More than one million people in the Netherlands now rely exclusively on social media for news, according to the 2026 Digital News Report published on Tuesday. They use no news websites, no television, no radio, and only 12% say they trust what they encounter on those platforms. The group represents 7% of Dutch adults, up from 2% […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Jeff Bezos appears to have settled on his AI thesis, and it is not chatbots. It is the physical world. CuspAI, a two-year-old Cambridge startup that uses AI to design new materials, is in talks to raise about $400mn at a $2.6bn valuation, the Financial Times reports. The round is led by Bezos Expeditions, the […]
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, […]
The conversation happened where these conversations usually happen, on the sidelines of a dinner. At the opening of the G7 summit in the French lakeside resort of Evian-les-Bains on Monday, representatives of several member countries raised with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick the idea of a ‘trusted partners’ scheme that would let allied nations, or […]
The timing was almost too neat. Days before more than 180,000 people were due to file into VivaTech in Paris, and before G7 leaders sat down at the lakeside resort of Evian-les-Bains, the United States tightened access to Anthropic’s most advanced models for foreign nationals. Europe arrived at its own party having just been reminded, […]
A Swedish startup wants to do to patent attorneys what Harvey and Legora are doing to corporate lawyers, except it is not trying to give them better tools. It wants to replace them. Lightbringer has raised $10m (€8.6m) in a Series A to take its self-styled ‘AI-native patent firm’ into the United States, the world’s […]
The European Parliament voted on Tuesday to ratify the Turnberry Agreement, the trade deal struck at Donald Trump’s Scottish golf resort in July 2025. The final tally was 440 in favour, 151 against, with 50 abstentions. Under the deal, the EU will eliminate most tariffs on US industrial goods. In return, the US caps tariffs on […]
