Brad Smith adds to calls for tougher rules for AI, including ‘kill switches’ and legal obligation to victims of rogue agents Business live – latest updates Artificial intelligence is less regulated than milk and washing machines, the president of Microsoft has said, as the tech industry warns over the safety of AI. Brad Smith said there should be more safety rules to govern the technology including a legal obligation to a “victim” if their system was breached by rogue AI agents. Continue reading...
AI dominated funding in the third quarter of 2026, with two inference companies each announcing $1 billion in funding. But with the data center buildout driving insatiable demand for memory, investors also rewarded startups with alternatives to costly, capacity-limited HBM. Some are building on commodity DRAM or holding models in on-chip SRAM, while others stack memory directly onto compute. Data movement at all levels of the stack remains a critical bottleneck, too. Interconnect technologies, networking chips, and photonics were the most active areas of the quarter, with startups tackling the problem with diverse approaches ranging from manufacturing-ready co-packaged optics, millimeter-wave RF signals over plastic waveguides, and ferroelectric glass modulators to optical couplers printed directly onto chips and coherent DSPs designed specifically for AI optics. Nearly $7.5 billion of the quarter’s total was directed to just 22 startups that raised $100 million or more, including eight that saw investors return within roughly a year, some more than doubling the previous round. Plus, agentic EDA and AI-generated analog layout, small chip fabs, diamond-based defect inspection, large-area nanoimprint lithography, and memory-safe microcontrollers feature in this look at 80 companies that collectively raised over $8.5 billion in Q3 2026. Summary table Chips AI hardware EDA Manufacturing & equipment Test, measurement & inspection Memory & storage Photonics & optics Previous reports Chips Xsight Labs raised over $300.0M in funding led by Fidelity Management & Research Company with participation from Aliya Capital Partners , Atreides Management , Artisan Partners , Battery Ventures , Diagonal Capital , Intel Capital , Key1 Capital , Maverick Capital , Sienna Venture Capital , T. Rowe Price , Union Group , and Valor Equity Partners . Xsight Labs designs fully programmable data processing units (DPUs) and Ethernet switches for hyperscale, edge, and
Numerous startups are innovating artificial intelligence solutions designed to amplify forecasting capabilities across multiple sectors. These AI tools aim to yield deeper insights into financial markets as well as fields like healthcare and public policy. The increasing dependence on AI by established prediction markets presents hurdles for traditional investors. By 2030, AI-driven forecasting models could dramatically transform decision-making processes through advanced questioning and probability assessment based on diverse outcomes.
Bill Gates highlighted the dangers of unregulated artificial intelligence during a recent interview. He expressed concern about bad actors exploiting existing AI systems without safeguards. Gates emphasized that the primary threat comes from cyberattacks driven by malicious use of AI technology. He criticized the idea of self-regulation by companies as insufficient to ensure public safety. Gates called for increased restrictions to prevent misuse of artificial intelligence for harmful purposes.
American AI developers can give the British government early access to AI models for safety testing without running afoul of US President Donald
Kanishka Narayan to say Britain cannot rely entirely on tech companies amid rising global concern over AI dangers Companies building the most advanced AI systems must increase safety efforts, the UK’s AI minister will say, as he announces a strengthening of Britain’s cyber defences. Kanishka Narayan will call on companies developing frontier AI to do more to make sure it is safe. He will say Britain cannot rely entirely on technology companies to police their own models and will argue the UK needs to build more of its own AI infrastructure. Continue reading...
When President Donald Trump announced his plans to rebrand artificial intelligence as " super intelligence ," you'd be forgiven for being skeptical that it would catch on. While most of the broader population is sticking with AI, some of Silicon Valley's most powerful are falling in line and trying to give Trump the great AI rebrand he so desires. That Elon Musk was quick to jump on board , promising to rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, isn't surprising. When, hours after Donald Trump declared that "The White House considers anyone that uses the term, 'Artificial Intelligence,' as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, 'Super I … Read the full story at The Verge.
