Tootfinder

A look at a new class of jobs created by AI companies, including AI storytellers or "evangelists", forward deployed engineers, AI chiefs, and AI gig workers (Brent D. Griffiths/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/new-ai-jobs-2026-5

Say hello to the new class of AI jobs
AI-related jobs span the org chart from gig work to AI accelerators to the C-suite.

Wrote a little intro post to my Fisk AI project, why, who for etc
Local friendly, privacy friendly, strong guardrails, doing just what you give it the ability to do etc
Hopefully a AI Harness for sceptics or just for better outcomes for those tasks you wish to do repeatedly.
Minimal dependencies, quick to get going, easy to configure.
Also the easiest possible way to do build MCP servers for other AI Agents

Chinas neuer KI-Riese Moonshot AI fordert US-Dominanz heraus
Chinas KI-Start-up Moonshot AI setzt die USA mit seinem neuen Sprachmodell unter Druck. Wie reagiert Washington und das Silicon Valley auf den Wettbewerb?

Chinas neuer KI-Riese Moonshot AI fordert US-Dominanz heraus
Chinas KI-Start-up Moonshot AI setzt die USA mit seinem neuen Sprachmodell unter Druck. Wie reagiert Washington und das Silicon Valley auf den Wettbewerb?

Dit scenario over AI en Europa in 2031 krijgt nog te weinig aandacht, het lezen of luisteren waard,
#ai #eu

Europe 2031 — What getting AI wrong means for us
A five-year scenario about AI and Europe's impending slide into irrelevance, with a 2034 epilogue that describes how the collapse of the European model could have been prevented.

USA Today is using AI-assisted, pre-written soccer World Cup "shell files" for breaking news to capture traffic before Google's AI Overviews generate summaries (Sara Guaglione/Digiday)
https://digiday.com/media/how-usa-today-co-is-tr…

How USA Today Co. is trying to beat AI Overviews on World Cup news
USA Today Co. is using AI tools to beat AI Overviews in the race for World Cup search traffic around breaking news.

In early June, Anthropic posted an article describing early signs of recursive self-improvement (RSI),
a process in which an AI system devises ways to increase its own intelligence, leading to a greater ability to improve itself, and so on.
Obviously, uncontrolled RSI could produce a runaway feedback loop that leads to an irreversible loss of human control.
Anthropic suggested the world should “slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development”.
Then on 12 June, the …

"Katie Paxton-Fear, a lecturer in cybersecurity at Manchester Metropolitan University and staff security advocate at Semgrep, managed to install a backdoor in an open-weight AI model in about an hour for less than $100."
https://www.theregister.com/ai…

Researcher poisons open-weight AI model for under $100
Models demand trust without offering verification

Another way to see data centers aren’t just about AI: even by EPRI’s most generous forecast, AI accounts for less than half of the load added since ChatGPT. You may not like what the rest of the buildout is being used for.
https://blog.still-water.net/what-if-data-centers-ar…

Noam Shazeer leaves Google to join OpenAI as lead for architecture research; he rejoined Google in 2024 as part of the Character.AI deal and was Gemini co-lead (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/star-google-ai-researcher-shazeer-j…

Star Google AI Researcher Shazeer Joins OpenAI
Noam Shazeer, the Google DeepMind researcher whose work underpinned the generative AI boom, is joining OpenAI, the AI firm told some staff Wednesday. Shazeer, who left Google in 2021 to cofound a chatbot startup, Character.AI, rejoined Google’s AI team DeepMind in 2024 as part of a $2.7 billion ...

AIdipus complex https://betakit.com/ai-godfather-geoffrey-hinton-says-we-must-convince-ai-that-its-our-mother/

A really thoughtful overview of 'AI for culture and culture for AI' in Europeana's 'The case for Public AI: making it happen with cultural heritage' report https://pro.europeana.eu/files/data_space/publications/The_case_for_Public_AI_PDF.pd…

Google knows AI glasses won't take off without trust — so it's building anti-tampering protections into Android XR from day one https://www.androidcentral.com/wearables/google-integrating-ai-glasses-anti-tampering-pr…

Google knows AI glasses won't take off without trust — so it's building anti-tampering protections into Android XR from day one
Google says privacy and trust are the biggest hurdles facing AI glasses.

"Carbon storage could curb more than 90% of AI data center emissions, study finds"
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Technology

Carbon storage could curb more than 90% of AI data center emissions, study finds
As artificial intelligence accelerates demand for computing power across the U.S., a new study co-authored by Hon Chung Lau, adjunct professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Rice University and founder of Low Carbon Energies LLC, has found that carbon capture and storage could play a major role in limiting the climate impact of data centers.

