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Industry

AI funding rounds, acquisitions, partnerships and leadership changes, plus regulation, copyright lawsuits and big compute deals.

17 stories in the last 7 days

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    DeepMind gets cinematic with A24

    Google DeepMind just announced a first-of-its-kind research partnership with indie movie powerhouse A24, embedding its tech directly into filmmakers' creative workflows. Rather than handing creators off-the-shelf models, the deal lets directors and artists guide DeepMind's tool development from the ground up—backed by a fresh investment from Google. Why it matters: It is a rare push toward tech labs building creative AI hand-in-hand with top Hollywood storytellers.

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    Five Eyes warns catastrophic AI cyberattacks are months away

    The Five Eyes intelligence alliance just issued a rare joint warning stating that frontier AI will supercharge offensive cyber attacks much faster than anticipated. The agencies warned the timeline for AI to outpace defenses is "mere months, not years," putting legacy systems at critical risk. It marks an unprecedented alert from global intelligence agencies, signaling that weaponized AI threats have arrived.

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    Getty Images brings its photo vault to ChatGPT search

    OpenAI just inked a multi-year display deal with Getty Images to embed licensed visual content directly into ChatGPT's search and discovery features. Instead of relying on web scrapes, ChatGPT can now serve up high-quality, verified imagery to make visual search results substantially more trustworthy.

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    The Atlantic opens searchable database of music used to train AI

    The Atlantic just launched a searchable database exposing four music datasets used to train AI models, with the two largest containing 12 million and 9 million tracks. Google and Stability have confirmed using them in research papers. The reporting reveals many tracks were pulled from YouTube and Spotify using automated tools that bypass platform terms.

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    AlphaFold lead John Jumper jumps to Anthropic

    Nobel laureate and AlphaFold pioneer John Jumper just announced he is leaving Google DeepMind after nearly nine years to join Anthropic. Jumper thanked CEO Demis Hassabis for trusting him to lead the protein-folding project fresh out of his PhD, noting he plans to take time to recharge before starting his new role.

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    Midjourney pivots to full-body ultrasound scanners and spas

    Midjourney just unveiled its first hardware product, an underwater full-body scanner that builds a 3D body map in 60 seconds using 500,000 ultrasound sensors. The company plans to roll out the scanners inside a luxury San Francisco spa in 2027, betting it can make routine body scanning accessible outside traditional hospitals.

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    OpenAI loses enterprise sales head Barret Zoph after just 5 months

    OpenAI's head of enterprise sales, Barret Zoph, just announced his exit via an internal Slack message after only five months on the job. Zoph had rejoined OpenAI in January after leaving Mira Murati's startup Thinking Machines Lab, where he was co-founder and CTO. It marks his second high-profile departure in under a year.

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    DeepMind treats its own AI agents like rogue employees

    Google DeepMind just published its AI Control Roadmap, a defense-in-depth framework designed to protect internal systems from misaligned agents. The blueprint treats advanced agents as potential insider threats, deploying trusted AI supervisors to review reasoning and block harmful actions in real time. DeepMind analyzed a million coding agent tasks to build live safeguards for Gemini Spark.

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    Transformer co-inventor Noam Shazeer jumps from Google to OpenAI

    Noam Shazeer, co-inventor of the Transformer architecture and former Character.AI co-founder, just announced he is joining OpenAI after leaving Google. Shazeer called it a difficult transition while praising the team he built at Google. Snagging one of deep learning's most foundational minds gives OpenAI a massive talent win in the frontier AI race.

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    Vampire Survivors dev might ditch Fortnite over Epic's AI push

    Poncle just signaled it may back out of a Fortnite crossover just hours after Epic announced the deal, citing the gaming giant's aggressive embrace of generative AI. Epic recently showed off concept artists using AI for Fortnite assets and introduced engine plugins integrating Claude and Gemini. The indie studio says it is now reviewing the partnership, underscoring real developer pushback against AI-generated art.

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    Tech CEOs pitch a U.S.-led AI coalition at G7

    Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis just called for a U.S.-led coalition to shape global AI guardrails during a closed-door G7 lunch with Donald Trump. Amodei urged cooperation on structured model access, cyber defenses, and restricting chip trade with China. Why it matters: With frontier models already triggering federal export freezes, AI leaders want Washington to set global standards before policies fragment.

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    Anthropic expects Mythos and Fable 5 back online 'in coming days'

    Anthropic just signaled that access to its frontier AI models, Mythos and Fable 5, could be restored within days following an abrupt global shutdown sparked by a White House security directive. The company pulled the models amid export control fallout, but executives speaking in Seoul stressed that Anthropic is pushing ahead with deeper local investments regardless.

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    Half of Americans use AI chatbots, but most wish they'd slow down

    Pew Research Center just found that nearly half of U.S. adults now use AI chatbots, up sharply from 2024, with ChatGPT leading the pack at 44%. But deeper adoption hasn't won hearts and minds: 63% of Americans believe the tech is advancing too quickly, and 71% fear it will erode their data privacy.

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    The EU wants to team up with the US on AI

    European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen just called for deeper EU-US AI cooperation at the G7, pointing out that together they represent 70% of the global market. She urged joint investment and faster adoption in sectors like healthcare, while stressing the need to keep the most powerful models trustworthy and safe.

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    Midjourney is stepping into hardware tomorrow

    Midjourney just revealed it will unveil its first hardware project during a launch event in San Francisco on Wednesday at 6pm PT. The company plans to livestream the announcement, though details about what the device actually is remain completely under wraps. It marks an unexpected leap beyond software for the image-gen heavyweight.

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    Qualcomm's new XR chip brings a 160% AI boost to smart glasses

    Qualcomm just unveiled the Snapdragon Reality Elite, packing a 160% jump in NPU performance and 60% faster graphics for next-gen headsets. The chip debuts inside Google and Xreal's upcoming Aura glasses this fall, aiming to run Gemini Live multimodality right on device. Preorders are open now.

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    Snap is finally shipping AR glasses — for $2,195

    Snap just unveiled Specs, its first consumer AR glasses priced at a steep $2,195. Unlike Apple's tethered Vision Pro, Specs are fully standalone, packing dual Snapdragon chips, a 51-degree field of view, hand tracking, and built-in AI assistance. They offer up to four hours of battery life and are slated to ship this fall.

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    SpaceX acquires Cursor in all-stock AI deal

    SpaceX just exercised its option to acquire AI coding assistant Cursor in an all-stock transaction. The two companies have spent the past few months jointly training a model that will roll out to Cursor and Grok Build soon, tapping SpaceX's Colossus supercomputer to supercharge their AI ambitions.

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    OpenAI launches Partner Network with $150M enterprise push

    OpenAI just launched the OpenAI Partner Network backed by a $150M fund to help businesses deploy frontier AI. The program features three partner tiers and aims to certify 300,000 consultants by the end of 2026. The move signals that enterprise adoption hurdles are no longer about raw model power, but workflow integration.

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    Satya Nadella warns against letting a few AI models hollow out industry

    Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella just published an essay urging companies to build and own their own AI learning loops. He introduced the idea of "token capital" alongside human capital, arguing firms must train agentic systems on internal data and private evals so proprietary knowledge isn't lost when switching models. Why it matters: Nadella warns that ceding all cognitive value to a handful of frontier models risks repeating the economic hollowing-out seen in early globalization.