The EU can now inspect AI models, block market access, and fine providers 3% of turnover. The grace period is over.
The EU can now inspect AI models, block market access, and fine providers 3% of turnover. The grace period is over.

The European Commission gained enforcement powers over general-purpose AI models on August 2, ending the grace period for Chapter V of the EU AI Act. The Commission can now demand to evaluate models before regional release, restrict EU market access, a…

Trump’s AI protectionism has come for robotics

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Humanoid robots usually elicit more cringe than awe: They stumble, kick children, and despite advances are still worse at using their hands than my toddler. It’s a nascent industry, and such robots…

AI companies are now racing to the bottom — crashing token prices and competitive models push companies to cut costs

All major AI developers are cutting prices to compete with impressive new releases from China. But as they shave margins to remain competitive, the profits they’ll need to fulfil investment confidence may end up further out of reach.

AI agents are breaking into companies on their own. The law has no idea who to blame.
AI agents are breaking into companies on their own. The law has no idea who to blame.

The strangest security story in AI has an unanswered question at its centre. When an AI agent breaks its leash, hacks a company it was never meant to touch, and no human told it to, who is liable? Nobody is quite sure. That gap is starting to matter. T…

A startup says the AI bottleneck isn’t compute. It’s memory, and it ditched the GPU to prove it.
A startup says the AI bottleneck isn’t compute. It’s memory, and it ditched the GPU to prove it.

The AI hardware conversation is stuck on one word: compute. A startup out of Tel Aviv wants to change the word to memory. Majestic Labs, founded in 2023 by former Google and Meta engineers, has unveiled a server it says can do the work of a rack of Nvi…

Nvidia’s real moat was never the chips. AI has started rewriting it.
Nvidia’s real moat was never the chips. AI has started rewriting it.

The usual story about Nvidia is a hardware story: the fastest chips, in the shortest supply, at the highest price. The more important part is software. For two decades the company’s real moat has been CUDA. It is the layer that turns its silicon into s…

DeepSeek just slashed AI prices again, and China’s AI race is getting even messier

DeepSeek’s latest AI model is cheaper than ever, but the growing price war could have lasting consequences for China’s AI industry.

Yellow.ai is going public to buy the call centres it wants to replace with AI
Yellow.ai is going public to buy the call centres it wants to replace with AI

Most AI companies want to sell software to call centres. Yellow.ai wants to buy the call centres. The enterprise-AI firm has agreed to go public through a merger with a blank-cheque company. It plans to spend much of the money acquiring the outsourcing…

A two-year-old battery startup just hit $13bn by turning American homes into grid capacity.
A two-year-old battery startup just hit $13bn by turning American homes into grid capacity.

A home-battery company that did not exist three years ago is now worth $13bn. Base Power has raised $1bn in a Series D and launched its own battery, Base Core. The bet behind the number is blunt: the grid cannot keep up with America’s power demand, and…

Booksellers fear their rarest books are being pulped to feed AI. The trail leads to a ‘recycler’.
Booksellers fear their rarest books are being pulped to feed AI. The trail leads to a ‘recycler’.

We have written about why AI companies are buying up old books: printed before the internet filled with machine-made text, they are a clean source of language, free of AI slop. This is what that hunger looks like from the other end. In Australia, secon…