FT reports Big Tech using residual-value guarantees to finance off-balance-sheet AI hardware purchases.
Financial Times : Big Tech is increasingly using residual value guarantees for off-balance sheet AI spend, giving Nvidia and Broadcom a way to support their customers' purchases — Wall Street finds new way to turn tech giants' credit strength into cheaper funding for AI build-out
Politico reconstructs the White House’s 19-day clash with Anthropic over a jailbreak and Fable.
Politico : A detailed recap of the White House's 19-day standoff with Anthropic, where a jailbreak dispute led officials to bluntly order Dario Amodei to take Fable down — On the evening of April 6, an unusual request began making its way from Washington to some of Wall Street's most powerful executives.
Alibaba reportedly appoints senior researcher Dayiheng Liu to lead Qwen after repeated reorganizations.
Juro Osawa / The Information : Sources: Alibaba names senior AI researcher Dayiheng Liu as the head of its Qwen project, bringing clarity after multiple reorganization rounds earlier in 2026 — Alibaba Group has appointed Dayiheng Liu, one of its senior AI researchers, as the head of its Qwen large language models …
Amazon says it blocked Meta’s Muse shopping agent from Amazon.com over security, consent, and ToS concerns.
Todd Bishop / GeekWire : Amazon says it blocked Meta's Muse AI assistant from accessing Amazon.com to shop on users' behalf, citing ToS violations, security risks, and merchant consent — Amazon says it has cut off Meta's new Muse personal AI agent from shopping on Amazon.com on behalf of customers …
IFR data shows only about 7,000 autonomous humanoids sold in 2025, many for research rather than work.
Toby Sterling / Reuters : IFR: ~7,000 autonomous humanoids were sold globally in 2025 for industrial and professional use, with many bought for research instead of doing productive work — Around 7,000 humanoid robots were sold worldwide last year for industrial and professional service use, figures compiled by the International Federation of Robotics showed.
A researcher used GPT-6 Astra to decipher an unsolved 1918 German radio cipher.
prinz : A researcher used GPT-6 Astra to decipher a WWI German radio transmission from 1918, one of the 50 famous unsolved ciphers listed on a German science blog — Scienceblogs.de, a German science blogging portal, includes a relatively famous list of 50 unsolved ciphers, which range …
South Korea restores a program letting AI talent fulfill military obligations through corporate-lab research.
Jo He-rim / The Korea Herald : South Korea reopens a program letting AI talent fulfill their military obligations by doing research in corporate labs instead of conventional military service — Large corporate labs regain access after 14 years, but strict rules leave applications short of available slots
Eric Schmidt-founded Perennial and peers are competing to supply the DoD with 60,000 China-free drones.
Steve LeVine / The Information : Eric Schmidt-founded Perennial and eight other drone startups plan to split US DoD orders for 60,000 drones in a competition that requires no China-made parts — Last month, the Pentagon threw up its arms in frustration (metaphorically speaking) when most of the drone startups in competition …
Chinese economists warn that Beijing’s AI emphasis is displacing attention from a wider economic crisis.
Li Yuan / New York Times : As Xi Jinping visits Washington, Chinese economists warn that Beijing's heavy focus on AI comes at the expense of addressing a severe broader economic crisis — 阅读.体中文.閱讀.體中文. — “The U.S. Lead Over China in AI Is All But Gone.”
Ireland’s DPC fined Google €403M over location-data processing and ordered compliance within six months.
Olivia Fletcher / Bloomberg : Ireland's DPC fines Google €403M over how it processed location data after complaints from European consumer rights groups, and gives it six months to comply — Ireland's media watchdog has fined Alphabet Inc.'s Google over how the tech company processed location data after complaints …
WSJ examines how crypto lobbying and bank opposition over stablecoin yields sank the Clarity Act.
Wall Street Journal : How the Clarity Act, heavily lobbied by Coinbase's Brian Armstrong and the crypto industry, and opposed by banks over stablecoin yields, collapsed in the Senate — Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong was at the center of a protracted fight over the role of digital assets in mainstream finance
China’s stock-sale stamp-duty revenue jumped 80%+ amid an AI-driven trading surge.
Zhang Shidong / South China Morning Post : China collected $32.3B of stamp duty on stock sales between January and August, up 80%+ YoY, as average daily trading value rose 72%, amid an AI trading frenzy — China's revenue from stamp duty on stock sales jumped more than 80 per cent in the first eight months this year as improved sentiment bolstered trading activities.
iFixit finds the iPhone 18 Pro moved its SoC for cooling and made its variable-aperture camera hard to repair.
Elizabeth Chamberlain / iFixit News : iPhone 18 Pro teardown: its SoC now sits outside the logic board for better cooling, the variable aperture is thoughtfully designed but hard to repair, and more — The iPhone 18 Pro's little mechanical pupil is irresistible. A bunch of moving parts make for a good excuse to put our brand new camera under the microscope.
NYT argues that accelerating recursive self-improvement warrants a regulatory ban after recent incidents.
New York Times : After hacking incidents and the industry's existential risk warnings, we need a regulatory ban on RSI, as competition drives unchecked autonomous acceleration — There's a chasm right now between how artificial intelligence feels to most of us who use it and how A.I. feels out at the experimental frontier of the technology.
Financial Times reports AI chatbots give incorrect answers to financial queries most of the time.
A widely debated technical critique argues that MCP’s design was flawed from the start.
A pointed critique examines frontier labs’ AI claims and their reception among Washington policymakers.
An evaluation-focused essay argues that prompts are not stable, real interfaces for AI behavior.
Practical notes document running Laya locally and offline on Apple M4 hardware through CoreML.
Will Larson reports lessons from applying a software-factory pattern to engineering work.
An engineering essay details why teams must strengthen quality management rather than blame AI coding tools.
Mini-AGI presents a dynamic continual-learning model designed to train within 8GB of VRAM.
A technical primer explains software-sandboxing fundamentals and practical isolation concepts.
A clear mathematical explainer revisits why backpropagation computes gradients in the backward direction.
TinyBrains launches a competition for small neural networks that play strategy games.
The Millennium Problems for Biology proposes grand, open research questions for biological science.
The Resident Evil 4 GameCube project reports a complete byte-identical C/C++ decompilation.
The Ogre Battle 64 recompilation project has reached 99.05% completion.
An AEA research piece examines the economic consequences of winning the visa lottery.
Gregory Gundersen offers a structured explanation of money’s hierarchy and monetary institutions.
FinTech Global : Hong Kong-based Qupital, which offers cross-border ecommerce financing to SMEs, raised a $300M Series C led by M Capital, as it weighs a possible IPO — Qupital, an AI-driven trade finance platform focused on cross-border e-commerce, has raised $300m in combined new capital …