Meta, Google, TikTok, and LinkedIn now face an Australian news law whether they carry news or not
Meta, Google, TikTok, and LinkedIn now face an Australian news law whether they carry news or not

Australia’s parliament passed the News Bargaining Incentive on Thursday, closing a five-year argument that began when Meta worked out it could avoid paying for news by simply not carrying any. The new law removes that option. Platforms with a significa…

Trump hosts crypto executives as the SEC proposes its friendliest rules yet
Trump hosts crypto executives as the SEC proposes its friendliest rules yet

The Securities and Exchange Commission spent Tuesday proposing the friendliest set of crypto rules an American regulator has ever put on paper. On Wednesday, the industry that would benefit from them was at the White House, having lunch with the presid…

Flock built an AI tool that lets police search for people by how they drive
Flock built an AI tool that lets police search for people by how they drive

The surveillance firm Flock Safety has told the public for years that its cameras “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a tool that does both, according to a new investigation. The artificial-intelligence system lets poli…

Tesla asked Las Vegas for 5,000 robotaxis and Nevada granted 10
Tesla asked Las Vegas for 5,000 robotaxis and Nevada granted 10

Tesla asked Nevada regulators for permission to run up to 5,000 robotaxis across Las Vegas. It was granted 10. The Nevada Transportation Authority set out the limit in an interim order dated 27 July. The cap sits far below what the company requested. T…

OpenAI puts a 20% compute cost on its new AI safety monitoring
OpenAI puts a 20% compute cost on its new AI safety monitoring

OpenAI has put figures and detail on the slowdown it signalled this week. It paused some frontier training for two weeks, it said. It is also running a new monitoring system for the riskiest work. That system adds about 20 percent to the compute cost o…

A watchdog says Meta pays influencers to fight teen bans worldwide
A watchdog says Meta pays influencers to fight teen bans worldwide

Meta is running a global campaign to push back against laws that would ban teenagers from social media, according to a new investigation by the Tech Transparency Project. The effort relies on paid influencers and funded parent groups, the watchdog said…

Amazon’s drone fleet is expanding sixfold in America and capped at 100 deliveries a day in England
Amazon’s drone fleet is expanding sixfold in America and capped at 100 deliveries a day in England

Amazon says it will offer drone delivery in nearly 500 US cities and towns by the end of 2026, six times its current footprint. Its only British site, in Darlington, is under an AAIB accident investigation with its CAA permission expiring on 31 Decembe…

Anthropic’s AI watermark has already spawned tools to remove it
Anthropic’s AI watermark has already spawned tools to remove it

Anthropic’s push to label AI-written text has produced an immediate counter-move. Developers have started building tools to strip those labels off, according to Business Insider. Thibault Spirlet and Agnes Applegate reported that one remover has gone v…

China’s AI alliance keeps growing, just as Washington tells countries to choose
China’s AI alliance keeps growing, just as Washington tells countries to choose

China’s World AI Cooperation Organisation has added nine members in the month since it was founded, taking it from 29 signatories to 38, according to the South China Morning Post. It is growing at precisely the moment Washington is drafting a letter te…

Pennsylvania just made itself one of the hardest US states to build a data centre in
Pennsylvania just made itself one of the hardest US states to build a data centre in

Governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order on Tuesday that makes Pennsylvania one of the harder places in America to build an AI data centre. The order strips data centres from the state’s permit fast-track programme, blocks environmental review u…