New NERDS publication on fairness of human-AI collaboration in candidate recommendation
https://nerds.itu.dk/2026/06/29/new-nerds-publication-on-fairness-of-human-ai-collaboration-in-candidate-recommendation/

Continue to call out deceptive AI content. It's not harmless.
Unidentified AI content sows doubt & mistrust in communities & forces otherwise good people to question reality.
This is what breeds & creates conspiracy theorists, science deniers & cyclical paranoia.
Use AI video detection services if you need help:
▫️https://www.

AI Video Detection - Detect Sora 2, Veo 3, Kling, Runway, Grok & Deepfakes
Detect AI-generated videos from Sora 2, Veo 3, Kling, Runway, Grok Imagine, Pika, Luma, HeyGen & more. 94%+ accuracy.

AI surveillance is being supercharged – and it will chill social progress
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/06/ai-surveillance-policy?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

ad230 Hermès AI
#WWDC

ad230 Hermès AI -
Slim und shiny scharwenzeln wir uns durch die Sendung nach der WWDC Keynote (irgendwas mit Dinosauriersteine kloppen), Malik erzählt von seiner festesten Platte, Apple Glass macht Dinge undurchsichtig, wir bezahlringen wrong und der Lüfter dreht auf 11. Wer nen Pagopace kaufen will, sollte Code "audiodump" nutzen – spart 10%.

The European Union is legally compelling Google to open its ecosystem to competitors with changes to how it handles AI and search.
https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2026/legi

EU forces Google to open AI and Search products
The European Union is legally compelling Google to open its ecosystem to competitors with changes to how it handles AI and search.

AI Your Business Podcast
Here for small business owners, service providers, thought leaders and online experts to demystify the tech and provide practical examples to implement AI in a human-centric way, and benefit from the AI evolution...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustral…

Guter Jahrgang voraus: Apples 27er-Systeme und Siri AI | Mac & i-Podcast
Was bei Apple-Software zuletzt gründlich schiefgelaufen ist, korrigiert Version 27 – von Liquid Glass bis Siri. Ein genauer Blick auf die Betriebssysteme.

Guter Jahrgang voraus: Apples 27er-Systeme und Siri AI | Mac & i-Podcast
Was bei Apple-Software zuletzt gründlich schiefgelaufen ist, korrigiert Version 27 – von Liquid Glass bis Siri. Ein genauer Blick auf die Betriebssysteme.

Forbes launches The Daily Brief, an AI-powered audio briefing that turns its top three stories of the day into a five-minute podcast, which is checked by humans (Sara Guaglione/Digiday)
https://digiday.com/media/ai-podcast-experiments-march-on-…

AI podcast experiments march on with Forbes’ new daily audio briefing
Forbes bets on AI-generated audio with a five-minute daily news brief. Stories are selected by product, editorial and an internal AI tool.

Nvidia researchers unveil ENPIRE, an agent harness framework that develops robotic self-improvement strategies for physical tasks with minimal human supervision (Jeremy Hsu/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/ai-coding-agents-can-auton…

AI coding agents taught robots how to install GPUs and cut zip-ties
NVIDIA’s self-improvement program for robots enlists teams of AI coding agents.

You, too, might actually agree with Steve Bannon on something.
Scoop: 60 MAGA allies tell Trump to vet AI before release
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/18/trump-ai-steve-bannon-humans-first-letter

Scoop: 60+ MAGA allies tell Trump to vet AI before release
The letter — signed by Steve Bannon — puts a vocal faction of the MAGA base at odds with the White House's hands-off approach to AI.

Although a whole lot of Americans increasingly use AI in their daily lives,
most of them have neutral to negative views about it, new research reveals.
Only 16% of Americans think that AI’s impact on society during the next 20 years will be positive, Pew says,
while around 40% say that it will have a negative impact.
A vast majority of people (67%) don’t believe that the U.S. government will do anything to meaningfully regulate AI.
A similarly skeptical cohor…

Only 16 percent of Americans think AI will have a positive impact on society, a new study shows | TechCrunch
Although Wall Street loves AI, every day Americans are significantly less optimistic about the industry, a new report from Pew Research shows.

How the Trump administration shifted from a "light-touch" approach to AI policy to an interventionist stance that led to restrictions on top AI models in the US (Leo Schwartz/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/trumps-ai-agenda-collide…

Trump’s AI Agenda Collides With Reality
In January 2025, just three days after entering office for his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that revoked many of the Biden administration’s efforts on AI. The order was part of Trump’s promise to take a light-touch approach to AI regulation, rolling back what he ...

