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The Download: the claim shaking up AI and the internet’s agent problem
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. “We were looking at it wrong”: The explosive claim that’s...
Cloudflare's Clairic pulls data from documents faster and cheaper than LLMs
Cloudflare has released an AI model it says pulls data from documents faster and more cheaply than large language models. The article Cloudflare's Clairic pulls data from documents faster and cheaper...
IBM-backed llm-d framework adds controls for running AI models in-house
IBM Corp. and several other contributors to the open-source llm-d project are releasing version 1.0 of their distributed artificial intelligence inference framework, adding operational controls...
AI startup Vectorial lands $3M in funding to simulate human behavior for consumer research
Consumer research is a slow and cumbersome challenge that few companies do well, but if Vectorial AI Inc. is successful, they’ll never have to worry about doing it again. The startup today said it...
AI adoption by industry shows what other sectors can learn
The current narrative around artificial intelligence in the workplace is largely driven by Silicon Valley. But treating the tech sector as an island misses the actual trends in technology...
US bans Deepseek technology across federal civilian agencies
The US Department of Homeland Security has banned federal civilian agencies from using AI technology from Chinese lab Deepseek. The article US bans Deepseek technology across federal civilian...
How To Build A Billion-Dollar Company Without Venture Capital
Founders can build billion-dollar businesses without venture capital by prioritizing customer revenue, pricing for quality, hiring exceptional talent and automating processes to scale efficiently,...
Fintech Funding Fell 21% In Q3 As Deals Grew Scarcer
All told, fintech startups raised $10.6 billion globally in the third quarter of 2026, down 28.4% from $14.9 billion in Q2 2026 and 21.4% from $13.5 billion in Q3 2025.
Otter.ai raises $320 million from General Catalyst’s growth fund for its meeting tool
Meeting note-taking tool Otter.ai announced on Tuesday that it has raised $320 million from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF), which provides capital to startups without diluting equity...
Yelp can now call on your behalf to check wait times at a restaurant
Yelp is embedding numerous new AI features into its app that can do everything from call to check on restaurant wait times to create personalized recommendations that remember your preferences.
How to study a swiftly melting climate disaster
Andrew Haverdink, a tall grad student in a rain bib and rubber boots, wrenched a double-handed drill from the frozen soil that underlies much of Alaska’s Denali National Park and then unclipped the...
A visit to Samsung’s massive new semiconductor hub
Generative AI models run on powerful chips known as GPUs, which depend on stacks of specialized memory chips packaged with the processor. To meet growing demand for memory, Samsung is building a...
These startups hope “blended” food will cut our appetite for red meat
In the fall of 2025, Jeff Dodge set up a six-foot folding table in the cafeteria of Cane Bay High School in Summerville, South Carolina, to conduct a taste test. When the first rush of about 150...
Mamdani says feds have abdicated on AI, urges New Yorkers to push back
Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday night that New Yorkers must resist the narrative that an AI takeover is inevitable and demand regulations that protect the public and put power back in their hands.
Trump administration orders ban on DeepSeek in federal agencies
The Department of Homeland Security has ordered artificial intelligence technology from the Chinese company DeepSeek Ltd. be removed from all federal civilian agencies. The order, published on the...
AI work assistant startup Town secures unicorn status after raising $108M just weeks after launching
Town.com Inc., an artificial intelligence agent startup laser focused on getting work done by collaborating with other AI agents, revealed today that it has raised $108 million in a new funding at a...
Nscale and Anthropic are reportedly in talks for yet another $45B compute deal
If the deal goes through, it would be the latest in a long string of giant compute deals Anthropic has struck over the past year.
Nvidia, Dell back $200M round for AI model developer doubleAI
Artificial intelligence developer doubleAI today announced that it has raised $200 million in funding. Lightspeed and Bessemer co-led the Series A round. They were joined by Nvidia Corp., Dell...
Embedded AI evaluators won’t be an easy solution, Hugging Face’s policy chief says
The idea of embedded evaluators — in which supposedly "neutral" third-party observers are placed inside AI organizations — has been popularized over the last several months, as AI labs grapple with a...
MiniMax launches M3.1 Flash model, says it cuts AI agent costs by 70%
Chinese artificial intelligence developer MiniMax Group Inc. today released M3.1 Flash, a faster and cheaper update to the M3 large language model it launched in June. The release takes aim at the...
Microsoft says AI agents are like insider threats as ‘frontier models can’t be trusted’
Microsoft wants enterprises to closely watch the agents that employees use with systems not controlled by AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Amazon is taking its biggest shot at Nvidia yet with new TorchNeuron dev tool
Amazon wants to break Nvidia’s hold on PyTorch, the free toolkit used to build most AI apps, so that more developers run their apps on alternative chips like its own.
OpenAI Engineer Accused of Spying on Executives Ordered to Remain in Custody
A judge ordered Abdulrahman Alfozan to remain in custody, likening the Saudi government’s offer to secure the former OpenAI engineer’s release to a “blank check.”
Hackers hit AI coding tool OpenCode, running up charges on users’ AI accounts
OpenCode is an open source AI coding agent that's become a popular alternative to Claude Code and Cursor. But hackers got into part of its online platform and stole some users’ API keys, and the AI...
NiCE bets the company on AI, data and accountability, and the legacy business buys it time
Every company in the customer experience ecosystem now claims to be an artificial intelligence company. Last week, at NiCE Ltd.’s annual industry analyst summit, the company demonstrated what happens...
