Chinese AI labs grow fast but lean on US clouds to close the monetization gap
Chinese AI startups are posting triple-digit revenue growth yet still falling short of the commercial trajectories their valuations imply, pushing at least one lab toward revenue-sharing arrangements with the same US hyperscalers that compe…
Emerald AI's $1B bet that data centers can bend to the grid
Emerald AI's $150 million Series A, which values the company at $1.05 billion less than a year after it exited stealth, arrives at the precise moment Wall Street is discovering that the data-center buildout it is financing carries risks it…
Anthropic Extends AI Agents to Physical Devices with Model Hardware Standard
Anthropic on August 27 released a research preview of the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), a specification that lets AI agents read data from and control physical laboratory and manufacturing equipment such as microscopes, robotic arms, liqui…
Alibaba Ships 125B-Parameter Qwen3.8-Flash on Qwen 4 Architecture
Alibaba Group released Qwen3.8-Flash, a 125-billion-parameter open-weight model built on its next-generation Qwen 4 architecture, positioning the release as a cost-effective competitor to Opus 4.6 and V4-Flash . The model is the latest ent…
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Meta Ties $5.3B of $18B Child-Safety Payout to TikTok, YouTube Adopting Same Restrictions
Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by state attorneys general alleging the company designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children and misled consumers . The settlement, signed with attorneys general from 48…
Barret Zoph Rejoins Google DeepMind as VP of Research After OpenAI, Thinking Machines Stints
Barret Zoph, co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab and former vice president of research at OpenAI, is returning to Google DeepMind as vice president of research, according to a Wall Street Journal exclusive . Zoph left Thinking Machines Lab…
Meta's Plan to Cut Teams 60% for AI-Native Workforce Collapsed After Agent Failures
Meta explored cutting the size of many teams across the company by as much as 60% in two waves as part of an effort to become "AI native," but reversed course after employee pushback and internal data showing AI agents were ineffective, acc…
Salesforce Embeds Full CRM Inside Anthropic's Claude via Claudeforce Plugin
Salesforce and Anthropic expanded their strategic partnership on August 26, unveiling Claudeforce, a plugin that pushes live Salesforce CRM data and workflows directly into Anthropic's Claude chatbot . The product ships with 37 pre-built sa…
DeepSeek Nears $7.4B Raise at $74B Valuation, Eyes Star Market Listing
DeepSeek is close to completing a funding round of approximately 50 billion yuan ($7.4 billion) at a pre-money valuation of about 500 billion yuan ($74 billion), according to people familiar with the matter . The round, which includes both…
Amazon Closes Mechanical Turk on September 30, Ending 21-Year Crowdsourcing Platform
Amazon has told users that Mechanical Turk, the crowdsourced-work platform launched in 2005, will close on September 30, 2026 . The company described the move as the result of a routine evaluation: "Following an assessment, Amazon made the…