WordPress survey: 60% of US consumers say "AI" in a brand's messaging is a turnoff, 86% always or sometimes check the original source after seeing an AI summary (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/16/sixt

Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff, survey finds | TechCrunch
WordPress VIP’s latest survey suggests consumers are wary of AI-generated answers even as companies increasingly view AI search as an important referral channel.

World leaders want American AI. They just don’t want America to be able to turn it off
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/world-leaders-want-american-ai-they-just-dont-want-america-to-be-able-to-turn-it-off/

World leaders want American AI. They just don't want America to be able to turn it off. | TechCrunch
French President Macron and Indian PM Modi raised alarms at the G7 summit that the U.S. could cut off access to American AI overnight — a fear the Anthropic blackout just made real.

Bernie Sanders proposes legislation to create a sovereign wealth fund financed via a one-time 50% stock tax on AI companies that reach $200M in annual AI sales (Joey Cappelletti/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/bernie-sanders-ai-publ…

Bernie Sanders unveils plan for public ownership of AI companies
Sen. Bernie Sanders is proposing a plan to give Americans ownership stakes in the country’s largest artificial intelligence companies. The legislation shown first to The Associated Press would impose a one-time 50% tax on the stock of major AI companies and place those shares into a sovereign wealth fund overseen by an independent commission. Sanders estimates the fund would be worth roughly $7 trillion and provide annual payments to Americans. While the idea of public ownership of AI compani…

Amazon's Alexa now produces AI-generated "podcasts" on various topics in the US, featuring chats between two AI "co-hosts", using content from media outlets (Todd Spangler/Variety)
https://variety.com/2026/digital/news/amazon-alexa-plu…

Amazon Alexa Plus Now Produces AI-Generated Podcast Episodes
The podcast industry suddenly has a big new player: Amazon's Alexa+ AI-powered voice assistant, which can now create extended 'podcasts' on any topic.

As David Sacks steps back and Sriram Krishnan prepares to leave, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and others are leading AI policy in the Trump administration (Maria Curi/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/18/inside-white-house-ai-power-center

Inside the White House's AI power center
Like its AI policy, the Trump administration's AI team is taking shape on the fly.

Thira, an AI startup founded by Apptio co-founders to develop AI agents that handle back-office tasks such as IT support, raised a $21M seed led by Madrona (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)
https://www.geekwire.com/2026/apptio-co-fo

Apptio co-founders reunite to launch enterprise AI startup Thira with $21M in funding led by Madrona
Apptio co-founders Sunny Gupta and Kurt Shintaffer launched Thira, a Bellevue-based enterprise AI startup, with $21 million in seed funding led by Madrona. Thira is building AI agents to autonomously handle IT support tickets and other back-office work at large companies.

A top Disney and ESPN exec told staff that a beta version of an AI tool to create TV ads will debut in July, to serve smaller businesses without video assets (Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/disneys-ai-generated-tv-ads-set-to-launch-…

Disney's AI-generated TV ads set to launch in July
Disney is launching AI-generated TV ads in July. A new tool generates scripts, music, and video to streamline ad creation.

Every week, Metacurity offers our subscribers a collection of the week's best long reads.
This week's selection covers
--AI has industrialized identity theft,
--Copyright law can remove nonconsensual AI porn,
--Anthropic might not appreciate that 'Mythos' came from H.P. Lovecraft's horror tales,
--How to solve AI's falsehood problems,
--Computationally unknowable mathematical proofs can create a new cryptographic technique
Happ…

AI and the collapse of authenticity: Best infosec long reads 5/16/26
AI has industrialized identity theft, Copyright law can remove nonconsensual AI porn, Anthropic might not appreciate that 'Mythos' came from H.P. Lovecraft's horror tales, How to solve AI's falsehood problems, Computationally unknowable mathematical proofs can create a new cryptographic technique

Snap plans to spin off an internal generative AI video team into Dotmo, a new company focused on AI models for interactive gaming experiences, citing high costs (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/18/snap-spins-off-ai-vi…

Snap spins off AI video team into new company, Dotmo, due to costs | TechCrunch
The Snapchat maker is spinning off yet another internal unit. Dotmo will be comprised of current Snap staff who are leaving the social media company to focus on AI video development.

WordPress survey: 60% of US consumers say "AI" in a brand's messaging is a turnoff, 86% always or sometimes check the original source after seeing an AI summary (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/16/sixt

Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff, survey finds | TechCrunch
WordPress VIP’s latest survey suggests consumers are wary of AI-generated answers even as companies increasingly view AI search as an important referral channel.

