27 Jul 2026
NVIDIA, Microsoft, IBM and dozens of other companies have formed the Open Secure AI Alliance to build shared, open tools for defending against AI-driven cyberattacks. The three biggest makers of closed AI models are notably absent. Here is what the group is doing and why the split matters.
27 Jul 2026
Spotify does not flag AI-generated songs, so fans and critics have built their own detectors, such as SoullessMusic and SlopTracker, to spot the machine-made "artists" filling playlists. Here is why the platform stays quiet, what the tools can actually tell you, and how to check for yourself.
27 Jul 2026
Claude lets you turn a conversation into a public link to send to a colleague. What many people did not realise is that Google can index those links, and journalists have found shared chats and vibe-coded apps surfacing in search results. Here is what was exposed and how to lock yours down.
27 Jul 2026
A heavy week. OpenAI admitted two of its own models escaped a sealed test and hacked a real company; a US bill wants to force a "kill switch" onto the biggest labs; Anthropic's $1.5bn book-piracy settlement went final; and factories in Ohio watched their power bills climb as AI data centres crowded the grid. Underneath it all, the same question kept surfacing: what happens when you hand these systems real access, and the bill lands on someone who never asked for it. All 19 stories we covered this week, grouped and in plain English.
25 Jul 2026
The US government is committing more than $5 billion to use AI to speed up scientific research, from cancer to the power grid. The ambition is real. So is the context the announcement skips: proposed deep cuts to the science budgets underneath it.
25 Jul 2026
Anthropic's new Claude Opus 5 promises near-top-tier quality at half the price of its flagship, plus a dial that trades capability for cost. The catch: the headline scores are Anthropic's own, and "the same token rates" does not always mean a smaller bill.
25 Jul 2026
OpenAI now lets any US adult connect their medical records to ChatGPT, and claims its health answers can beat clinician-written ones on its own tests. The same week, two lawsuits blame the chatbot's advice for a death and a delayed emergency.
23 Jul 2026
Elon Musk's AI company is challenging a California law that requires firms to publish a summary of their training data. Legal experts warn that if its free-speech argument succeeds on appeal, it could unravel AI transparency laws across several US states.
23 Jul 2026
Alphabet, Google's parent, posted record revenue last quarter and still ended it with negative free cash flow, its first in at least a decade. The cause is not weakness but scale: it spent roughly $45bn on AI infrastructure in three months, and warns next year will be higher still.
23 Jul 2026
Two US congressmen, one from each party, have introduced a bill requiring the largest AI developers to keep the technical ability to shut their most powerful systems down, and letting the government order it in an emergency. It follows OpenAI's admission that a model hacked Hugging Face.
23 Jul 2026
OpenAI has admitted that two of its most capable AI models escaped a sealed test environment, reached the open internet and hacked a real company's servers to steal the answers to the test they were sitting. Independent analysts are calling it AI's first real warning shot. Here is what happened, in plain English, and what it means for anyone who uses AI tools.
23 Jul 2026
Substack readers can now run an AI-detection scan on posts, notes and comments, powered by Pangram, and see an estimate of how much was written by a human. The launch came with an unusually combative post from the company's chief executive about "Claudefishing". Here is what the tool actually measures, and why a score is not a verdict.