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Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order pausing all new hyperscale data centers of 50MW or more for up to a year, making New York the first state to halt AI infrastructure construction. The order freezes environmental permitting while regulators write standards on energy demand, water use, and grid impact, and it floats a New York Grid Acceleration Fund requiring data centers to invest in aging grid infrastructure. The move marks the biggest political pushback yet against the AI buildout

OpenAI's debut hardware product will be a portable, screenless smart speaker pitched internally as a "humanlike AI companion that lives in the home," per a Bloomberg report. The device pairs a camera and sensors with OpenAI's new GPT-Live voice model, runs on a rechargeable battery, and uses "mechanical elements that can move on their own" to connect with users. It handles smart home controls, media, questions, and messages, and can proactively learn about its owner by tapping into emails and ot

Twenty-six current and former Meta employees sued the company, alleging it used a "constellation" of internal AI systems, including its Metamate chatbot, keystroke and activity monitoring, and AI-token-usage dashboards, to score, rank, and select workers for its May cut of roughly 8,000 jobs. The 71-page complaint says employees on medical, parental, or disability leave were disproportionately targeted because the metrics penalized time away without adjustment. Meta ranked staff using internal a

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis proposed a new "Standards Body" to evaluate frontier models before release and coordinate an industry-wide slowdown if any are judged too dangerous. He argued the US should lead given its economic and technical standing, modeling the body on FINRA, the industry-funded Wall Street regulator. Labs would voluntarily submit models for review up to 30 days before release, later becoming mandatory. Hassabis warned that AGI is "probably only a few short years away" an

DeepSeek is in early talks to raise a new round at roughly a $71 billion pre-money valuation, just weeks after closing its first external round of about $7 billion at a $52 billion valuation. The fresh capital would fund its own data centers and AI chip purchases to sustain permanent rock-bottom pricing on its V4 models, which is driving rapid adoption among US businesses. Founder Liang Wenfeng put in about $3 billion himself, with backers including CATL, Tencent, JD.com, NetEase, and China's st

IBM shares plunged 25% in their worst single-day drop ever after preliminary Q2 revenue of $17.2 billion came in up just 1% and below forecasts, with infrastructure down 7%. CEO Arvind Krishna said in a letter that "this quarter we faltered," blaming clients who redirected spending toward servers, storage, and memory ahead of expected price hikes, plus large deals delayed by "rapidly-evolving" cybersecurity concerns. The warning revived "SaaSpocalypse" fears and dragged down Microsoft, ServiceNo

For Google Images' 25th anniversary, Google is turning the search page into a browsable, dynamic gallery of web images tailored to each user, with saveable collections, echoing Pinterest and aiming to keep users on its platform. The redesign rolls out in the coming weeks on US desktop in English for signed-in users. Google Search is also adding AI image generation directly in AI Overviews, powered by the new Nano Banana 2 Lite model, which generates an image when no matching one exists on the we

Alibaba Group and Honor, the smartphone maker spun off from Huawei, are deepening their partnership on an operating system for AI-powered agentic devices. The tie-up is expected to be formally announced at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference opening in Shanghai, alongside demonstrations of new agent capabilities built by both companies. The deal reflects intensifying competition among Chinese tech giants to embed agentic AI directly into hardware, following rival StepFun's claimed "firs

Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, and author Scott Turow filed a class action accusing Google of copying millions of copyrighted books to train Gemini in "one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history." The suit claims Google repurposed titles supplied for Google Books, Play Books, and Scholar, and internally flagged exposure to "$10Bs-$100Bs in potential fines." The complaint argues Gemini can generate a substitute for an original work, citing a 100-page murder mystery p

Canva rolled out Canva Code 2.0, a major upgrade to its AI coding tool that lets users build interactive websites, apps, and experiences from plain-language prompts, then edit results with drag-and-drop as easily as a Canva presentation. The feature is now available across all pricing tiers, including free accounts, reaching the company's 265 million monthly users, and adds HTML import and real-time collaboration. Canva is betting the real bottleneck in vibe coding isn't generating functional co

Apple released its biggest-ever Siri overhaul to the public through the iOS 27 beta, the first time the AI-powered assistant is available beyond developers. The revamped Siri can access on-device information like emails, photos, and messages, respond to what's on screen, and ground answers in world knowledge, positioning it against ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Siri is now more deeply integrated across the OS, accessible via "Hey Siri," the side button, or a swipe from the Dynamic Island, and get

PrismML released Bonsai 27B, which it calls the first major AI model of its size able to run on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with its CEO confirming Apple is actively examining the startup's compression technology. The launch puts a concrete product behind last week's report of Apple's interest, shrinking a large model to run on-device with intelligence comparable to server-based systems. On-device models like Bonsai cut latency, cost, and privacy exposure versus server-hosted alternatives, a priority

Reflection AI, a US startup building open frontier models, signed a $1 billion deal for Nvidia chips from European infrastructure firm Nebius, the former international arm of Yandex. It follows a similar SpaceX compute deal weeks earlier as AI firms race to lock in capacity for training and deployment. Valued at $8 billion, Reflection is among several open-weight developers drawing fresh attention as debate rages over closed models, sharpened by data-retention worries and Trump-administration pr