Chinese automaker BYD has unveiled the design of its first self-developed humanoid robot, marking a broader push into embodied AI and robotics that could eventually see the company deploy autonomous machines across its factories and dealerships. The design appeared in a patent published by China’s National Intellectual Property Administration, describing a robot designed to walk, maintain balance and interact with its surroundings. The patent points to potential applications in service, education and industrial environments. Although the design resembles BYD’s previously teased humanoid robot , known as Xiao Di, the company has not confirmed whether the patent depicts the final production model. Designed for real-world interaction The newly revealed design features a black-and-white body, a rounded head without a display and articulated joints across its torso, arms and legs. Its human-like proportions suggest a platform intended to operate in environments designed for people, rather than a robot restricted to a dedicated industrial workspace. Previously disclosed specifications for the Xiao Di concept put its height at approximately 5 feet 3 inches and its weight at around 129 pounds (58 kg). The robot is reported to have 31 degrees of freedom, allowing movement across multiple joints, and a dexterous hand with repeatable positioning accuracy of approximately 0.04 inches. These features could support tasks such as picking up objects, making gestures and pointing out information to people. However, the published design does not establish how reliably the robot can perform these tasks in real-world conditions, or whether the specifications will carry over to a production model. As automakers and technology companies invest in embodied AI , which combines AI with physical systems that can sense and interact with the real world, humanoid robots face a more complex challenge than software-based AI. They must coordinate perception, decision-making and physical movement w

On Equity, we debate the impact of data center moratoriums and whether the AI industry has a communication problem.
Happy hormones | Fuel costs | Drive-in parking | Guys and girls | Young or old? | Singapore pollution Re your report ( ‘Pull the plug’: protesters resort to direct action against AI firms, 6 October ), the US neuroscientist Ben Rein has shown that there is a fundamental difference in our cognitive response according to the type of interaction we have. In-person meetings and conversations show a dramatic increase in serotonin, oxytocin and dopamine – “feelgood” hormones – compared with online interactions. I have been encouraged to speak to people at bus stops. Judith Furner Eastbourne, East Sussex • Re easing winter fuel costs ( Report, 6 October ), it would benefit everyone if the outrageous daily standing charges were reduced or on a sliding scale based on usage. I can’t be the only person whose standing charges each month are half or more than the energy used. Judith Pearson Sheffield Continue reading...
Teams of AI agents barely outperform solo agents but cost up to 5.1x more, according to Vals AI. Only one out of four tests with GPT-6 Sol and Claude Opus 5.5 showed a measurable gain. Anthropic's own data backs this up: beyond ten agents, quality plateaus while token costs keep climbing. The article AI agent teams waste massive tokens for barely measurable quality gains, research finds appeared first on The Decoder .
