Category: Top News

  • The Trump Administration Will Forbid State Laws that Conflict with Federal Policy on AI 

    The Trump Administration Will Forbid State Laws that Conflict with Federal Policy on AI 

    IBL News | New York

    President Donald Trump on Thursday threatened to withhold funding for states that regulate AI, arguing that 50 different regulatory regimes hamper the industry’s growth. President Trump signed an executive order in this regard.

    That funding refers to the $42 billion included in Broadband Equity Access and Deployment.

    It directs the Secretary of Commerce to evaluate state laws for conflicts with Trump’s AI priorities and to block those states in conflict from accessing.

    “We want to have one central source of approval,” Trump told reporters, flanked by top advisers, including Treasury Secretary Scott.

    “To win, United States AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation.”

    The order targets states such as Colorado, whose efforts, according to the White House, can result in “ideological bias and produce false results.”

    Trump’s order called for his administration to work with Congress to craft a national standard that forbids state laws that conflict with federal policy, protects children, prevents censorship, respects copyrights, and protects communities.

    California Governor Gavin Newsom, whose state is home to several major AI companies, signed a bill this year requiring major AI developers to explain their plans to mitigate potential catastrophic risks.

    New York state last month became the first to enact a law requiring online retailers that employ “surveillance pricing” to disclose their use of algorithms and customers’ personal data.

    Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has proposed an AI bill of rights that includes data privacy, parental controls, and consumer protections.

    Other states have passed laws banning AI-generated non-consensual sexual imagery and unauthorized political deepfakes.

    The Trump Administration has embraced AI as a critical technology, working closely with U.S. companies to boost investment in a sector where China has also made great strides.

  • OpenAI Prioritizes Agentic Commerce, Launching More AI Tools For Shopping

    OpenAI Prioritizes Agentic Commerce, Launching More AI Tools For Shopping

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI is prioritizing Agentic commerce, that is, the use of AI tools to do shopping research and make purchases on a user’s behalf.

    This year, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has launched integrations with apps such as Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Expedia, Figma, Spotify, and Zillow. It has also announced further partnerships with Target, Intuit, and others.

    With Instacart’s built-in search app, OpenAI is launching a grocery shopping experience inside of ChatGPT, allowing customers to brainstorm meal ideas, make a grocery list, and check out, all without leaving the chat interface.

    These agentic commerce tools can give OpenAI another way of making money, since it’ll take an undisclosed “small fee” when it helps merchants make a sale.

    Adobe has predicted that AI-assisted online shopping will grow by 520% this holiday season.

  • OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block Form of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF)

    OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block Form of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF)

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block announced this week the creation of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), an open-source organization to promote standards for AI agents, created under the Linux Foundation.

    Beyond these three members, other companies, such as Google, Microsoft, AWS, Bloomberg, and Cloudflare, signed on.

    The three founding companies are donating to the foundation ownership of some of their agentic technologies, which were already free to use and now will be available for others’ development as open standards.

    As a neutral home, the Linux Foundation will provide legal and technological support.

    These technologies include:

    – Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for connecting AI applications to external systems.

    – OpenAI’s Agents.md, which lets programs and websites specify rules for coding agents;

    – Block’s Goose, a framework for building agents

    With AI, agents use the web and negotiate with one another to power applications and manage customer interactions.

    Working to the same open-source standards will help ensure those interactions happen seamlessly.

    Currently, several Chinese AI companies, including DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and Z.ai, provide open source models that have become popular with developers, startups, and AI researchers.

    As the open standards managed by ICANN and W3C shaped the evolution of the web,  OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block believe that openness will remove barriers to the deployment of agentic AI, benefit their businesses, and determine how this technology gets used daily worldwide.

    In 2024, Anthropic introduced MCP, and, currently, there are over 10,000 active public MCP servers, with the leading companies (ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Visual Studio Code, etc.) as adopters, and support from cloud organizations (AWS, Cloudflare, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure).

    Anthropic now has a directory with over 75 MCP-powered connectors.

    The Linux Foundation has decades of experience stewarding the significant open-source projects, including The Linux Kernel, Kubernetes, Node.js, and PyTorch.

  • Mistral Releases Its Latest Open-Source Coding Model, Devstral 2

    Mistral Releases Its Latest Open-Source Coding Model, Devstral 2

    IBL News | New York

    French startup Mistral launched its latest open-source coding model, Devstral 2, yesterday.

    This announcement follows the recent launch of the Mistral 3 family of open-weight models and Mistral Vibe, a new command-line interface (CLI) for code automation through natural language.

