29 countries sign a treaty to establish the World AI Cooperation Organization
29 countries sign a treaty to establish the World AI Cooperation Organization

Twenty-nine countries signed an agreement on 16 July to establish the World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO), Reuters reported. China says the intergovernmental body aims to promote international cooperation and global governance in AI. China’s fore…

Fireworks raised $1.5bn on a bet that companies will build AI, not rent it
Fireworks raised $1.5bn on a bet that companies will build AI, not rent it

The AI economy has run on a simple habit: rent a model from a big lab. Fireworks just raised $1.5bn to argue the opposite, that every company will build intelligence of its own. The Series D values the San Mateo startup at $17.5bn, it said. Atreides Ma…

Oak raised $60M to give every user, machine, and AI agent one identity system
Oak raised $60M to give every user, machine, and AI agent one identity system

Most companies still cannot say who, or what, has access to their systems at any given moment. Oak, an Israeli startup, has raised $60M to fix that, and it is betting AI agents make the problem urgent. The company came out of stealth with the seed roun…

Anthropic and Blackstone bet the next fortune in AI is implementation, not models
Anthropic and Blackstone bet the next fortune in AI is implementation, not models

The race in AI has been about who builds the best model. A new company backed by Anthropic thinks the real money sits elsewhere: in getting those models to actually work inside big companies. That company is Ode with Anthropic, and it launched under it…

An F1 aerodynamicist just raised $55m to teach factory robots, using footage of people doing chores
An F1 aerodynamicist just raised $55m to teach factory robots, using footage of people doing chores

Bercan Kilic got his dream job in 2023, designing aerodynamics for Red Bull Racing while it was winning everything. He found the engineering magnificent and the point of it thin. His Munich startup, microagi, has now raised $55m, which it says is the l…

Trump calls New York’s data centre pause a ‘terrible decision’. Hochul is not moving.
Trump calls New York’s data centre pause a ‘terrible decision’. Hochul is not moving.

Kathy Hochul signed the executive order on Tuesday. Donald Trump was demanding she undo it by Wednesday. The order pauses construction of new data centres drawing 50 megawatts or more for up to a year, making New York the first US state to pull the bra…

WHO warns Europe’s AI health governance gap is becoming irreversible
WHO warns Europe’s AI health governance gap is becoming irreversible

Hans Kluge opened his speech in Lisbon with a number, which is not how the World Health Organization usually does this. “Let me start with a number: 8%,” the WHO Regional Director for Europe told delegates on 15 July. “That’s the share of countries in …

xAI’s first lawsuit against a user tests who is responsible for what Grok makes
xAI’s first lawsuit against a user tests who is responsible for what Grok makes

The company says the defendant engineered prompts to defeat Grok’s safeguards. Courts on three continents are being asked whether the safeguards were ever the point. AI has sued one of its own users, alleging he used Grok to generate child sexual abuse…

Nvidia signs up Japan’s robotics establishment for its open world models
Nvidia signs up Japan’s robotics establishment for its open world models

Nvidia has recruited most of Japan’s industrial robotics establishment into the Cosmos Coalition, the open world-model programme it uses to seed its physical AI stack, in announcements timed to Jensen Huang’s week in Tokyo. Twenty-two companies are nam…

OpenAI built an AI super-hacker to break its own models, then locked it away
OpenAI built an AI super-hacker to break its own models, then locked it away

OpenAI has trained an elite hacker, then locked it in a cage. Its whole job is to break OpenAI’s own AI. The company says it is too dangerous to let anyone else near it. The model is called GPT-Red, and OpenAI detailed it this week. It is an automated …