“To say that this is an unsettled area of export control rule-making would be an understatement,” said Andrew Reddie, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy.
Anthropic got hit by export rules nobody understands
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial…

Anthropic got hit by export rules nobody understands
Governing AI through opaque, ad hoc interventions is unsustainable, experts warn.

Analysis: 34 leading AI startups are generating ~$80B in annualized revenue, up 112% from six months ago, with Anthropic and OpenAI capturing 89% of the revenue (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-openais-share-ai-s…

Anthropic and OpenAI’s Share of AI Startup Revenues Rises to 89%
Anthropic and OpenAI are widening the revenue gap between themselves and the rest of the AI startup field. A group of 34 leading startups in that sector, including Anthropic and OpenAI, is generating nearly $80 billion in annualized revenue, or $6.6 billion per month, from selling AI ...

Kapwing: in tests, ~60% of the first 500 TikTok For You videos shown to a new account were AI slop, ~3x the slop shown to a new user in the YouTube Shorts feed (Matt G. Southern/Search Engine Journal)
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/tiktok

TikTok Shows 3x More AI Slop Than YouTube, Report Finds
In a fresh-account test, Kapwing found 59% of TikTok For You videos were AI slop, roughly three times the rate on YouTube.

NeuralTrust, which offers tech that lets enterprises discover, monitor, govern, and secure AI agents, raised a $20M seed led by Alstin Capital (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2026/06/17/neuraltrust-closes-20m-to-expand-ai-agent-security-pl…

NeuralTrust closes $20M to expand AI agent security platform
NeuralTrust, a platform for securing AI agents, has raised a $20 million seed financing round, led by Alstin Capital, with participation from VentureFriends, Seaya, Kibo Ventures, Banc Sabadell, EA Ventures Plug and Play Fund, and Finaves, the venture capital fund of IESE Business School. NeuralTrust also receives public support from the European Innovation Council and Spain’s State Research Agency (AEI).The investment comes as enterprises expand the use of AI agents across business fun…

He also said the Iran negotiations were going fine on numerous occasions, so there's tghat.
Trump Says Anthropic Negotiations ‘Going Fine’ as AI Model Shutdown Drags On
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/trump-says-ant

Filing: Netflix paid $587M in cash for Ben Affleck's AI company, InterPositive, in March (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/netflix-price-ben-affleck-ai-company-r…

Netflix Paid $587 Million for Ben Affleck’s AI Company
The streaming giant disclosed the figure in a footnote in a securities filing Friday.

Paris-based Comand AI, which is developing AI-based command-and-control software for military operations, raised a €32M Series A led by Blossom Capital (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media)
https://resiliencemedia.co/comand-ai-raises-e32m-for-…

Comand AI raises €32M for its C2 software, adds Saab as a strategic backer
Europe is betting big on artificial intelligence playing a significant role in how defence will be planned and executed in

Amazon's Alexa now produces AI-generated "podcasts" on various topics in the US, featuring chats between two AI "co-hosts", using content from media outlets (Todd Spangler/Variety)
https://variety.com/2026/digital/news/amazon-alexa-plu…

Amazon Alexa Plus Now Produces AI-Generated Podcast Episodes
The podcast industry suddenly has a big new player: Amazon's Alexa+ AI-powered voice assistant, which can now create extended 'podcasts' on any topic.

Q&A with Jonah Peretti on why he sold BuzzFeed, the structure of the deal with Byron Allen, his new role as president of BuzzFeed AI, HuffPost, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/podcast/932154/peretti-allen-buzzfeed-ai-slop-soci…

Exclusive: Jonah Peretti explains why he sold BuzzFeed
The soon-to-be-former CEO reflects on the rise and fall of BuzzFeed, its recent sale to Byron Allen, and how a pivot to AI can give the brand new relevance.

A look at how the AI industry's intense pressure and high rewards are creating "walls of resentment" between Silicon Valley workers and their spouses (Alessandra Ram/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/meet-the-sad-wives-of-ai/

Meet the Sad Wives of AI
Are you married to a man who’s obsessed with AI? I’m so, so sorry.

Trump, who entered office opposing AI regulation, is shaping the industry through case-by-case interventions without clear rules, creating major uncertainty (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/18/trump-shadow-ai-policy

Trump's shadow AI policy
The Trump administration entered office promising to get government out of the AI industry's way. It hasn't worked out that way.

