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 […]
Ashton Kutcher is leaving Sound Ventures, the firm he co-founded with Guy Oseary 11 years ago, to start a new venture capital firm with Morgan Beller, according to TechCrunch. The new firm will target early-stage investments in AI infrastructure, energy, and deep tech, areas where Kutcher believes the next generation of transformative companies will be […]
A reported plan to sell surplus computing power would put Meta up against AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, and give investors a reason to look past its spending. Meta has spent two years buying every scrap of AI computing power it can lay hands on. Now it appears to be working out how to sell […]
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 […]
Apple chief executive Tim Cook and the European Union’s technology chief spoke by video call on Monday, and both sides came away describing the exchange as “constructive”. That word is doing a lot of work. Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen, who oversees the bloc’s digital rulebook, held the meeting with Cook on 30 June. An EU […]
Aconsortium of more than 140 financial and technology companies, among them Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and Coinbase, launched a new dollar-pegged stablecoin on Tuesday called Open USD. The venture, run by an independent company named Open Standard, is a direct swipe at the economics that have made Circle and Tether the dominant issuers in the sector. […]
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 […]
Google on Tuesday released Nano Banana 2 Lite, the fastest and cheapest model in its Nano Banana family of AI image generators. The model produces images in four seconds and costs under four cents per thousand images, making it the company’s most aggressive play yet for developers who need to generate visuals at scale. It […]
Clicks Technology released a video on Tuesday showing the pre-production hardware and internal software of its Communicator, a $499 smartphone with a physical keyboard that is the closest thing to a new BlackBerry anyone has built in years. The phone was first unveiled at CES in January and is scheduled to ship in the fourth […]
