A tritium ‘nuclear battery’ just reached orbit for the first time
A tritium ‘nuclear battery’ just reached orbit for the first time

The nuclear age has quietly reached commercial spaceflight. City Labs, a Miami firm, has launched BOHR, which it calls the world’s first commercial nuclear-powered satellite and the first nuclear CubeSat. The craft is about the size of a softball. It f…

Smart glasses are having a privacy reckoning, and Meta is caught in the middle
Smart glasses are having a privacy reckoning, and Meta is caught in the middle

The smart-glasses backlash has reached the courtroom. From 20 July, New York will ban recording eyewear from every one of its 1,240 courts. It is the first US state to go that far. An internal memo from the New York State Unified Court System sets out …

Musk’s SpaceXAI ships ‘Opus-class’ Grok 4.5 to undercut OpenAI and Anthropic
Musk’s SpaceXAI ships ‘Opus-class’ Grok 4.5 to undercut OpenAI and Anthropic

SpaceXAI has launched Grok 4.5, its most capable model yet. It is the company’s first release since going public and buying the AI coding startup Cursor. This is the joint model the two firms had raced to ship. Elon Musk aimed it squarely at coding and…

Meta’s AI campus flushed a rare bacterium into Cheyenne’s water. The city hit back
Meta’s AI campus flushed a rare bacterium into Cheyenne’s water. The city hit back

A Meta contractor flushed a rare, potentially deadly bacterium into Cheyenne’s wastewater system. The Wyoming city has now suspended all data centre discharge, a fresh flashpoint in the fight over AI’s thirst for water. Officials in Cheyenne, Wyoming, …

Palmer Luckey: US universities are falling behind China’s, and it shows
Palmer Luckey: US universities are falling behind China’s, and it shows

Palmer Luckey has a blunt warning about the US-China tech race: America is losing the classroom. The Anduril founder argues that US universities have stopped teaching engineers how to build. That, he says, hands China a lead well beyond cheap labour. H…

One symlink trick breaks 6 top AI coding agents, from Amazon
One symlink trick breaks 6 top AI coding agents, from Amazon

Security firm Wiz found one old Unix trick that breaks six popular AI coding assistants, from Amazon Q to Cursor. A booby-trapped repository can walk an agent past its own safety prompt. The payoff is a planted key that hands an attacker the developer’…

Your customers would rather use ChatGPT than your chatbot, Gartner finds
Your customers would rather use ChatGPT than your chatbot, Gartner finds

Businesses spent big on AI to answer their customers. The customers had other ideas. People are approximately three times more likely to use a third-party GenAI tool, such as ChatGPT, than a company’s own chatbot to sort out a service problem, accordin…

Cloudflare spent a year blocking AI crawlers. Now it’s helping OpenAI index the web
Cloudflare spent a year blocking AI crawlers. Now it’s helping OpenAI index the web

Cloudflare has spent a year arming websites against AI crawlers. Now it wants to help one crawl better. The company said on Wednesday it is running a research pilot with OpenAI to test whether its network data can make AI search more accurate. Cloudfla…

AI’s hacking skills are outgrowing the tests built to measure them
AI’s hacking skills are outgrowing the tests built to measure them

The tools built to measure how dangerous AI can be have stopped working. Frontier models outpace the benchmarks meant to gauge their hacking skills, Axios reports. That leaves regulators and security teams half-blind to what these systems can really do…

OpenAI buys Northslope to put its engineers inside your business
OpenAI buys Northslope to put its engineers inside your business

OpenAI wants the work that once belonged to consultants. Its deployment arm has agreed to buy Northslope, an applied-AI firm, the company told Axios in an exclusive on Wednesday. It did not disclose terms, and the deal still needs regulatory clearance….