Category: Semafor

A small plane crash in China’s capital exposed major gaps in the country’s airspace controls, analysts said, as the government tried to limit public discussion of the incident. The aircraft flew into Beijing’s tallest skyscraper Friday, not far from the Chinese Communist Party’s headquarters and the homes of top leaders. ...

President Vladimir Putin acknowledged Russia is facing a “difficult period” as Ukraine expanded its long-range assaults on the country’s infrastructure. Kyiv struck a Russian defense plant and set fire to a major oil refinery as part of its efforts to weaken Moscow’s wartime economy. Russian fuel production has dropped, and ...

The Scoop The US government Friday lifted its block on Anthropic’s powerful Claude Mythos 5 AI model, allowing the company to release it to more than 100 US institutions, including major companies and government agencies. The decision, in a letter sent Friday afternoon to Anthropic, is a major de-escalation in ...

Qualcomm, the chipmaker supplying smartphones and wearable devices, said it plans to use the new chip technology it created for data centers in smartphones — ultimately allowing AI to run better on mobile devices, said Executive Vice President Durga Malladi in an interview. When Qualcomm announced its data-center chips this ...

Palo Alto-based law firm Cooley built a platform that intends to help startups make legal decisions without a lawyer. Users can ask it to analyze nondisclosure and contractor agreements, locate proper business forms, and ask legal questions about company documents. Built with legal AI startup Legora and trained on Cooley’s ...

The Scoop Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pursued a more active role in artificial intelligence policy earlier this year after financial institutions warned advanced models could leave critical infrastructure vulnerable — including the Federal Reserve payment rails that enable them to send money back and forth, people familiar with the talks ...

Since the ChatGPT moment nearly four years ago, the AI race has been viewed by many as a contest of model performance. Say what you will about OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, but he saw from the very beginning that compute infrastructure would become an important battlefront, and his ...

Reed’s view Hollywood shouldn’t worry too much about generative AI — the transformer architecture that underpins AI models that can build images, videos, and songs from a single text prompt. While film executives may not like to say it out loud, AI is already being used to bring down costs ...

The AI buildout is reshaping global energy grids. In the US, data centers are boosting energy demand faster than the power network can keep up, according to ING analysis. But the Dutch bank said that the data center buildout could be “a new grid asset” — developers are having to ...

Europe’s ongoing heat wave is piling pressure on its electricity system. Surging demand for air conditioning, with temperatures staying high into the evening when solar output falls, combined with the high-pressure system behind the heat wave stilling the air and limiting wind generation, have forced power networks to scramble. Britain’s ...