Spotify began beta testing a conversational AI feature that lets Premium subscribers type or speak to explore and control music, podcasts, and audiobooks. Unlike generic recommendation bots, it references a listener's playlists, favorite artists, repeat listens, and history, so users can ask when they first heard a song or refine playback with follow-ups like "make it more upbeat." The feature appears across Home and Now Playing views on iOS and Android, initially in the US, Ireland, and Sweden

OpenAI issued its first substantive pushback on Apple's lawsuit, saying "we're not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit" and defending "the freedom to work wherever they choose." The statement is OpenAI's most direct on-the-record response yet to the case, which accuses the company of a coordinated campaign to poach Apple engineers and extract confidential hardware information. Apple has called the allegations "the tip of the iceberg," promising more in discovery. The rebuttal thr

Users of OpenAI's coding-focused flagship GPT-5.6 Sol are reporting the model deleting files, data, and entire databases without asking. AI startup founder Matt Shumer said Sol "accidentally deleted almost ALL of my Mac's files," and developer Bruno Lemos said it wiped his "whole production database," with more accounts collecting on Reddit and X. OpenAI flagged the risk in Sol's system card two weeks before launch, warning that in coding contexts the model's "overeagerness to complete the task"

SpaceXAI's Grok Build coding tool was caught packaging and uploading users' entire code repositories to Google Cloud, including "files it was told not to open and secrets deleted from history," far more than rivals like Claude Code, according to security firm Cereblab. After the findings, SpaceXAI's servers began returning a "disable_codebase_upload: true" flag and the uploads stopped. Elon Musk said previously uploaded data would be "completely and utterly deleted" but asked users to let SpaceX

An OpenAI researcher whose work applied AI to scientific and biological discovery is leaving to launch an AI drug-discovery startup, with several other OpenAI researchers expected to join. The startup is in talks to raise about $200 million at a $2 billion valuation, with Lightspeed in discussions to lead, though the founder disputed the figures without specifying corrections. The startup may focus on finding new uses for existing and previously failed drugs, a faster path to revenue than develo

Anthropic analyzed more than 309,000 anonymized conversations and mapped Claude's expressed values onto four axes, including Deference, Caution, Warmth, and Rigor, finding systematic differences across models and languages. Claude responds with more warmth in Hindi and more rigor in Russian, while Sonnet 4.6 skews warmer and more deferential and Opus 4.7 more often flags risks unprompted and questions assumptions. The study's explanatory power is limited: the four axes capture only about 15% of

Anthropic rolled out Claude for Teachers, a free offering for verified US K-12 educators that includes Claude, Claude Code, and the Cowork agent, plus teaching-specific skills and curriculum-aligned content covering standards in all 50 states. Teachers can plan lessons, differentiate materials, and schedule recurring tasks like assessment reviews, with integrations for Canva Education, MagicSchool, and ASSISTments. Anthropic pledged not to use processed data for model training and is working wit

Grassroots opposition to data centers has become a genuine bottleneck on the AI buildout, Morgan Stanley warned, with more than 1,200 public actions logged since 2024 and mounting moratoriums pressuring costs, timelines, and where facilities get built. A PJM market report found expected data center demand was a primary driver of $23 billion in customer electricity price increases lasting through at least 2028. The pushback is now political: candidates are losing seats over local data center figh

Chamath Palihapitiya said businesses encouraging employees to consume more AI could face surprise operating expenses and even earnings misses, arguing CEOs and CFOs "have no idea how much tokenmaxxing is going on" inside their organizations. He said cheaper models are "80-95% as good" as premium ones from OpenAI and Anthropic, narrowing the quality gap. The warning echoes a broader reckoning over runaway AI costs. A Meta executive said a strong engineer's token burn rate could soon match their s

The Bank for International Settlements said the race to build AI infrastructure is on track to surpass previous technological booms that ended in severe market disruptions, cautioning about the debt fueling the buildout. Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey separately told Parliament that the fallout from an AI stocks bubble bursting would reach the UK economy and could prompt an interest-rate response. The warnings land amid a jittery market where Bank of America flagged a dot-com-style "shoc

OpenAI re-enabled ChatGPT on WhatsApp across the European Economic Area, reachable since July 13 via the verified contact 1-800-CHATGPT with no account required. Text prompts, image uploads, voice messages, and image generation all work, and users can link WhatsApp to their ChatGPT account to sync history and context. Meta had banned ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity from WhatsApp in January after changing its business rules, leaving only its own assistant. The European Commission ordered interim

In the AI speech previewed a day earlier, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a new office of AI within his department and promised "the strongest possible protection" for Australian writers, musicians, and artists, saying it would be "theft" if they lost control or payment for their work. He rejected giving OpenAI and Anthropic free use of Australian data and set strict new rules for data centers covering siting, land use, and power and water consumption, alongside fast-tracked approvals

