A $3.7bn plan to merge the world’s two biggest stock-photo libraries has collapsed. The reason is not America, where regulators waved it through. It is Britain, where a single condition proved a deal-breaker. Getty Images will terminate its merger with Shutterstock, the company said this week. Its board voted unanimously to walk away after the […]
India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has ordered WhatsApp not to launch its planned usernames feature in the country until further consultations are complete, according to a letter seen by Reuters. The ministry, known as MeitY, has given Meta three days to explain why regulatory action should not follow the feature’s announcement. WhatsApp said on […]
The US government is negotiating voluntary standards with AI companies covering how new models get released, according to the Financial Times, with an announcement said to be possible within the next week. The standards would reportedly set benchmarks and timelines for advanced models, while clarifying who gets access to them inside the US and abroad. […]
Alibaba and its US digital payment processor have agreed to pay 600 million dollars to resolve a federal investigation into whether they failed to prevent the sale and importation of illegal pharmaceuticals and controlled substances, the Justice Department said on Wednesday. Alibaba entered into a non-prosecution agreement to end a probe of alleged violations of […]
A Swedish court has ordered Google to pay more than 14 billion kronor to Klarna’s PriceRunner subsidiary for illegally favouring its own comparison shopping service in search results. The ruling, handed down on Tuesday by the Patent and Market Court in Stockholm, is the largest competition damages award in Swedish history. Presiding judge Linda Kullberg […]
Palantir has a new enemy, and it is the way most of the AI industry makes money. Its nine-point manifesto tells institutions to hoard their data, own their model weights, and stop “tokenmaxxing.” It is a pitch dressed as a principle. On Tuesday, Palantir posted its “thoughts on the importance of AI sovereignty” on X. […]
The US government has just handed scientists the largest map of human health ever assembled. It pairs more than half a million genomes with real medical records, and it arrives as the programme behind it faces deep budget cuts. The database comes from All of Us, a research programme run by the National Institutes of […]
The US Commerce Department has lifted the export controls it placed on Anthropic’s most advanced models, ending a roughly three-week freeze that had pulled the company’s Claude Fable 5 offline. Reuters first reported the move on Tuesday, 30 June, citing a person familiar with the decision. Within hours, Anthropic confirmed it on the record in […]
TikTok has reached a confidential settlement with a Florida teenager who accused the platform of contributing to his mental health problems, removing itself from a jury trial scheduled to begin on July 27 in Los Angeles. The deal, first reported by Bloomberg on Tuesday, makes TikTok the second defendant to exit the case in recent […]
The US Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to hear Apple’s appeal of the contempt finding in its long-running legal battle with Epic Games over App Store fees. The justices will review lower court decisions that found Apple willfully defied a 2021 order requiring it to let developers direct consumers to cheaper payment options outside the […]