Tolan snags $30M for its AI companion that helps users navigate life
AI companion app Tolan has raised another $30 million after attracting more than 250,000 active users.
Replika’s founder built the AI assistant she pitched at Disrupt 12 years ago
Eugenia Kuyda's newest startup Wabi is positioned to take advantage of an idea she had more than a decade ago. Wabi offers a personal AI assistant with a twist, free and downloadable to anyone today.
Tenstorrent hits $6.2B valuation to scale open-weight AI chips
After drawing acquisition interest earlier this year, the Nvidia challenger raised $1.5 billion to remain independent.
Making the internet better for AI agents might make it worse for everyone else
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Until recently, you could divide internet users into just two...
MiniMax M3.1 Flash shows China's AI price race has no floor in sight
MiniMax's M3.1 Flash jumps 13 points over its predecessor to 42 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, at half the cost. It also hits 73.7 percent on the DeepSWE v1.1 coding benchmark for...
“We were looking at it wrong”: The explosive claim that’s upended the AI world
“I think I have good news about the nature of neural networks.” With those simple words of optimism, Nick Cammarata, a researcher at the AI startup Goodfire, kicked off a 26,000-word blog post that...
Kling AI drops version 4.0 with stereo audio, multilingual lip sync, and a lighter Flash variant
Kling AI has released version 4.0 of its video generator with support for clips up to 30 seconds, ten keyframe images as input, and prompt comprehension expanded to 8,000 tokens. In comparisons with...
Nvidia launches new open models to run agents in the enterprise and on PCs
Nvidia is leaning hard into the trend of enterprise companies wanting to run their own open models in their own data centers and also trying to make on-device, private AI agents a thing.
Two German courts now hold Google liable for what its AI overviews say
Google tried to overturn a landmark Munich ruling on AI search liability by appealing, then quietly settled. The strategy isn't working. The Aachen Regional Court just applied the exact same...
Motive brings agentic AI to physical operations with agents that act before problems escalate
Motive Inc., the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence platform provider for physical operations, today announced the launch of Agents, a new capability that automatically responds to safety,...
Motive Technologies revs up new AI Agents to automate fleet management
Motive Technologies Inc. is pushing the needle for fleet management automation with the launch of a new artificial intelligence offering called Agents today. As the name strongly hints at, Motive’s...
Stripe says AI agent purchases are adding up, but it won't share the numbers
AI agents are increasingly using Stripe's payment service Link to shop for their users, Upstarts Media reports. The article Stripe says AI agent purchases are adding up, but it won't share the...
Laplace Intelligence red-teams robots and self-driving cars before they hit the real world
University of Michigan spinout Laplace Intelligence uses AI agents and interactive simulation to stress-test robots and self-driving vehicles before deployment. The profitable startup is competing in...
The Download: preserving the Arctic permafrost, and playful AI agents
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Inside the quest to combat Arctic fires and save the planet’s...
The neocloud shakeout is coming, and Nvidia has the most to lose
After stock crashes and Firmus's scrapped IPO, industry executives expect only seven to ten of the hundreds of AI cloud providers to survive. CoreWeave lost a quarter of its market value, and...
Anthropic plans fund for workers threatened by AI, Musk counters with SpaceX shares for children
Anthropic wants to put five percent of its shares into a new public benefit fund that will also look into direct payments to workers at risk of losing their jobs. The fund is a company-owned LLC, so...
The FDE Bubble: Silicon Valley’s Most Expensive Game Of Pretend
Enterprise AI companies relying on armies of forward deployed engineers are disguising labor-intensive services as scalable software, inflating recurring revenue and valuations while falling short of...
Inside the quest to combat Arctic fires and save the planet’s frozen carbon
In the middle of an especially warm July in 2021, a wildfire ignited in a thick forest of black spruce and peeling paper birch trees on the northern campus of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks....
Pax8 launches 8os to let IT partners govern AI agents and 8bot as a managed AI co-worker
Small business software marketplace Pax8 Inc. today launched 8os, an operating system that lets its information technology service provider partners govern the artificial intelligence agents running...
Disney Asked Character.AI to Go Bankrupt for a Get-Out-of-Lawsuits Card
The entertainment giant hopes to get trust and safety tech, among other IP, from a startup whose chatbots dozens of states allege encouraged minors to self-harm and kill their parents.
DeepSeek releases updated V4.1-Flash model it says completes tasks faster
Chinese artificial intelligence startup Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co. Ltd. has released an updated version of its V4.1-Flash model that it says completes...
Anthropic says it’s committing 5% of its shares to a ‘public benefit fund’
The company offered some broad-strokes ideas for how this money might actually be used, such as “large donations to traditional nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations.”
Disney agrees to hire the majority of Character AI’s workforce
The filing also says that the “vast majority” of Character.AI employees who were offered jobs at Disney accepted them. However, this is a stalking horse bid, so another company could come forward...
Anthropic has nearly stopped hiring junior staff because AI agents now work six times as many hours
Anthropic is hiring fewer and fewer junior staff in technical roles. The share of junior positions among new hires dropped from 27 to 9 percent since early 2025. By August 2026, AI agents across the...
Hot Right Now
The Download: the claim shaking up AI and the internet’s agent problem
Cloudflare's Clairic pulls data from documents faster and cheaper than LLMs
IBM-backed llm-d framework adds controls for running AI models in-house
AI startup Vectorial lands $3M in funding to simulate human behavior for consumer research
AI adoption by industry shows what other sectors can learn