Author: Jaxon Bennett

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Elon Musk’s xAI is preparing to raise more money from investors in a deal that could value the artificial intelligence company as high as $200bn — 10 times its value early last year, according to people close to the talks.The fundraising, which is being discussed and could start formally next month, would be its third large share sale in less than two months. It raised $10bn through loans and cash investments in July, and in June sold $300mn of shares in a…

Last week, Elon Musk announced that his artificial intelligence company xAI had upgraded the Grok chatbot available on X. “You should notice a difference,” he said. Within days, users indeed noted a change: a new appreciation for Adolf Hitler. By Tuesday, the chatbot was spewing out antisemitic tropes and declaring that it identified as a “MechaHitler” — a reference to a fictional, robotic Führer from a 1990s video game. This came only two months after Grok repeatedly referenced “white genocide” in South Africa in response to unrelated questions, which xAI later said was because of an “unauthorised modification” to prompts…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Amazon Prime Day is often referred to as Black Friday in July. For good reasons. What started out as a one-day event back in 2015 for shoppers to snag discounts on big-ticket items has morphed into an annual extravaganza that is widely copied by other retailers.Last year’s Prime Day generated about $13.4bn in gross merchandise value over a 48-hour period, according to Bank of America. That’s a 10 per cent increase on 2023 and represents about 6 per cent of Amazon’s online…

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the worldGoogle will heavily discount cloud computing services for the US government, as the Trump administration pressures technology groups to slash prices on long-standing, lucrative contracts.The agreement comes after Oracle last week cut a deal with the government, including a 75 per cent discount on some software contracts for a limited period and “substantial discounts” on its wider cloud computing contracts.Google’s cloud contract is likely “to land in a similar spot”, according to a senior official at the General Services Administration…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Here we go again. That must have been the first thought on the minds of many Tesla shareholders this week as Elon Musk waded back into the political fray, declaring his intention to launch a third party to rival the Republicans and Democrats.It is less than two months since Musk’s moonlighting for Donald Trump’s administration led a group of Tesla shareholders to call for their chief executive to devote at least 40 hours a week to his day job, and the latest…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Technology sector myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The writer is senior fellow in technology policy at the Cato Institute and adjunct professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law SchoolLast month, the US Supreme Court upheld a Texas law that requires verification of a user’s age when visiting websites with pornographic content. It joins the UK’s Online Safety Act and Australia’s ban on social media use by under 16s as the latest measure aimed at keeping young people safe online.While protecting children is the well-intentioned motivation for these laws,…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The EU has unveiled its code of practice for general purpose artificial intelligence, pushing ahead with its landmark regulation despite fierce lobbying from the US government and Big Tech groups. The final version of the code, which helps explain rules that are due to come into effect next month for powerful AI models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini, includes copyright protections for creators and potential independent risk assessments for the most advanced systems.The EU’s decision to push forward with its…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The writer is co-founder, chair and CEO of SalesforceThe techno-atheists like to tell a joke.They imagine the moment AI fully awakens and is asked, “Is there a God?” To which the AI replies: “There is now.”The joke is more than just a punchline. It’s a warning that reveals something deeper: the fear that as AI begins to match human intelligence, it will no longer be a tool for humanity but our replacement.AI is the most transformative technology in our lifetime, and we face…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Technology myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Techworld is abuzz with how artificial intelligence agents are going to augment, if not replace, humans in the workplace. But the present-day reality of agentic AI falls well short of the future promise. What happened when the research lab Anthropic prompted an AI agent to run a simple automated shop? It lost money, hallucinated a fictitious bank account and underwent an “identity crisis”. The world’s shopkeepers can rest easy — at least for now.Anthropic has developed some of the world’s most capable generative…

Amazon is weighing another multibillion-dollar investment in Anthropic to deepen a strategic alliance that the tech companies believe will provide an edge in the global competition to profit from artificial intelligence.The Seattle-based cloud and ecommerce group has discussed plans to extend beyond the $8bn it has already ploughed into the San Francisco-based AI model builder, according to multiple people with knowledge of the talks. A new deal would further a relationship that — according to interviews with more than a dozen Amazon and Anthropic executives, board members and investors — has become vital to both their futures. The investment will…