Tech & Science

Google’s Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer leaves to join OpenAI

Noam Shazeer, a vice president of engineering at Google Alphabet Inc. and co-lead of its Gemini artificial intelligence models, announced on Wednesday that he will leave the company to join OpenAI, according to Reuters. The move marks the departure of…

Estonia to issue government-backed digital IDs for AI agents

Estonia is moving to become the first country to issue government-backed digital identities to AI agents, creating a framework that would let autonomous software act on behalf of people and businesses with limited, traceable permissions.

Anthropic CEO urges G7 leaders not to ‘splinter’ on AI

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei addressed G7 leaders on Wednesday at a working lunch in Évian-les-Bains, France, calling on the world's wealthiest democracies to maintain unity on artificial intelligence development rather than fracture into competing blocs. The remarks, first reported by…

Cohere sees surge in interest after U.S. bans Anthropic’s top AI models

The U.S. government's unprecedented export control order forcing Anthropic to disable its most advanced AI models for foreign nationals has reignited a global debate over AI sovereignty — and handed Canadian AI company Cohere a surge of new business interest.

AI uncovers new antibiotic candidates for drug-resistant gonorrhea

Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have used deep learning to identify new antibiotic compounds effective against multi-drug resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae, according to a study published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine.

Paradromics implants first long-term brain chip in FDA speech-restoration study

Paradromics, an Austin-based neurotechnology company, has implanted its Connexus brain-computer interface in the first participant of its FDA-approved clinical study, marking a milestone in the company's nearly decade-long effort to restore speech for people with severe motor impairments.

Trump rejects UK plea for exemption from Anthropic AI ban

When the U.S. Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to suspend all foreign access to its newly released Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models on June 12, citing national security concerns, it set off a chain reaction that is now reshaping…

Scientists detect quantum entanglement in crystal visible to the naked eye

Physicists have for the first time directly detected a high degree of quantum entanglement in a centimeter-sized crystal — a macroscopic object visible to the naked eye — challenging long-held assumptions about the scale at which quantum mechanics operates.

AI chiefs join G7 leaders to discuss global standards

The chief executives of the world's most powerful artificial intelligence companies sat down Wednesday with heads of state at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, France, for a working lunch focused on the safe and rapid deployment of AI — a…

ASML CEO warns of supply strain from Musk’s Terafab

ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet warned Wednesday that the chip equipment maker must guard against supply constraints as it prepares to service massive new projects like Elon Musk's Terafab, the planned semiconductor megafactory in Texas.

Anthropic CEO joins rival AI leaders at G7 summit

Anthropic has vaulted past OpenAI to become the world's most valuable AI startup after closing a $65 billion Series H funding round that pushed its post-money valuation to $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI's roughly $852 billion valuation for the first time.…

G7 leaders push ‘trusted partners’ plan for access to restricted US AI models

As the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, France, drew to a close on Wednesday, leaders from the world's wealthiest democracies rallied around a proposal to grant select "trusted partners" access to advanced American AI models — a direct response to the…

UK quantum sensor clears key hurdle in dark matter search

Researchers at Imperial College London have demonstrated for the first time that a prototype quantum sensor can cancel out overwhelming laser noise by comparing two atom interferometers, recovering faint signals that would otherwise be lost. The advance, published in Nature…

Ghost particle traced to star-forming galaxy 11B light-years away

Astronomers have linked a high-energy neutrino detected by the IceCube Observatory in Antarctica to a distant, dust-choked galaxy 11 billion light-years away — a finding that challenges long-held assumptions about where the universe's most elusive particles originate.

