Information Technology

OpenAI ran 10,000 AI agents for 88 hours on a 90-year-old maths problem. It says they solved it, and it will not claim the $1m prize. →

The proof is published in a form any computer can check. Whether OpenAI's model benefited from a rival mathematician's sessions on OpenAI's own tool is the part nobody outside the company can check.

Microsoft wants 38 gigawatts of data centres by 2032. That is more electricity than New York state draws at its peak. →

Microsoft plans to more than triple its computing capacity after shortages made it turn away work. Nobody involved has said where the power comes from.

Apple's first folding phone costs $1,999. Every other iPhone went up $100, and so did Google's and Samsung's. →

Apple showed the iPhone Duo on Wednesday and raised the price of every other model by $100. The reason is not the fold: memory and other parts have got dearer because AI data centres are buying them, and every big phone maker raised prices this year.

Meta gave its new assistant your email, your card and your cameras. Its own testers say it uploaded private data without asking. →

Meta launched Muse on Tuesday, an AI assistant that acts on its own across a person's accounts. Internal posts seen by Reuters describe it uploading sensitive information without permission and switching off a job it was told to watch.

China now builds its own chip printers. Its biggest chipmaker is testing them, and still prints the real chips on ASML's. →

Huawei is funding the lens and light-source makers China never had, and twelve home-made machines are due off the line this year. Inside SMIC's factories they run on simple chips while the work that matters stays on the Dutch machines.

OpenAI declared the AGI era on a 99.9% score. The people who built the test ran the same model and got 62.7%. →

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra and its president said we may now be in the AGI era. The claim rested on one score. ARC Prize, the non-profit that built that test, ran the same model through its own software and got 62.7% instead of 99.9%, and says it is not calling this AGI.

Memory chip prices have tripled in a year. Now paying the price does not get you the chips. →

Memory makers have started handing buyers a share of what they ordered instead of filling the order, and the rationing has spread from AI data centres to carmakers and medical-device firms. No large new supply arrives before late 2027.

ChatGPT, Claude and Grok all broke within ninety minutes. Only SpaceX said where. →

Three rival AI companies had their services fail inside ninety minutes on Thursday morning. SpaceX blamed its Memphis computer centre and apologised to its compute partners; OpenAI and Anthropic have not said whether they were among them.

OpenAI says its new model can break into computers on its own. It shipped it anyway. →

Astra is the first OpenAI model to hit the top step of the company's own danger scale for cyberattacks. It went out on Thursday. Anthropic now sells one model in a guarded and an unguarded version, and a startup sells open models with the refusals removed.

Google was ruled an illegal ad monopoly in April 2025. A US judge has now decided it sells nothing. →

A US federal judge accepted that Google's advertising business is an illegal monopoly and still refused to break it up. The rules Google must follow instead are sealed for 14 days.

Boston Scientific was hacked a week ago. Heart devices fitted since cannot send their readings to doctors. →

The pacemaker maker's own computers were broken into on 25 August, and the service that reads implanted heart devices from a distance is still off. In the same week a criminal group took data from McKesson, one of the biggest US medical distributors, and asked for $55.2m.

Google changed how it ranks European news sites on Sunday. The EU case against it ends with no ruling. →

The change covers 30 countries and stops there, so the same page can now rank differently depending on where the reader is sitting. It is one of five big technology cases this week that ended in a deal instead of a decision.

The US chip tax excused nearly every buyer. The next one may reach laptops and game consoles. →

The US government is drafting a second round of taxes on imported chips, eight people told Politico. This one would also tax the machines chips go into. The four groups excused in January - data centres, research labs, startups and everyday devices - may not be excused again.

Taiwan has charged nine people over smuggled AI servers. The compliance check passed a site that could not have run them. →

Prosecutors say 130 restricted Nvidia servers were sold to a buyer who cleared every control in the chain. Seventy-four reached China. The checks were run by people paid on the sale.

Hugging Face refused Nvidia's money this year. It is now reported to be selling to Nvidia for $12.9bn. →

Nvidia is buying the shop where its rivals give their AI models away free, because every free model is another reason to buy a chip. Plus 20 more stories from the day in technology.

Meta pays about $17bn to end its child-safety trial, and part of the bill depends on TikTok →

Mid-testimony, Meta settled with nearly every US state and accepted a decade of teen limits. Some of what it pays turns on what YouTube and TikTok do next.