    This announcement follows the recent launch of the Mistral 3 family of open-weight models and confirms Mistral’s

    Devstral 2 requires at least four H100 GPUs or equivalent for deployment, as it weighs 123 billion parameters. However, the model is also available in a smaller version, Devstral Small, which, at 24 billion parameters, is deployable locally on consumer hardware.

    Devstral 2, shipped under a modified MIT license, is currently free to use via the company’s API. After the free period, the API pricing will cost $0.40/$2.00 per million tokens (input/output) for Devstral 2.

    Mistral has partnered with the agent tools Kilo Code and Cline to release Devstral 2 to users, while the Mistral Vibe CLI is available as an extension in Zed for use within the IDE.

    Valued at $13.8 billion, this European unicorn [part of its team in the picture above] is aiming to close in on its larger American AI rivals and other coding-focused LLMs, such as Cursor and Supabase.

  • Dartmouth Will Implement Anthropic’s Claude for Education and AWS’s Bedrock Programs

    Dartmouth Will Implement Anthropic’s Claude for Education and AWS’s Bedrock Programs

    IBL News | New York

    Dartmouth University announced this month a partnership with Anthropic and AWS to implement AI solutions tailored for the academic environment, intended for students, faculty, and staff.

    Anthropic’s Claude for Education and AWS’s Amazon Bedrock models will be used to equip the institution for teaching and research across the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and creative disciplines, as well as for co-curricular activities such as career design and the use of AI technologies aligned with faculty’s fields of study.

    “This is more than a collaboration. It’s the next chapter in a story that began at Dartmouth 70 years ago,” says President Sian Leah Beilock.

    “This is the kind of partnership that makes me genuinely excited about AI’s role in education,” explained Daniela Amodei, President and Co-Founder of Anthropic.

    The agreement is nonexclusive, and Claude will be a powerful addition to other AI models that Dartmouth provides access to, such as ChatGPT and CoPilot.

    As a research university, Dartmouth and its faculty began using AI in 1956, with the Dartmouth Summer Research Project. The institution also has a rich history of coupling the latest technological innovations with teaching and learning—from the invention of the BASIC programming language and one of the earliest email systems to universal computing access and campuswide wireless networking.

    Currently, a Faculty Leadership Group on Artificial Intelligence is working to define a principled, evidence-based strategy on AI.

    Dartmouth’s staff is already utilizing AI to:

    • Facilitating student access to AI-enhanced personalized career pathways, career coaching using Claude, including using AI services to evaluate job offers; articulating their strengths, interests, goals, and values; and refining resumes and cover letters;
    • connecting students with applied learning events through AWS Skills to Jobs, designed in collaboration with employers to build industry-aligned skills;
    • collaborating on student-led programs to create a culture of innovation and ethical use on campus and provide career readiness; and
    • granting Dartmouth students access to learning and networking opportunities hosted by Anthropic.

    “As the workplace evolves and technology accelerates change, employers are seeking individuals who pair technical fluency with strong communication and problem-solving skills,” said Joe Catrino, executive director of DCCD.

    Across Dartmouth’s schools, findings already include key results in medical education, energy and the environment, computational social science, cybersecurity, and mental health and well-being.

    • Geography professor Justin Mankin’s team uses climate models to connect greenhouse gas emissions to extreme weather
    • The Polarization Research Lab, co-founded by government professor Sean Westwood, analyzes public opinion data to study political polarization and online misinformation.
    • Engineering professor Peter Chin’s lab is developing a learning algorithm and training framework to predict and defend against future cyberattacks.
    • Through the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health, Dartmouth is a leading partner in the National Science Foundation-funded AI Research Institute on Interaction for AI Assistants, spearheading research on AI-powered devices and wearables to support digital interventions for addiction, behavioral, and mental health disorders.
    • Through its Center for Precision Health and Artificial Intelligence, Dartmouth is also building AI tools to improve diagnostic accuracy and personalize treatments, especially in cancer care.

    Dartmouth will use Amazon Bedrock to build custom AI applications for campus operations and student services, with AWS’s Digital Innovation Team providing direct support using their “working backwards” methodology. Comprehensive training and support are also scheduled.

    “AWS is looking forward to empowering Dartmouth, in partnership with Anthropic, as they continue to approach AI ethically, strategically, and securely to provide transformational student experiences and operational excellence,” added Kim Majerus, vice president of global education and U.S. state and local government at Amazon Web Services.

  • Anthropic Finds that AI is Radically Changing the Nature of Work for Its Software Developers

    Anthropic Finds that AI is Radically Changing the Nature of Work for Its Software Developers

    IBL News | New York

    Anthropic found that the use of AI is radically changing the nature of work for software developers inside the company, while it is handling increasingly complex tasks more autonomously.

    Key findings from a survey of 132 engineers and researchers at Anthropic indicate that Claude Code is most often used to fix code errors and learn about the codebase.