Bezos says colonizing the Moon is key to saving Earth

Jeff Bezos took the stage at VivaTech in Paris on Wednesday to argue that colonizing the Moon is not a detour from saving Earth but the only way to accomplish it, framing Blue Origin's lunar ambitions as both environmentally necessary…

Trump says Anthropic talks ‘going fine’ at G7 AI lunch

President Trump told reporters at the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains, France, that negotiations with Anthropic are "going fine," offering his first public remarks on the standoff since his administration ordered the AI company to disable its most advanced models nearly…

Google opens pre-orders for its first smart speaker in six years

Google Alphabet Inc. on Tuesday began accepting pre-orders for the Google Home Speaker, a $99.99 device that marks the company's first new standalone smart speaker since the Nest Audio launched in 2020. Units are set to arrive on store shelves…

Odyssey ML raises $310M to build AI world models

Odyssey ML, a startup developing AI systems that simulate the physical world, has raised $310 million at a $1.45 billion valuation in a round that cements Amazon Amazon.com, Inc. as a central partner in its infrastructure strategy. The deal, first…

EU cyber agency to meet Anthropic amid Fable 5 export ban fallout

The U.S. Commerce Department's unprecedented use of export controls to force Anthropic to disable its most advanced AI models has triggered alarm among cybersecurity professionals and drawn international attention, with the European Union's cybersecurity agency ENISA set to meet with…

AMD, Google, BYD, Tesla eye Samsung for chip production

Samsung Electronics is drawing growing interest from several of the world's largest technology companies for contract chip manufacturing, as capacity constraints at rival TSMC Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited push clients to seek alternatives amid surging AI infrastructure demand.

Z.ai’s open-weights GLM-5.2 beats GPT-5.5 on coding benchmarks

Chinese AI startup Z.ai, formerly known as Zhipu AI, released GLM-5.2 as an open-weights model on June 16, delivering a 753-billion-parameter system that outperforms OpenAI's GPT-5.5 on several long-horizon coding benchmarks while costing roughly one-sixth as much to operate via…

Microsoft confirms work on patch for Defender zero-day

Microsoft has formally acknowledged a privilege escalation vulnerability in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine, now tracked as CVE-2026-50656 with a CVSS score of 7.8, and said it is developing a security update to address the flaw. The vulnerability, publicly referred…

Mistral pitches open-source AI after US ban on Anthropic models abroad

The French AI startup Mistral is seizing on a wave of European anxiety over U.S. export controls to position itself as a sovereign alternative to American AI providers, days after the Trump administration forced Anthropic to cut off access to…

Tech giants pledge $915M more for carbon removal

Frontier, the advance market commitment backed by some of the world's largest technology companies, announced on Wednesday that it will commit an additional $915 million to carbon removal technologies, bringing total funding pledges to $1.8 billion. The coalition also welcomed…

OpenAI unveils method to predict AI behavior before release

OpenAI on Monday published a new pre-deployment safety method called Deployment Simulation, designed to predict how AI models will behave in the real world before they are released to the public.

Samsung builds world’s first 3D stacked transistor at record 42nm pitch

Samsung Electronics announced on Tuesday that its Semiconductor Research Center has demonstrated the world's first 3D Stacked Field-Effect Transistor at a gate pitch of 42 nanometers, a breakthrough presented at the VLSI Symposium 2026 in Honolulu that earned the conference's…

Apple eyes 1.4nm chips for 2028 iPhones, considers Intel as supplier

Apple is planning to equip its high-end 2028 iPhones with chips built on a 1.4-nanometer process, marking the next major leap in its mobile silicon roadmap. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported on Monday that the A22 Pro processor will be manufactured…

Stellantis, Wayve, and Uber team up on global robotaxi plan

Stellantis, Wayve, and Uber announced a non-binding memorandum of understanding on June 17, 2026, to jointly develop and deploy Level 4 driverless robotaxi services across Europe, North America, and other regions.

Top AI CEOs meet with G7 leaders amid European sovereignty fears

The heads of the three most powerful frontier AI labs — OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, and Google Alphabet Inc. DeepMind's Demis Hassabis — gathered Wednesday with world leaders at the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains, France, marking the first…

Plutonium from ancient cosmic explosion found on Pacific Ocean floor

Debris from a cataclysmic cosmic explosion more than 100 million years ago is still falling on Earth today. An international team of researchers has detected hundreds of atoms of plutonium-244 — a radioactive isotope that can only form in the…