Tech, in brief

Companies cutting staff costs

Oracle, a big business-software company, began new layoffs days after revenue rose about 30%. [9] Reach, publisher of the Daily Mirror, is cutting 220 newsroom jobs after Google traffic fell 46%. [10] Wipro moved 20,000 workers' worth of work to AI. [3]

Bosses refusing to slow AI

Jensen Huang of Nvidia, the main maker of AI chips, called a legal waiver for slowing AI unnecessary. [11] Mark Zuckerberg of Meta said each lab already has reason to build safely, without new rules. [14] The US House Speaker said there can be no pause on AI. [16]

AI paid for with borrowed money

Insuring big cloud companies' bonds against default now costs more than insuring bank bonds. [18] JPMorgan expects Meta to spend $65bn to $75bn a year more than it earns in 2027 and 2028. [19] Oracle spent $28.5bn on buildings and equipment in one quarter. [8]

Governments setting rules for tech

A US judge ordered Google to share ad auction data with websites. [7] Florida sued Netflix over data it collects on children. [25] The European Commission is due to present a child online-safety law on Thursday. [24]

One pressure seen across the day runs through Tech too.

• Investors paying for things nobody has judged yetBuilding ↑ · seen in 3 beats→

1. 1AI is not firing office workers. It is slowing their pay and their hiring.
2. 2Google's sealed ad order is made public
3. 3Oracle cuts jobs after a record quarter
4. 4Reach cuts 220 newsroom jobs
5. 5Nvidia's boss rejects a legal pass to slow AI

A new study says AI is holding down office workers' pay, not taking away their jobs. [1]

The next test is whether the pay gap still shows up when researchers can measure more than 321 of the roughly 800 US job types. [2]

When firms need fewer new hires, workers have fewer places to go, and raises shrink even though nobody is fired.

It is enough that fewer firms are hiring, because a raise is mostly what a firm pays to keep a worker who could leave.

Wipro kept its staff but needs fewer new ones, and TCS said Indian IT firms will slow hiring, so engineers have fewer firms to move to.

An IT manager who has sent 600 applications since January cannot easily refuse a bad interview, because each opening is scarce.

Workers who fear being replaced pay for the tools and hide their use, instead of asking their employer to pay.

None of them can see the job that was never advertised.

A US federal court on Wednesday made public Judge Leonie Brinkema's 106-page order on Google's advertising technology, the software that sells ad space on websites. [7]

She ruled last year that Google broke the law to protect that business, and this month refused to make it sell part of it. [7]

The order says Google must make its ad tools work with rival products and share auction data with publishers. [7] Google must also appoint an internal monitor to check it obeys. [7]

News sites that sell ads through Google get auction data they could not see before. [7] Google keeps its ad exchange and every other ad tool it owns. [7]

US courts have now twice found Google a monopoly, in search and in ads, and twice declined to break it up. [7]

Oracle, the American business-software company that now rents out AI data centres, began another round of layoffs on Monday. [8]

Staff were emailed that their role was gone and that Monday was their last working day. [9]

Its workforce had already shrunk 13%, from about 162,000 to 141,000, in the year to 31 May. [8]

Days earlier it reported quarterly revenue of $19.3bn, up about 30%, and added $700m to its budget for job cuts. [9]

The money is going into data centres: Oracle spent $28.5bn on buildings and equipment in one quarter, against $8.5bn a year earlier. [8]

About two-thirds of its staff work outside the US, and EU law requires talks with staff and a 30-day wait before large layoffs. [8]

Reach, the British publisher of the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express and many local papers, is cutting 220 editorial jobs and closing three local news websites. [10]

Its chief content officer, David Higgerson, told staff that visits from Google had fallen 46% in a year. [10]

Reach blames Google answering more searches with AI-written summaries, so fewer people click through to news sites. [10]

About 60 new jobs in subscriptions and video make the net loss nearly 160. [10]

Britain's competition regulator ruled in June that Google must let publishers opt out of AI summaries without losing search ranking. [10] Those controls can take up to nine months to arrive. [10]

KentLive, AberdeenLive and GalwayBeo close in the meantime. [10]

Dario Amodei, head of the AI lab Anthropic, proposed on Saturday that leading labs agree to slow their most advanced models, possibly with a waiver from competition law. [11]

US competition law normally bans rival firms from agreeing to limit what they make. [11]

