Companies, products, and big moves
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Two Chinese AI stories landed today that point in opposite directions on what "working" looks like at scale: a Hong Kong-listed industry-agent company posted real growth on a Palantir-style model, and one of the country's largest healthcare AI products inked a deal to
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The always-on agent race got a real code drop today. OpenAI is wiring a new "Persistent" setting into Codex's reasoning-effort menu — the closest a frontier lab has come to shipping a product around the idea of an agent that doesn't politely end
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Nvidia's plan to become more than the chip supplier to the AI boom — to finance the data centers themselves and share in their revenue — just hit a speed bump. Nvidia has paused the revenue-sharing and credit-support deals it struck with AI cloud companies, people familiar with
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Alibaba Cloud has switched on its first data center region in Brazil, the company's second in Latin America. The new region, launched August 27, runs two availability zones offering compute, storage, and database services to enterprise and developer customers, with enterprise-grade AI services set to roll out
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The fourth annual TIME100 AI list is out, and it reads as a map of where the industry's power has migrated over the past year — from model labs into the compute, chips, and data-center infrastructure that actually sustains them. TIME's 2026 TIME100 AI list — its
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The AI industry's money story keeps zigging where nobody expects it. Eighteen months after DeepSeek shredded assumptions about what it costs to build frontier AI, its billionaire founder is now gambling his quant fund's capital on the wildest corner of China's equity market. Liang
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Two of AI's busiest storylines collided overnight: the coding-agent boom keeps printing money, and Anthropic's desktop agent stopped borrowing your browser and grew its own. Cognition is now generating roughly $900 million in annualized revenue — more than triple its pace at the start of the
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Two enterprise signals landed on the same day: Uber flattened its AI bill even as agent use exploded, and Workday showed AI agents now pulling customers into core platform deals. Both point the same direction — enterprise AI is moving from a cost headache to something a CFO can actually budget.
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Agents have lived on screens since the moment they were born. Today that changed on two fronts: Anthropic put its models in charge of real lab machinery, and a new study showed we're a long way from trusting them with something as simple as a shopping cart. Both
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Nvidia is opening a new front in Washington. As the AI and chip-export-control fights heat up, the company that makes the chips at the center of it all is building its own political machine. Nvidia is launching an employee-funded political action committee called NVPAC, a step-up
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Robotaxi operators are getting hurt as the robots scale. Waymo's and Zoox's on-road test drivers logged more than two dozen injuries in 2024 and 2025 from hard braking and sudden swerves, according to a TechCrunch review of US safety data. The injuries — sprains, strains, and
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For months, Mark Zuckerberg has cast Anthropic — and OpenAI — as the closed, centralized dangers his open-source movement exists to fight. His own spreadsheets tell a flatter story. Sources told The New York Times that Meta's internal projections assumed it could spend as much as $10 billion a