China exported more than 6.2 million passenger cars in the first eight months of this year, beating its full-year total for 2025 with four months to spare, while domestic sales fell 25.6% in August. Europe absorbed much of the growth through plug-in hybrids, which the EU’s tariff on Chinese cars does not cover, and BYD’s […]
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Pony.ai and Verne have started fully driverless passenger rides in Zagreb, the first anywhere in Europe, with nobody in the driver’s seat and Uber taking the bookings. The pair want more than 2,000 robotaxis on European roads, but the only EU-wide approval route for a fully automated car is capped at 1,500 units a year […]
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Five ElevenLabs services are listed on the software lot of G-Cloud 15, the UK government’s cloud buying framework, according to the Digital Marketplace. They cover conversational agents, transcription, dubbing and text-to-speech. Three months ago the same government signed an agreement with the company that committed it to buying nothing. TNW reported in June that the […]
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TL;DR Moonshot AI is weighing a Hong Kong listing of up to $5bn as soon as this year, Bloomberg reports, having filed confidentially and added Bank of America alongside CICC, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs. Zhipu and MiniMax already listed in Hong Kong in January, ahead of OpenAI and Anthropic. The argument here is that […]
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TL;DR G42 executives have held exploratory talks about selling a majority stake to American companies to secure chip access past April 2027, Bloomberg reports. The company already stripped out Huawei equipment for Microsoft’s $1.5bn in 2024 and built US-specified monitoring into its own data centres this February. The article’s argument is that export control has […]
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A German chemicals company is considering closing the American plant that Washington’s new polysilicon tariffs were supposed to protect. Wacker Chemie has lost its last two customers for the material since the measures were announced and is weighing the future of a factory in Charleston, Tennessee, that employs about 600 people, Reuters reported in an exclusive. […]
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America’s road safety regulator is looking into Tesla’s newest robotaxi just a day after it began carrying passengers. “NHTSA is in contact with Tesla and is evaluating the situation,” a spokesperson for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said, according to Reuters. The service began on Thursday in limited areas of Austin. Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s […]
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South Korea negotiated tariff protection for its chipmakers, and Washington is pressing for American factories anyway. Semiconductor investment is now part of the broader talks between the two governments, a presidential official in Seoul has confirmed. The confirmation was reported by Reuters, and it follows Washington signalling plans for targeted tariffs on semiconductor imports. Howard Lutnick has […]
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OpenAI has told two House Democrats it is building automated shutdown capabilities, without providing the logs from the July incident in which an agent breached another company. The Commission has been able to require the withdrawal or recall of a general-purpose model from the EU market since 2 August. OpenAI has told two House Democrats […]
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Microsoft has launched its Fabric data platform in Government Community Cloud High on public preview, with general availability from 1 October, pitched at agentic AI workloads. Europe has no equivalent accredited tier, because its cloud certification scheme has been stuck since 2020 and lost its sovereignty requirement in 2024. Microsoft has launched its Fabric data […]
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A US federal judge has ruled that Google will not have to sell its advertising exchange, leaving the remedies from three American antitrust cases largely behavioural. The European Commission fined Google €2.95B last September and said only divestment of part of its services would address the same conduct. A US federal judge has ruled that […]
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Meta has released Muse Spark 1.3 and has not decided whether to publish its weights, though it still plans to release the weights for version 1.2. The AI Act exempts genuinely open-source general-purpose models from part of Article 53, but that exemption does not apply to models classified as carrying systemic risk. Meta has released […]
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New York City is imposing a one-year moratorium on generative AI for pupils from 2-K through eighth grade, removing student-facing AI software and companion chatbots for around 600,000 children. Norway banned generative AI in its primary schools in June, and the EU AI Act regulates AI used on pupils rather than AI used by them. […]
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Microsoft will report Azure revenue in dollars each quarter for the first time, having grown it 42% to $29.42B in the June quarter under a new two-segment structure. The European Commission reached a preliminary position in June that Azure should be designated a gatekeeper, with a final decision expected by the end of the year. […]
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Electrek has matched two fatal US freeway crashes to redacted Tesla reports showing a driver assistance system verified as engaged with the car stopped at 0mph in a live lane. The Netherlands approved FSD Supervised in April under UN Regulation 171, sealed the reasoning as commercial secrets, and an EU-wide vote is expected in October. […]
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Google gave publishers a way to opt out of its AI search features in June without affecting their ordinary search rankings. The European Commission has spent the summer trying to work out whether that option actually gives publishers any meaningful choice. The Commission sent publishers a questionnaire in July, with a deadline of August 28, […]
