Category: Semafor

Democrats should use Congress’ August recess to lean into economic populism and take on corporate interests — not just “simply oppose Trump and his billionaire friends,” according to a memo by a quartet of progressives that was obtained by Semafor. “If Democrats are going to be the party of working ...

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund bought game maker Electronic Arts in perhaps the largest leveraged buyout in history. The $55 billion deal — part-funded with $20 billion borrowed against EA itself — buys Riyadh a profitable business and control of some of the biggest franchises in the world’s biggest entertainment ...

The Scoop Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis’s departure Wednesday from the top job at the company he founded in 2010 and sold to Google in 2014 was at least a year in the making, said two people familiar with his thinking. Hassabis had been drifting away from the day-to-day responsibilities ...

Iran and Oman were in the “final stages” of an agreement to establish a commercial route in the Strait of Hormuz, Tehran’s state media said Wednesday, though analysts cautioned the deal was unlikely to resolve the wider disputes fueling the conflict. Tehran has threatened to strike Gulf nations if Washington ...

The Scoop Quintessential San Francisco AI startup Polsia employs nobody and operates swarms of AI agents to help run other businesses. Its projected annual revenue skyrocketed almost overnight this year from $100,000 to $10 million, but so did its token spending, reaching a debilitating $1.2 million a month on Anthropic. ...

David’s view I doubt that anybody who bundled up for “Menorah in the D,” the 2023 kickoff of Hanukkah in Detroit, knew how much it would end up shaping the 2026 Senate primary. The event took place two months after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel — in hindsight, a ...

Surveillance technology without accountability is a recipe for authoritarianism, but with strong guardrails and transparency, it can help stop crime, including crimes committed by law enforcement. An article in the Washington Post chronicled how police officers were caught abusing surveillance technology to stalk ex-wives and, in at least one case, ...

Reed’s view The White House says it discussed a framework for evaluating the cybersecurity risks of frontier AI models with OpenAI and Anthropic, but it doesn’t plan to release details publicly. The secrecy (frontier labs are being asked to submit the most powerful models for assessment 30 days before releasing ...

The head of Google DeepMind is stepping down from his role and moving into a chairman position, in a major shakeup at the AI research lab. Demis Hassabis, who founded DeepMind in 2010 before it was acquired in 2014, will also become chief scientist at Google parent company Alphabet. Other ...

The News The US has made permanent a pilot program requiring citizens of 50 countries — 30 of them African — to post bonds to obtain US tourist and business visas. Launched 12 months ago, the program instructed consular officers to set a bond of $5,000, $10,000, or $15,000, “based ...