    Productivity gain was a 50% productivity boost, a 2-3x increase from this time last year.

    In addition, 27% of Claude-assisted work consists of tasks that wouldn’t have been done otherwise, such as scaling projects, making nice-to-have tools (e.g., interactive data dashboards), and exploratory work that wouldn’t be cost-effective if done manually.

    Claude fixes a lot of “papercuts”. 8.6% of Claude Code tasks involve fixing minor issues, such as refactoring code for maintainability. These minor fixes could add up to larger productivity and efficiency gains.

    Another conclusion is that most employees use Claude frequently, yet report they can “fully delegate” 0-20% of their work to it. Claude is a constant collaborator, but using it generally involves active supervision and validation, especially in high-stakes work, rather than handing off tasks that require no verification at all.

  • Runway Released a Video Model that Outperformed Veo 3 and Sora 2 Pro on An Benchmark

    Runway Released a Video Model that Outperformed Veo 3 and Sora 2 Pro on An Benchmark

    IBL News | New York

    AI startup Runway released its latest video model, Gen 4.5, to generate high-definition videos from written prompts.

    The company said the model outperformed similar models from Google’s Veo 3 and OpenAI’s Sora 2 Pro on the independent Video Arena leaderboard, noting that it excels at understanding physics, human motion, camera movements, and cause-and-effect.

    “We managed to out-compete trillion-dollar companies with a team of 100 people,” Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela said. “You can get to frontiers just by being extremely focused and diligent.” Gen 4.5 was codenamed “David” in a nod to the biblical story of David and Goliath.

    With a market valuation of $3.55 billion, Runway’s customers include media organizations, studios, brands, designers, creatives, and students.

  • Google Launches “Workspace Studio”, a New AI Productivity Tool for Business

    Google Launches “Workspace Studio”, a New AI Productivity Tool for Business

    IBL News | New York

    This month, Google launched Workspace Studio, a new automation productivity tool for everyday work, designed to build AI agents and powered by Gemini 3’s multimodal understanding.

    Previously known as Workspace Flows, Workspace Studio offers full integration with Gmail, Chat, Drive, and other Google productivity apps, and it also connects to Asana, Jira, Mailchimp, and Salesforce.

    The new platform orchestrates work relying on pre-built connectors and custom extensions.

    Google summarized some business cases of this tool:

  • Harvey, With $100M in ARR, Reaches a Valuation of $8B, Doubling Its Valuation

    Harvey, With $100M in ARR, Reaches a Valuation of $8B, Doubling Its Valuation

    IBL News | New York

    Harvey.ai, an AI platform for law firms, closed a $150 million funding round last month, valuing the company at $8 billion, double its valuation from the previous year. Andreessen Horowitz led the round.

    Harvey is backed by the investment arm of RELX, a $85 billion publishing group with a market cap, which owns the legal database LexisNexis. Harvey signed a deal with LexisNexis in June.

    The San Francisco-based three-year-old startup has raised more than $1 billion, including the new round, outstripping its rivals in valuation and fundraising.

    Annually, it generates more than $100 million in recurring revenue, or ARR.

    Harvey was founded in 2022 by Weinberg, then a junior lawyer with O’Melveny & Myers, and his friend and former DeepMind researcher Gabe Pereyra.

    The legal AI tools market is crowded:

    • Harvey is head-to-head with the Swedish startup Legora, which has a $1.8 billion valuation.
    • Other tech startups are Luminace, Clio, and Ironclad.
    • Chasing legal niches is EvenUp’s tool for personal injury lawyers, and Finch for paralegals.
    • Thomson Reuters, which owns case law database Westlaw, last year snapped up Casetext, another Harvey rival, in a $650 million deal.

  • MIT Says that AI Will Reshape the Labor Market, Replacing 11.7% of the U.S. Workforce

    MIT Says that AI Will Reshape the Labor Market, Replacing 11.7% of the U.S. Workforce

    IBL News | New York

    AI can replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor force, amounting to $1.2 trillion in wages across finance, health care, and professional services.

    This is the main finding of an MIT study conducted using its simulation tool, the Iceberg Index, that simulates how 151 million U.S. workers interact across the country and how they are affected by AI.

    Researchers found that layoffs and role shifts in tech, computing, and information technology account for just 2.2% of total wage exposure, or about $211 billion.

    The Iceberg Index also challenges a common assumption about AI risk — that it will stay confined to tech roles in coastal hubs. It runs population-level experiments, revealing how AI reshapes tasks, skills, and labor flows long before those changes show up in the real economy.

    “Basically, we are creating a digital twin for the U.S. labor market,” said Prasanna Balaprakash, ORNL director and co-leader of the research.