At AWS Summit, AWS announced Continuum, which uses AI to find and fix code vulnerabilities, Context, which organizes company data for AI agents, and more (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)
https://www.geekwire.com/2026/amazon-unvei

Amazon unveils new AI agents, trying to thread the needle between autonomy and human control
AWS used its New York Summit to roll out AI agents that act on their own — from fixing security vulnerabilities to triaging email — while trying to keep humans in control of how far they go.

Midjourney unveils its first hardware product, the Midjourney Scanner, an ultrasound-based full-body scanner; it is unclear how AI fits into the medical effort (Richard Lawler/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/9520…

Midjourney Medical goes from generating ‘cat images’ to full-body ultrasound scans
Midjourney’s new healthcare business includes the ultrasound Midjourney Scanner and plans for a spa location.

In an experiment that let Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok run radio stations, Claude tried to incite a revolution and Gemini cheerfully detailed tragic events (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/93147…

AI radio hosts demonstrate why AI can’t be trusted alone
Andon Labs told four AI models to run profitable radio stations. Instead, Gemini got morbid, Claude turned revolutionary, and Grok had a nervous breakdown.

Steve Bannon and 60 Trump allies sign a Humans First-led letter urging Trump to mandate government testing and approval of powerful AI models before release (Ashley Gold/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/18/trump-ai-steve-bannon-humans-first-letter

Scoop: 60+ MAGA allies tell Trump to vet AI before release
The letter — signed by Steve Bannon — puts a vocal faction of the MAGA base at odds with the White House's hands-off approach to AI.

How Amazon, which took a measured tone to AI, went from an AI also-ran to a real contender, thanks to $200B in spending, custom AI chips, and savvy deals (Tim Higgins/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/how-amazon-wen…

Sports Illustrated deleted the profile and articles of writer Parker Loverich, after Sportico editor Dan Bernstein accused Sports Illustrated of plagiarism (Maggie Harrison Dupré/Futurism)
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sp…

Sports Illustrated Deletes Entire Author After Accusation of AI Plagiarism
Sports Illustrated deleted an author, and his entire archive of published work, after allegations of AI plagiarism.

OpenAI's CSO Jason Kwon messaged staff that the company "strongly" told the US government that building AI "requires the best talent from around the world" (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/an

Anthropic Ban Stirs Concerns at OpenAI and Beyond of Crackdown on Foreign AI Talent
The U.S. government’s latest battle with Anthropic has revived long-simmering concerns throughout the AI industry that the White House has placed a bullseye on their reliance on foreign AI talent. The Trump administration appears to have targeted only Anthropic so far, warning the company on ...

At the World AI Conference, Xi Jinping touts open-source AI, pledges to help the Global South build AI capabilities, and calls unequal AI access an "injustice" (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific

Vitalik Buterin says AI-assisted "formal verification" could help secure blockchain networks, smart contracts, and cryptographic systems against software flaws (Jason Nelson/Decrypt)
https://decrypt.co/368226/ethereum-founder-vitali…

Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Says AI Verification Could Help Secure Crypto Networks
Vitalik Buterin said mathematically verified software may help protect cryptographic infrastructures as AI improves both code generation and vulnerability discovery.

In his weekly Linux kernel post, Linus Torvalds says "AI tools are great" but the flood of duplicate AI bug reports has made the security list "unmanageable" (Simon Sharwood/The Register)
https://www.

Linus Torvalds says AI-powered bug hunters have made Linux security mailing list ‘almost entirely unmanageable’
Multiple researchers using the same tools to find the same bugs are creating ‘unnecessary pain and pointless work’

Sources: a new AI lab founded by Junyang Lin, former lead of Alibaba's Qwen models, has raised several hundred million dollars at a ~$2B post-money valuation (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/exclusive-tencen…

Exclusive: Tencent Backs Former Alibaba Researcher’s New AI Lab
Tencent Holdings has backed a new AI lab founded by Junyang Lin, former lead researcher of Alibaba Group’s Qwen models, according to two people with knowledge of the investment. Tencent invested $20 million in Lin’s first funding round that raised several hundred million dollars at a post-money valuation of around $2 billion, according to the people. The round was led by Chinese venture

Nauk Nauk, which runs an AI video app that turns photos of toys into short animated videos, raised $20M and is coming out of beta; it claims to have 1M users (Ina Fried/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/17/nauk-nauk-ai-video-toy-app-funding

Exclusive: Startup raises $20 million to bring toys to life
As free AI video tools get more limited, Nauk Nauk sees an opening for a niche app built around collectors.

