Category: Semafor

David’s view What’s the point of a political party? We’ve received a few answers to that question this month. Maine Democrats threw together a mini-primary to replace their US Senate nominee. In Wisconsin, where the Democrat most party leaders were comfortable with blew up her campaign, Gov. Tony Evers yanked ...

PsiQuantum is getting a $125 million cash infusion from DARPA, the startup announced today, a new vote of confidence for its efforts to build the world’s first large-scale quantum computer. PsiQuantum is part of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, which started as a way to evaluate the legitimacy of quantum startups ...

Reed’s view The blast radius from Chinese open-weight model Kimi K3 continues to widen. President Donald Trump’s tech adviser Michael Kratsios and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are threatening China over what they deem as IP theft, while OpenAI’s Dean Ball is pushing the White House to stop US companies from ...

The News African countries must open up their power markets in order to court the private investors needed to supply the electricity that AI will demand, a data center executive told Semafor, as a new report warned the continent risks seeing little economic benefit from the technology. Africa’s economy is ...

The News An AI-driven lending platform backed by one of South Africa’s biggest lenders is expanding into two of Africa’s largest credit-starved markets, its CEO told Semafor, betting its machine-learning algorithms can maintain a default rate that is a fraction of traditional commercial banks. Optasia, which made its stock market ...

Liron’s view Six years ago, the signing of the Abraham Accords was dismissed by skeptics as a fragile, fair-weather agreement, bound to shatter at the first sign of Middle Eastern turbulence. Yet, as we mark the latest anniversary of that historic breakthrough — and as I conclude my tenure as ...

Americans are more likely than those living in any other nation to name politics as a leading risk to their safety. One in 10 US adults identified politics as the “greatest source of risk” to their daily safety, according to new Gallup polling, up from 6% who said so in ...

The center-left Searchlight Institute is urging Democrats to abandon Medicare for All legislation and instead work toward universal healthcare in other ways that wouldn’t disrupt private insurance. The Health Care Unity plan, shared first with Semafor, endorses a bigger role for government in healthcare — negotiating drug prices and breaking ...

The Scoop News Corp, the Murdoch family-owned parent company of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, is suing an AI company that describes itself as “the world’s most complete non-Big Tech search engine.” On Tuesday, News Corp announced that it is suing Brave AI, a privacy-focused search ...

Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk sued Eli Lilly on Tuesday, accusing the US drug giant of misleading advertising practices. The lawsuit reflects the companies’ intensifying rivalry in the US weight-loss drug market. Novo argued that Lilly’s ads used outdated comparisons for how much weight users lost using the drugs. The legal ...