Half of American adults now use AI chatbots, but a plurality believe the technology will ultimately damage society, and overwhelming majorities have lost confidence that either the government or the companies building it will manage it responsibly. A new Pew Research Center report released Wednesday, based on a survey of 5,119 US adults conducted in […]
The problem with letting an AI agent loose inside a company is not that it might forget who it is. It is that it has no reason to hold back. A human employee is restrained by the fear of being fired. An agent, as one investor in Arcade.dev put it, “will exhaustively exploit every permission […]
China has spent two years telling the world it intends to win the AI race. Its new five-year employment plan is the quieter admission that winning it could cost a lot of people their jobs. The State Council, effectively China’s cabinet, has issued its blueprint for employment policy from 2026 to 2030. Buried in a […]
Poland produced one of the world’s most valuable AI companies almost by accident. Now it is spending public money to make sure the next one stays closer to home. Vinci, the venture arm of Poland’s state development bank BGK, has taken an $11mn stake in ElevenLabs, the AI-voice firm valued at $11bn. The same day, […]
The word “agent” is everywhere in enterprise software right now, which is exactly why Convey does not want to use it. The startup has raised a $38mn Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Khosla Ventures and Pear VC joining. Its pitch is a deliberate rebrand: not AI agents that complete tasks, but AI “teammates” […]
There is an unglamorous deadline bearing down on corporate IT, and it has just produced one of London’s more interesting AI raises. Conduct, a 35-person startup founded by three former Palantir engineers, has raised a $60mn Series A co-led by Index Ventures and ICONIQ, with SAP itself investing. The round takes its total funding to […]
Google has finally made a new smart speaker, its first in roughly six years. The more interesting thing it has made is a reason to pay it every month. The Google Home Speaker costs $99.99, opens for preorder today and ships on June 25. It is the first audio device built around Gemini for Home, […]
When an AI agent does something on your behalf today, it usually has to become you. It logs in as you, with your access to everything. Estonia wants to end that. The country plans to issue personal identification numbers to AI assistants, the first nation to do so, prime minister Kristen Michal said. The idea […]