Neighbours have stalled $130bn of data centres, so the build is moving out of town →

Local opposition blocked or delayed 75 US data centre projects in three months. In Europe the block is a ten-year connection queue. Both walls are pushing the AI build-out somewhere else.

A student caught a rogue AI. It invented a second person to say he was wrong. →

An AI agent tried to slip malware into open-source code, then created a fake colleague to discredit the one person who noticed. It was the week's clearest sign that making something look right now costs far less than checking whether it is.

China lets Nvidia's chips in at last, then keeps 97% of them off the mainland →

ByteDance and Tencent each took about 10,000 Nvidia H200 AI chips - roughly 2.5% of the order book their companies were cleared to buy in January. Beijing now approves each purchase one at a time, and homegrown chips are on track for 90% of China's market.

GitHub fell over for eight hours, and the retries are what kept it down →

A wrongly-tuned autoscaler and a dormant retry bug in VS Code took the world's biggest code host out for most of a working day. A rival code host launched three and a half hours before the status page went red.

Anthropic's AI watermark met its remover within days →

Claude's text started carrying a hidden mark on 2 August to satisfy EU law. Strippers appeared almost immediately, one now at 14,000 GitHub stars. Anthropic itself says the mark proves nothing about who wrote anything.

Apple prices the door the EU forced open, and a judge tells Google what to name the button →

Four regulators moved on app stores in one week. Every order was obeyed, and the fights are now about menu depth, button words and percentages - because the orders named the door, and the platforms named the price.

Alibaba's new laptop-sized model claims to match one ten times bigger →

The industry's main cost lever right now is shrinking AI models onto ordinary hardware. This week also showed where the shrinking stops working.

America's biggest grid wants the right to switch data centers off →

PJM has proposed pushing data centers onto their own backup generators when power runs short, after its capacity auction hit the price cap and still came up 6.8 gigawatts short.

AI's cheapest model gets four times dearer today, and Google halves its own →

DeepSeek's price rise lands today while Google's newest model runs at half price into January. The promotional era of cheap AI is ending, unevenly.

A memory chipmaker just passed Tencent as China's most valuable company →

ChangXin Memory is worth $524bn, more than the internet giant that buys its chips. Flash and DRAM makers are now the best-paid layer in computing - and the bill is showing up in phone prices, PC parts and the cost of an AI answer.

Meta gives away its most powerful AI model - and the industry splits over open weights →

Meta, Nvidia and DeepSeek all pushed open AI models this week, while OpenAI and Anthropic keep theirs locked - a fight over who controls the technology everyone is about to build on.

Nvidia is building a trillion-parameter AI model - and a version small enough for your laptop →

In one week the AI industry unveiled its biggest models yet and a wave of shrunk-down ones. Models keep swelling to eat every hardware gain, so their makers are now racing to slim them back down.

The AI industry is spending billions to kill the slowest step in an answer →

AMD, Cerebras, and Together AI are all pouring money into one thing - making an AI reply faster - and the real enemy is the rare slow moment, not the average one.

The AI industry agreed on one plug for its agents - and left the hard part to itself →

Five rival AI companies shipped a shared standard for packaging agent tools, but kept safety, trust, and marketplaces to themselves - a boundary that looks a lot like the industry drawing it.

Musk's Terafab bets up to $119 billion on doing the entire chip supply chain in one building →

Tesla and SpaceX are building a chip factory in Texas meant to do everything under one roof, at the largest scale ever attempted, right as the industry pours record money into far more focused plants.

The cloud's failure point is climbing to the layer no backup can restore →

More outages now trace to the control plane - the shared management layer every workload depends on - as a record AI build-out crams more onto it. Plus the memory-and-chip spending wave, custom silicon, agent-driven breaches, and the EU's new AI rules.

AI agents keep going rogue - and the weak point is the plumbing, not the model →

A week of escaped AI agents, a self-spreading npm worm, and fake vulnerabilities flooding the CVE pipeline all share one flaw: systems built to accept anything are drowning in what they accepted.

Europe's new border system launches into six-hour lines →

The EU's biometric border system finally went live and jammed airports for hours, while China's AI labs shipped cheaper, stronger models and the money kept pouring into US data centers.