Category: Semafor

OpenAI is announcing the winners of its call for grant proposals to study the economic and societal impact of artificial intelligence, and to develop solutions to address disruptions. According to details shared first with Semafor, recipients include US-based organizations across the political spectrum, like the American Enterprise Institute, the Progressive ...

The News A Ghanaian energy company has raised more than half a billion dollars to fund ongoing natural gas-based power projects and pursue new opportunities in West Africa. Genser Energy secured a €456 million ($527 million) credit package arranged by three of South Africa’s top banks First Rand Bank, Absa ...

Chinese AI startup Zhipu said its new GLM-5.3 model outperformed Anthropic’s Mythos 5 in a key cybersecurity benchmark and closed the gap on coding capabilities, marking the latest Chinese open-weight model to claim parity with the Western AI frontier. Following its last release in June, Zhipu, also known as Z.ai, ...

US President Donald Trump dismissed reports of poor living conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln, escalating a fight in Washington over the aircraft carrier’s record 260-plus-day stretch at sea. Multiple sailors have reportedly attempted to jump overboard during the deployment, which was extended to support the Iran war. The US’ ...

Europe’s latest summer heat wave risks worsening already-fragile global food security. Though hunger worldwide has fallen in recent years, restrictions to trade through key global chokepoints as well as fears of an unusually intense El Niño threaten that progress. In Europe, higher-than-usual temperatures and a lack of rain have left ...

Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei pushed back Saturday against criticism that his messaging around AI — that it could centralize power and produce mass job displacement — has stoked the growing backlash against the technology. In rare social media remarks, Amodei acknowledged AI firms “haven’t yet delivered on our ...

A Spanish fighter jet shot down a suspected Russian drone over Romania on Sunday, two days after NATO downed a similar drone over Latvia. Such incursions have become a “near-weekly occurrence,” The Wall Street Journal noted, as Russia and Ukraine escalate their air campaigns: Ukraine launched one of its largest ...

Two Chinese tech firms with major African businesses are turning to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in fresh capital, in the latest test of whether global investors see the continent as a source of scalable growth. Shenzhen-based Transsion — whose Tecno, Infinix, and ...

Growing demand for solar power in Africa’s largest economies is driving governments to strengthen local manufacturing of components for panels. But China’s dominance of the supply chain means those ambitions could take years to materialize, energy analysts told the Associated Press. Solar use has surged in South Africa and Nigeria ...

A White House meeting slated for Wednesday with cryptocurrency and prediction market players is expected to feature remarks from President Donald Trump as well as CFTC Chair Mike Selig, people familiar with the plans told Semafor. Attendees, according to those people, will include executives from cryptocurrency firms Coinbase, a16z, Ripple, ...