France’s Parliament adopted a bill on Tuesday that dismantles the monopoly Électricité de France has held over the country’s hydropower market for decades, according to Bloomberg. The law converts EDF’s hydropower concessions into permits and requires the state-owned utility to auction 6 gigawatts of capacity each year under the supervision of France’s energy regulator, CRE. EDF […]
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis used a closed-door lunch at the G7 summit on Wednesday to call for a US-led coalition that would shape international rules and standards for artificial intelligence, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions who spoke to CNBC on condition of anonymity. Canadian Prime Minister […]
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on Wednesday that her government would not take the initiative to introduce a social media ban for teens, breaking from the approach taken by Britain and France. “I am not against a social media ban for under-16s, but I am not either convinced that this proposal alone can solve […]
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, […]
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 […]
The Pentagon says Grok helped strike 2,000 targets in 96 hours, and that the polluting power plant behind it is a matter of paramount national security. The two claims belong in the same sentence, and that is the problem. The admission did not come in a press release or a Pentagon briefing, it came in […]
Amazon’s advertising business has become its quiet money machine. It may also be its next big regulatory headache. The US Federal Trade Commission has drafted a potential complaint accusing Amazon of misleading advertisers, a case that could lead to billions of dollars in civil penalties, Bloomberg reported on 16 June, citing people familiar with the […]
Helion has become the first company in the world licensed to operate a fusion power plant. On 16 June, the Washington-based firm said it had received two licences from the state’s Department of Health, clearing a regulatory bar no fusion company has reached before. It is a real milestone. It is also a regulatory one, […]
On Wednesday, Arthur Mensch took his seat at a G7 working lunch in Evian alongside Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Dario Amodei. Days earlier, the US government had ordered Amodei’s company to cut foreign nationals off from its most capable models, and Anthropic had pulled them worldwide. For the one European founder at the table, […]
