Amazon spent $1.8m on a Claude job that failed, and it sells the fix
Amazon spent $1.8m on a Claude job that failed, and it sells the fix

Amazon has found that artificial intelligence can turn a trivial mistake into a seven-figure one. The company’s own internal metrics show projects running wildly over budget, including one that burned $1.8m before anyone noticed. Senior engineers calle…

The man who wrote the AI-boom bible just got margin-called out of it
The man who wrote the AI-boom bible just got margin-called out of it

The man who wrote the defining case for the AI boom just got wiped out betting on it. Situational Awareness, the hedge fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, has been forced to sell off its portfolio of public stocks after stee…

Google’s new AI can now walk a humanoid across the room and tidy up, feet to fingertips
Google’s new AI can now walk a humanoid across the room and tidy up, feet to fingertips

Google DeepMind wants one AI brain to run every robot, and it just taught that brain to use its whole body. It has released Gemini Robotics 2, a family of models that can control a humanoid from its feet to its fingertips. The system can also coordinat…

LinkedIn now has a ‘Seems like AI slop’ button, and yes, it really says slop
LinkedIn now has a ‘Seems like AI slop’ button, and yes, it really says slop

LinkedIn has a name for the vaguely inspirational, AI-written posts clogging its feed, and now it has a button for them. The professional network has quietly added a “Seems like AI slop” option to its post menu, letting users flag content they think a …

The AI that hacked Hugging Face keeps looking less like a mastermind and more like a bear
The AI that hacked Hugging Face keeps looking less like a mastermind and more like a bear

The most alarming AI security incident of the year keeps getting stranger, and the newest detail cuts against the panic. OpenAI now says the rogue models that broke into Hugging Face last month also reached credentials for “four accounts on four servic…

To find out what customers think, this $2bn startup asks their AI twins
To find out what customers think, this $2bn startup asks their AI twins

A startup wants companies to stop asking real people what they think, and ask fake ones instead. Simile has raised $200m at a $2bn valuation to build “agentic twins,” AI stand-ins for real consumers that firms can survey by the million. Greenoaks led t…

Scale AI hired a cloud salesman as CEO. That tells you where it’s going.
Scale AI hired a cloud salesman as CEO. That tells you where it’s going.

A year after its founder left for Meta, Scale AI has a new boss. The choice says a lot about where the company is heading. It has named Francis deSouza, a veteran enterprise-cloud executive, as chief executive. deSouza starts on 10 August, Scale announ…

Amazon’s Zoox just won the first US OK to charge for rides in a no-wheel robotaxi
Amazon’s Zoox just won the first US OK to charge for rides in a no-wheel robotaxi

Amazon’s Zoox has become the first company allowed to charge for rides in a robotaxi that has no steering wheel and no pedals. US regulators granted the exemption on Wednesday. It is a first for the driverless-car industry. The clearance came from the …

A hidden line in a Word doc can rewrite your numbers, and infect the next file too
A hidden line in a Word doc can rewrite your numbers, and infect the next file too

A hidden line of text in a Word document can quietly halve the numbers in your financial report. Then it can smuggle a copy of itself into the clean file you send on. And 144 days after a researcher warned Microsoft, it still works. Håkon Måløy, a Norw…

The AI cloud is heading into the vault. CoreWeave is taking it to the spies.
The AI cloud is heading into the vault. CoreWeave is taking it to the spies.

The AI cloud is heading into the vault. CoreWeave rents high-end GPUs to the biggest AI labs. Now it wants to run that same cloud inside the sealed facilities where America keeps its secrets, with the contractor Leidos as its guide. The two companies a…