpenAI executive, two prominent governance scholars and one very large demand on the same stage. The demand is that AI developers…