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has introduced an open-source development stack to help companies build and deploy robots that can perceive their surroundings, make decisions, and perform physical tasks by bringing together cloud computing, simulation, and artificial intelligence tools. Called the Physical AI Toolchain on AWS, the platform combines AWS infrastructure with NVIDIA’s physical AI software ecosystem to support the development of industrial robots, autonomous mobile machines, and humanoid systems. Amazon says the toolchain is intended to reduce the engineering effort required to move AI models from development into real-world machines. The launch reflects a broader shift in AI development: moving beyond systems that generate text and images toward machines that must interact with physical environments, where mistakes can damage equipment, disrupt production, or create safety risks. Teaching robots to operate beyond the screen Traditional industrial robots typically perform predefined movements in controlled environments. Physical AI aims to make machines more adaptable by enabling them to interpret sensory information, respond to changing conditions, and learn from experience. For example, a robot working on an assembly line might need to handle components presented at different angles, while an autonomous warehouse machine must navigate changing layouts and avoid obstacles. Humanoid robots face an even broader challenge: manipulating unfamiliar objects and performing tasks in environments designed for people. Training these systems requires more than a capable AI model. Developers need large quantities of training data, realistic simulations, computing resources, and methods to transfer trained models onto physical hardware. AWS says its new toolchain brings these elements together in a common development workflow, allowing companies to adopt the full stack or select individual components for existing projects. Five stages from simulation to deployment T
Every Claude Code user has watched a new session start from zero. You open it on a system you built last week, ask for a small feature, and the agent begins by rediscovering your own architecture: which service owns the data, which frontend calls it, which type the two of them share. The conversation that explained all of that is gone or compressed into a summary, and the source files show what exists without saying what depends on what. So far, the main answer is memory. Claude Code loads CLAUDE.md instructions and its own auto-memory notes at the start of every session, and since September 17, the redesigned Projects, in beta in Claude Code cloud sessions, keep a shared memory across threads, so Claude can recall that “the release moved to Friday” or “who to check in with before touching the billing service.” I wanted to test a different source of context: the dependency records a build platform writes when it creates each version of a component. Disclosure: I’m an engineer at Bit Cloud, a platform that builds, hosts, and deploys even a single app from its first component, with coding agents working on it over MCP. I asked Claude to build on it to see what an agent can do when the platform records each part and its dependencies as they are versioned. The project and its build records are public. What can a fresh session recover without memory? The system was a small support console I had built with Claude Code earlier, and I wrote up how I built and deployed it separately. The prompt that started that build mentioned tooling in two words, “using Bit”, and otherwise described the product. It has four components: a React app, an Express service backed by MongoDB, a shared ticket entity, and a platform component that puts the app and the service behind one gateway. All four are versioned in a public scope , bit-oss.support, and the console runs in production over HTTPS. To test what the records alone could carry, I open
Voice AI's often misses important points for its context layer, and causes the whole pipeline to break
Epoch AI and Anthropic independently found the same thing: current AI models like GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Fable 5 can run experiments but lack scientific self-criticism and genuine creative thinking. At best, Sol reached 15 percent of the human reference score, and even that came from methods researchers already knew. The models' biggest weakness is still their inability to critically question their own results. The article AI agents overstate their results and remain far from autonomous research, study finds appeared first on The Decoder .
‘Even if AI supercharged the economy, its impact on the government’s finances would be muted’ Back through political history to the age of Ronald Reagan , Republicans have repeatedly promised the US public that tax cuts would pay for themselves, firing up economic growth and filling the government’s coffers. The promise never really panned out. From the Gipper’s day on, the Republicans’ tax cuts inevitably increased the budget deficit. Despite its failure, though, the promise is back, coated in a fine new layer of artificial intelligence pixie dust. It will fail again. Continue reading...

Data from a16z shows a Jevons paradox in the AI market: token prices keep falling, but H100 GPU rental prices hold steady or climb. Cheaper AI drives demand faster than costs drop. If that demand flattens, the chain from chip makers to cloud providers takes a hit. The article Cheaper AI tokens are driving more demand, and that's Jensen Huang's best-case scenario appeared first on The Decoder .
Starting October 2026, arXiv will cap submissions at two per person per month. Monthly submissions have doubled in two years, and in the cs.AI category they've grown more than sixfold. According to arXiv, a small fraction of authors are flooding the platform with low-quality papers, overwhelming its volunteer moderators. The article ArXiv caps submissions at two per month as AI paper flood overwhelms the preprint server appeared first on The Decoder .
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella now calls artificial intelligence "super intelligence" instead of artificial intelligence, falling in line with Trump's preferred language. In his latest blog post, he frames AI models as insider security threats, taking yet another shot at OpenAI and Anthropic. The real motive is business: Microsoft risks falling behind as AI labs turn their models into the primary computer interface. The article Microsoft's Nadella bows to Trump's language diktat on "Super Intelligence" and uses it to attack OpenAI and Anthropic appeared first on The Decoder .