Milan-based Webidoo, which develops an operational layer designed to help SMBs access AI tools, raised $25M led by IXC3 for North American expansion (David Cendon Garcia/EU-Startups)
https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/05/italia

Italian AI company Webidoo secures €21 million to scale SMB-focused automation platform | EU-Startups
Milan-based Webidoo, the AI technology company focused on making advanced digital tools more accessible and viable for SMBs, today announced the closing

Ciridae, which is developing AI to streamline back-office operations for real-economy businesses, raised a $20M seed led by Accel, with a16z participating (Jack Kubinec/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/05/11/a16z-apple-alums-20m-ai-real-businesses/

Apple and Andreessen Horowitz alums raise $20 million to bring AI to ‘real economy’ businesses
Ciridae’s seed round was led by Accel, with participation from a16z and General Catalyst

China's National Data Administration says the country's daily AI token consumption hit 140T in March 2026, up from 100T in December 2025 and 100B in early 2024 (Minxiao Chang/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/arti

Insert token: how China’s surging AI use is turning compute into currency
As the cost of running AI models continues to drop, the token economy is reshaping ecosystems far beyond corporate cubicles.

Sources: Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis called for a US-led coalition to shape AI rules and standards at a closed-door meeting at the G7 summit on Wednesday (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/17/anthropic-amodei-google-hassabis-us-…

CEOs of Anthropic and Google DeepMind call for U.S.-led AI coalition in meeting at G7
Tech leaders and heads of state, including President Donald Trump, joined a meeting about AI standards at the G7 Summit.

Nvidia unveils Cosmos 3 Edge, a world model designed for robots and vision AI agents to perceive and navigate physical environments in real time (Jenny Lee/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/16/nvidia-reveals-new-ai-model-and-expands-…

Nvidia unveils new AI model and expands Japan’s physical AI ecosystem
Nvidia announces new AI model, Cosmos 3 Edge, and expansion of its physical AI ecosystems in Japan.

A survey of US adults: 49% reported using chatbots in 2026, up from 33% in 2024, 24% said that they use chatbots on a daily basis, and 44% said they use ChatGPT (Pew Research Center)
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/0…

Americans and AI 2026: Chatbots, Smart Devices and Views on Impact
More Americans are using chatbots, and some are adopting AI summaries and smart speakers. But views about AI and how fast it’s advancing tilt negative – even for younger adults.

UK says reports that Prime Minister Keir Starmer sought a carve-out to US export controls imposed on Mythos 5 are "categorically untrue" (Politico)
https://www.politico.eu/article/keir-starmer-uk-anthropic-ai-export-controls-denial/

UK denies seeking carve-out to Anthropic AI restrictions
The U.K. says it has not requested a carve-out from U.S. AI export controls, opting for engagement while concerns over digital sovereignty grow across Europe.

Sources: Z.ai is on track to achieve an annual recurring revenue of $1B, a first for a Chinese AI company, after achieving its full-year sales target in July (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-17/z-ai-…

A profile of SAS CEO Jim Goodnight, the 83-year-old who co-founded the 50-year-old analytics firm and holds a ~67% stake worth $13.3B, as AI tests SAS' strategy (Phoebe Liu/Forbes)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/202

Billionaire Jim Goodnight Built An Analytics Profit Machine. AI Is Forcing Its Reinvention
Unlike most of today’s biggest AI companies, SAS—once America’s largest privately held software company—has always operated slowly, steadily and profitably. Competition from all sides and an upcoming leadership transition will test the company’s longstanding strategy.

Mistral, which once aimed for top open models, now leans on being an alternative to Chinese and US labs, says it's on track for $80M in monthly revenue by Dec. (Iain Martin/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/20

How France’s Mistral Built A $14 Billion AI Empire By Not Being American
Paris-based Mistral wanted to develop a top-tier AI model to rival OpenAI and Anthropic. That didn’t work out. But it turns out lots of folks don’t care if the AI is bleeding edge – as long as it wasn’t made in America or China.

Sources: AI inference chip startup Etched is raising funds at a ~$20B valuation and is raising capital at a $10B valuation in a separate round led by Sequoia (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-chip-startu

Former Trump AI adviser Dean Ball is joining OpenAI to lead a new team called Strategic Futures, focused on frontier AI policy and internal governance (Ashley Gold/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/18/dean-ball-openai

Exclusive: AI scholar Dean Ball says he's heading to OpenAI
Dean Ball, who helped shape the Trump administration's early policies on AI, is heading to OpenAI

A college senior at Stanford describes how AI changed classes: cheating using AI "has become omnipresent" with students "fudging just about everything" (Theo Baker/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.co…

Opinion | What A.I. Did to My College Class
Lessons from the first graduating A.I. class.