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US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has posted plans to buy a fleet of Boston Dynamics robot dogs. The listing puts the spend at $1m to $2m. It also says ICE does not intend to compete the purchase. Joseph Cox found the plan for 404 Media on Friday. It sits in the Department of Homeland Security’s […]
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Florida has ordered every automated licence plate reader off its state highways. Agencies have 30 days to take them down. Texas froze state funding for the same cameras four days earlier. Two states run by Republican governors moved against Flock Safety in the space of a week. Zack Whittaker reported both decisions for TechCrunch on […]
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X said it had found a Chinese bot farm pushing Americans to turn against AI data centres. A researcher who went looking for those accounts found that almost nobody had seen them. Darren Linvill, a researcher at Clemson University, identified at least 59 of those accounts with zero engagement. X probably suspended them before they […]
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The United States will ask the G20 not to build any new institutions for governing artificial intelligence. A White House official set out the position before a two-day meeting that opened in North Carolina on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The argument is procedural rather than substantive, which is what makes it effective. Washington is not proposing rules […]
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Brazil votes on October 4, and its electoral court spent Tuesday working through a question that many regulators are still struggling to answer: what exactly counts as a deepfake? The Tribunal Superior Eleitoral was expected to rule on broader restrictions for AI-generated campaign material, Reuters reported. The proposed rules go beyond simply banning deceptive deepfakes. […]
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Amazon runs a second-price auction for its search ads, a system in which the winning advertiser is supposed to pay one cent more than the next-highest bid. The Federal Trade Commission now alleges that Amazon charged advertisers their full winning bid roughly 80% of the time instead. The agency and 22 states sued Amazon on […]
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Reform UK wants to abolish the UK GDPR. It would replace the regime with a lighter privacy law modelled on New Zealand’s. Nigel Farage and the party’s economy chief Robert Jenrick announced the pledge on Tuesday evening, inside a package aimed at small businesses. Mizy Clifton reported the plan for Politico. Britain wrote an amended […]
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Google has agreed to pay £260m to settle a class action brought on behalf of UK app developers, ending a case that was due to go to trial next month. The deal appeared on Thursday and is worth about $353m, Reuters reported. Lawyers had previously valued the claim at just over £1bn. It sought compensation […]
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The European Commission has classified ChatGPT as a search engine. Monday’s designation brings the chatbot under the Digital Services Act as a Very Large Online Search Engine, alongside Reddit and Roblox, which have been designated as Very Large Online Platforms. ChatGPT is the first AI chatbot to be designated under the regime. The Commission announced […]
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The US Justice Department has quietly rewritten a press release that said Chinese hackers had claimed victims across the Senate, the Federal Reserve, NASA and half a dozen other federal bodies. The revised version says those organisations were targets, and that only some were actually compromised, as Reuters reported. The original text went out on […]
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A federal judge has voided the Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a national security supply-chain risk, finding that the label was punishment for the company’s public criticism of the Trump administration rather than a security assessment. US District Judge Rita Lin, of the Northern District of California, issued the decision on Thursday in a 59-page […]
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Southeast Asia has 306 data centres running and 173 more in the pipeline, according to figures published on Tuesday. The capacity being planned is nearly four times what is already operating. Southeast Asia data centre investment will rise from $15.72bn in 2025 to $35.08bn by 2031, according to Arizton. The Chicago research firm puts that […]
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Texas governor Greg Abbott says data centre companies brought the backlash on themselves. “They basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them,” he told ABC’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday. “And that’s why they got the backlash they deserve.” Andrew Pantazi and Ben Geman reported the remarks for Axios. They called […]
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Ukraine and the United Kingdom have signed a joint declaration on artificial intelligence partnership covering the development and deployment of AI-enabled military capabilities, according to the Ukrainian presidency’s account of talks in Kyiv between Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Andy Burnham. It formalises a direction British defence policy has already been moving in, having committed £2bn to […]
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The Australian government intends to impose national energy standards on AI data centres at this week’s National Cabinet meeting even though Queensland will not agree to them, a shift from the consensus approach that stalled when Queensland and the Northern Territory rejected most of the framework in July. The policy requires large facilities to buy power […]
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