The US government has just become a shareholder in an AI startup, in exchange for a bet that artificial intelligence can break China’s hold on the materials inside every chip factory. The Department of Commerce has awarded SandboxAQ $500mn under the CH…
Neuralink has dominated the brain-chip story for two years. It now has a serious challenger with a patient of its own. Paradromics, an Austin neurotech firm, has implanted its Connexus brain-computer interface in the first participant of its FDA-approv…
Most cybersecurity startups sell shields. Twenty sells the sword, and investors just valued that at $1bn. The company, which describes itself as America’s first venture-backed cyber warfare firm, has raised a $100mn Series B led by Accel, Axios reporte…
Odyssey, an AI lab building real-time ‘world models’, has raised $310mn at a $1.45bn valuation. The more telling number is whose names are on the round. The Series B was led by Natural Capital, with Amazon, AMD Ventures, Google’s GV, EQT and the CIA-li…
A year ago, the smart move inside a big company was to use as much AI as humanly possible. Some firms even ranked employees on leaderboards by how many tokens they burned, a status game that earned its own name: tokenmaxxing. That era is ending. The sa…
Microsoft is considering putting a Chinese AI model inside its enterprise Copilot, and the reason is money. The company told Axios it is exploring a self-hosted, fine-tuned version of DeepSeek V4, or another open-source model, as a cheaper option to po…
Amazon’s advertising business has become its quiet money machine. It may also be its next big regulatory headache. The US Federal Trade Commission has drafted a potential complaint accusing Amazon of misleading advertisers, a case that could lead to bi…
Helion has become the first company in the world licensed to operate a fusion power plant. On 16 June, the Washington-based firm said it had received two licences from the state’s Department of Health, clearing a regulatory bar no fusion company has re…
Uber is taking its robotaxi service to Houston. The company said on 17 June that it will launch a premium driverless service in the city by mid-2027, the second US market for its partnership with EV maker Lucid and self-driving startup Nuro. It is also…
The exemption is narrower than the announcement makes it sound. On Tuesday the US Federal Communications Commission said it would again allow new models of Chinese toy drones to be imported, six months after it barred new foreign-made drones outright. …