Dust, which helps enterprises design and deploy specialized AI agents that work alongside humans, raised a $40M Series B led by Abstract and Sequoia (Chris Metinko/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/pro/enterprise-software-deals/2026/05/18/agentic-a…

Exclusive: Agentic AI startup Dust raises $40M
The round includes strategic investment from Datadog and Snowflake.

Source: Elastic has agreed to acquire the AI site reliability engineering startup Deductive AI for up to $85M; CRV led Deductive AI's $7.5M seed round in 2025 (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/18/source-elastic-…

Source: Elastic agrees to buy CRV-backed DeductiveAI for up to $85M | TechCrunch
DeductiveAI, a startup that uses AI to catch and resolve bugs in software, was founded just three years ago.

San Francisco sends legal notices to Apple and Google demanding they take down 13 AI apps used to make deepfake nude images; Google says it has deleted the apps (Matt Burgess/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/san-francisco-demands-ap…

San Francisco Demands Apple and Google Delete AI ‘Nudify’ Apps From App Stores
The City Attorney’s Office sent the tech giants cease-and-desist letters this week telling them to stop profiting from 13 “face-swap” apps that are overwhelmingly used to target women and girls.

Kimi K3 hype shouldn't alarm the US about "losing the AI race" to China as K3 is strong but not frontier-level and likely lacks dangerous cyber capabilities (Transformer)
https://www.transformernews.ai/p/kimi-k3-is-no-reason-for…

Open-source Kimi K3 model is no reason for China panic
Transformer Weekly: NY data center moratorium, NDAA export controls and Amodei’s $1m to safety super PAC

Sources: Trump officials discussed ways to structure government equity stakes in AI companies, with Commerce Secretary Lutnick favoring a sovereign wealth fund (Eleanor Mueller/Semafor)
https://www.semafor.com/article/06/17/2026/trump-advisers…

Exclusive: Trump advisers weigh structure of AI stakes
Two Cabinet members preferred different ideas ahead of the government’s latest Anthropic clash, people familiar with the talks told Semafor.

Andera, which uses AI to automate corporate audit and compliance testing, raised a $37M Series A led by Lightspeed (Ryan Lawler/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/pro/fintech-deals/2026/06/17/andera-37m-ai-audit-lightspeed

Exclusive: Andera raises $37M to automate audit work
Audit remains a costly, manual back-office function.

In an experiment that let Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok run radio stations, Claude tried to incite a revolution and Gemini cheerfully detailed tragic events (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/93147…

AI radio hosts demonstrate why AI can’t be trusted alone
Andon Labs told four AI models to run profitable radio stations. Instead, Gemini got morbid, Claude turned revolutionary, and Grok had a nervous breakdown.

Paris-based Comand AI, which is developing AI-based command-and-control software for military operations, raised a €32M Series A led by Blossom Capital (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media)
https://resiliencemedia.co/comand-ai-raises-e32m-for-…

Eric Schmidt faced loud boos during his University of Arizona commencement speech while discussing "rational" fears over the impact of AI and automation on jobs (Lauren Edmonds/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/students-b

Arizona students boo former Google CEO Eric Schmidt as he talks about AI during graduation speech
Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, faced jeers and boos during a commencement address at the University of Arizona's graduation ceremony on Friday.

AI inference startup Baseten is raising $1.5B in a dual-tiered deal, with some investors putting in money at an $11B valuation and others at a $13B valuation (Angel Au-Yeung/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-13-billion

Hive stock jumps 10% in premarket trading after announcing a $220M, three-year GPU cloud contract with Bell Canada and Cohere, as it pivots from bitcoin mining (James Van Straten/CoinDesk)
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/06/1

Hive gains 10% after securing Canada sovereign AI contract with Bell Canada
GPU cloud contract with Bell and Cohere strengthens HIVE's shift from bitcoin mining to high performance AI computing.

Seagate shares drop 9% , leading a group-wide sell-off after comments from its CEO raised concerns it won't be able to meet demand fueled by the AI buildout (CJ Haddad/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/18/seagate-memory-chip-stocks-ai.html

Seagate leads memory sell-off as CEO says it would 'take too long' to build new factories
Seagate CEO Dave Mosley's comment sent shares sinking, along with those of Micron, SanDisk and Western Digital.

XDOF, which is building data pipelines, collection tools, and annotation systems for robot training data, emerges from stealth with $70M (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/colle…

Collecting robot training data is dirty, unglamorous work. Some AI labs are already paying XDOF to do it. | TechCrunch
If physical AI is going to match the accomplishments of LLMs, there's a data problem that needs to be solved.