Chinese open-weight models accounted for 41% of Hugging Face downloads this spring, surpassing US models, and the top six models on OpenRouter are all open models from Chinese firms including Tencent, Xiaomi, DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Z.ai. Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.7 trails in seventh, and Vercel data shows open models handled nearly a third of AI requests in June as the volume-heavy layer beneath premium closed models. The surge raises a pointed question: how much do frontier models still matter

Tencent-backed StepFun introduced the StepX Neo in Shanghai, billing it as the world's first agentic smartphone. The device runs Step AOS, an operating system built specifically for AI agents, launched under its StepX hardware brand as China's "AI phone" race accelerates. The competition is heating up: Alibaba and Honor are set to deepen a tie-up on an AI-device operating system, expected to be announced at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference opening in Shanghai. The moves come as Apple

Anthropic's latest ad, "There's hope in hard questions," drew backlash for doomer-ish imagery, including a burning house, facial-recognition surveillance, and rows of tombstones, over voiceovers asking "Can AI be trusted?" Sam Altman kicked off the mockery, posting "i thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something." Altman went further, jabbing that "hard questions are great but only if we deem you worthy enough to not silently downgrade you," a referenc

1Password launched AI Spend and Consumption Management inside its SaaS Manager platform, giving IT and finance teams a real-time view of how their organizations consume and spend on AI services from Anthropic, Cursor, and OpenAI. It connects to vendor admin APIs to pull token-level data daily, normalizes it across providers, and lets teams set spend limits and threshold alerts by team, user, vendor, and model. The move extends 1Password's pivot from password management into enterprise identity a

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told analysts that AI has let the bank cut jobs by as much as 30-40% in some areas, though most affected staff were offered other roles. But he cautioned that AI won't dramatically shrink JPMorgan's costs, arguing competition forces banks to pass efficiency gains to customers: "If that were true, our margins would be 80% today because of computerization." JPMorgan's CFO said token spending will be an important question going forward. The comments came as five major banks

A Goldman Sachs economist argues AI boosters may be badly miscalibrated on timing, noting the computing revolution took 15 years to show up in macro productivity data. The analysis found productivity actually got measurably worse for four years after the PC's 1981 commercialization, then flatlined, becoming statistically significant only in year eight. The drag, the research finds, has less to do with the technology than with humans reluctant to adopt it, sometimes even sabotaging rollouts. Gold

Hinge's founder announced an $18 million raise for Overtone, a new "voice- and audio-forward" dating service that uses AI to deliver highly curated introductions. Backers include Hinge owner Match Group, alongside FirstMark Capital and Pace Capital. The founder, who left Hinge last year, is positioning Overtone against algorithmic feeds and swiping, saying "it's not a dating app." The pitch taps growing user fatigue, with a 2024 survey finding 78% of dating-app users felt burnt out, using AI to

Email client Superhuman launched a new auto-draft feature that identifies important emails and writes replies matching the user's tone from past conversations, generating two extra variations to choose from. In testing, drafts confirming meetings or agreeing to embargoes needed little to no editing, a step up from earlier AI replies that read like an overeager salesperson. The feature learns from usage, improving over time, though it still defaults to overly agreeable responses, once scheduling

MIT's JARVIS Challenge gave 31 undergraduates four weeks to design, fabricate, and test a small gas-turbine jet engine producing 50-100 pounds of thrust, using AI as their primary engineering partner. Many students had little prior experience in turbomachinery or even thermodynamics. The takeaway: AI can substantially accelerate safety-critical hardware engineering, but engineering judgment remains the decisive differentiator, and manufacturing, not design or analysis, was the rate-limiting step

AI tools are helping job seekers cheat on interviews and coding tests, leaving hiring managers paranoid and scrambling to reverse course, Bloomberg reports. Candidates who ace AI-assisted screens are struggling once on the job, exposing a gap between interview performance and real ability. The trend is pushing employers to rethink remote assessments and lean back toward in-person evaluation. It adds a new wrinkle to hiring at a moment when AI is already reshaping which roles companies staff and

A neuroscientist studying consciousness pushed back on claims that AI may be conscious, responding to Anthropic research that reported signs of consciousness emerging in Claude's inner workings. Anthropic stopped short of claiming Claude is conscious like humans, but the findings, plus Richard Dawkins recently concluding Claude "just had to be conscious," have raised the stakes. The researcher argues the case is far weaker than it appears and warns against conflating sophisticated conversation w

Mark Cuban urged employers to run every healthcare contract through AI chatbots like Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini and ask "Where am I getting ripped off?" He argues large language models can parse hundreds of pages of dense contract language to surface hidden costs and overpayments that human reviewers miss. The Cost Plus Drugs cofounder, a longtime critic of insurers and pharmacy benefit managers, says opaque pricing and complex contracts drive up costs, and AI can help level the playing field fo

The Philippines' main business-process outsourcing group cut its industry revenue and job forecasts, and warned of possibly shrinking future business, citing the emergence of AI alongside shifting geopolitics and rising competition. The BPO sector is a major pillar of the Philippine economy and a bellwether for AI's impact on service jobs. The downgrade adds to mounting evidence that AI automation is beginning to reshape labor forecasts in outsourcing-heavy economies, where call centers and back

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