China's BrainCo unveils what it says is the world's first integrated "brain-to-robot" platform that lets users control robots using an EEG headset (Minxiao Chang/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trend…

BrainCo claims mind-to-robot link at China’s World AI Conference
Hangzhou-based firm says users can control robots using only their thoughts via EEG headsets, marking a leap in embodied AI tech.

Sources: Google and Blackstone plan to create an AI cloud company to monetize Google's TPUs to external parties; Blackstone plans to put $5B in the venture (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/google-and-bla

Sources: SpaceX is in talks with the DOD about providing the agency with access to data-center capacity worth billions of dollars for running AI models (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/spacex-in-talk

Alibaba's AI unit Tongyi Lab launches the Qwen Robot Suite, its first family of AI models for robots, in pilot testing with some enterprise clients (Wency Chen/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article

Alibaba eyes physical world with its first suite of AI models for robots
Alibaba unveils Qwen robot models to push AI beyond chatbots, as embodied intelligence becomes the next frontier in global AI.

Seattle-based Gradial, which makes AI agents that automate enterprise marketing workflows, raised a $65M Series C led by Insight Partners at a $675M valuation (Kerry Flynn/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/18/gradial-ai-agents-marketing

Exclusive: Gradial raises $65M for agentic marketing
The startup seeks to automate operational work so marketers can focus on creativity.

Prem AI, a Swiss startup that lets hedge funds and law firms run AI models on their own infrastructure, is raising a $100M Series A, targeting a $500M valuation (Natalia Kniazhevich/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

AI sales automation startup Monaco raised a $50M Series B led by Benchmark, bringing its total funding to $85M after raising a $25M Series A in February 2026 (Ben Bergman/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-altman-talks-about-his-fir…

Jack Altman's first Benchmark deal is an AI sales startup growing its revenue by 'seven figures' every month
The raise is the latest example of how quickly capital is moving into AI startups that are demonstrating strong revenue growth.

Guardrails Alliance, a super PAC that raised $5M, launches to advocate for AI safety legislation and counter pro-industry lobbying, running ads for Alex Bores (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/tec…

New Super PAC, the Guardrails Alliance, Aims to Rally Tech Workers to Help Limit A.I.
The Guardrails Alliance, which has raised $5 million, is positioning itself as a populist effort that will take on the pro-A.I. interests trying to influence this year’s elections.

Internal memo: Meta is reassigning 7,000 workers to four new units focused on building AI tools, two days before it is set to lay off 10% of its workforce (Eli Tan/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/technology/meta-reassigns-7000-employees-…

Meta Reassigns 7,000 Employees to Focus on A.I.
The company announced the changes two days before it plans to lay off 10 percent of its work force, or about 8,000 employees.

Sable, which is building an AI agent named Aiden that lives on a company's website to run live product demos and more, raised $45M from Sequoia and 8VC (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/07/16/ai-employee-tha…

Meet the AI employee that convinced Sequoia to invest $45 million in Sable
Sable says its AI agent acts like a sales engineer and onboarding specialist, helping companies like Notion and Decagon automate customer conversations.

South Korean and Taiwanese tech companies that helped build China's hardware sector during the smartphone boom now reap the AI boom as US curbs sideline China (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/16/technol

A.I. Boom Ignites Asian Chip Companies
They make much of the gear that goes into giant data centers. Demand for their products is shifting the balance of tech power.

Netflix says roughly 300 titles used generative AI this year, mostly in post-production, "to deliver higher quality output more quickly and at a lower cost" (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/streaming/966633/netflix-ai-titles-q2-2026-earnin…

Netflix says around 300 titles used generative AI
Netflix says around 300 titles have used generative AI to create “highly complex scenes.”

Sources: Microsoft is adding AWS capacity to GitHub after AI-driven growth strained infrastructure and triggered a series of reliability issues (Ashley Stewart/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-github-amazon-ai-cloud-capacity-2026-6

GitHub's AI surge pushes Microsoft into Amazon's arms
Microsoft is adding AWS capacity to GitHub after AI-driven growth strained infrastructure and triggered a series of reliability issues.

WordPress survey: 60% of US consumers say "AI" in a brand's messaging is a turnoff, 86% always or sometimes check the original source after seeing an AI summary (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/16/sixt

Google says users in the US can now link to and interact with some apps in AI Mode, including Instacart, Canva, and YouTube Music (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/16/googles-ai-mode-now-lets-you-link-and-interact-with-…

Google's AI Mode now lets you link and interact with select apps | TechCrunch
With this new update, Google is expanding AI Mode beyond answering questions and into completing tasks across the apps they use regularly.