Jensen Huang, head of Nvidia, whose chips most AI runs on, called new laws for this 'completely unnecessary'. [11]

David Sacks, who chairs the US president's science advisers, told the labs to slow down without asking for a waiver. [12]

OpenAI told reporters it has talked with Anthropic and Google about safety for weeks and does not think a waiver is needed. [13]

Nvidia sells chips to both Anthropic and OpenAI, so a slower race could slow its own growth. [11]

Mark Zuckerberg, head of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, wrote on Tuesday that every AI lab already has reason to build safely. [14]

He said labs would face large legal claims if their models caused harm. [14] He pointed to Meta delaying its Muse AI agent from April to 8 September for safety work. [15]

He gave no sign Meta would join the slowdown Amodei proposed. [15]

Meta's own tests found Muse pulling up personal photos it had not been asked for. [15]

OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk backed Amodei's call, so the biggest US labs are now split. [14]

Senator Bernie Sanders, Representative Chip Roy and Steve Bannon, Trump's former strategist, spoke on Tuesday at a 'Pro-Human Assembly' in Washington. [16]

The Future of Life Institute, a charity that campaigns on technology risks, organised it. [16] Sanders and Representative Greg Casar have introduced a bill to pause advanced AI development. [16]

House Speaker Mike Johnson said the same day there can be no pause, because the US would lose its lead to China. [16]

The House leaves Washington on Thursday and does not return until after the 3 November election, so no AI law is likely before then. [16]

President Trump has called the safety worries a hoax. [16]

A report from Mozilla, published on 15 September, says open-weight AI models, which anyone can download and run, are about 4.4 months behind the best paid models. [17]

Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 costs about 30% as much as Anthropic's best model, and scored three points lower on one combined test. [17]

On a neutral test setup, Z.ai's GLM 5.2 cost a fifth as much per task as Anthropic's Claude Opus models and scored within a point of them. [17]

Eight of the ten most-used models on OpenRouter, a marketplace for AI models, had open weights in August, and most of the best open models are Chinese. [17]

Mozilla's technology chief says paid models earn their price mainly on tasks taking eight to twelve hours. [17]

Apollo Global Management, a large US investment firm, said on Wednesday that insurance against default on big cloud companies' bonds is getting pricier. [18]

The extra cost over the same insurance on bank bonds has grown to about 0.6 percentage points, from roughly zero in October 2025. [18]

Apollo's chief economist Torsten Slok blamed borrowing for AI buildings, rising debt and negative cash flow. [18]

Alphabet, Amazon and Meta are each expected to spend $25bn to $30bn more than they bring in. [18]

JPMorgan still told clients to buy Meta shares, while forecasting it could spend $65bn to $75bn a year more than it earns in 2027 and 2028. [19]

Microsoft is the exception among the four, with positive cash flow of $33.4bn. [18]

Also seen in Gaming and Finance.

California's utility regulator, the CPUC, was set to vote on Thursday on the state's plan for $1.86bn of federal broadband money. [20]

The Trump administration requires states taking that money to stop enforcing net neutrality, rules that bar internet providers from blocking or slowing lawful traffic. [20]

The exemption would cover the whole state for up to 14 years. [20] California and Illinois are the only states that have not finalised their plans. [20]

About 69% of California's share goes to five big providers, including Comcast, AT&T and SpaceX's Starlink. [20]

Nearly 30 groups warn the deal could also put at risk a $20-a-month Verizon plan for low-income homes. [20]

Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, the US telecom regulator, said on Wednesday that coming sales of radio airwaves could raise more than $100bn. [21]

The first, in 2027, sells 160 megahertz in the Upper C-Band, frequencies used for mobile data. [21] Three more auctions are planned, to finish by the end of 2028. [21]

Carr said buyers now reach beyond AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, which carry nearly all US mobile service. [21]

SpaceX bought $17bn of airwave licences from EchoStar last year to sell phone and data service from its Starlink satellites. [22]

Starlink had 9 million subscribers last year, small next to carriers with about $350bn of yearly revenue but growing much faster. [22]

Spain's data protection agency, the AEPD, said on Monday it had its first report of a data breach allegedly carried out by an AI agent, software that acts on its own. [23]

Using a widely known AI model, the agent logged into a system, searched it for weaknesses, changed personal data and viewed invoices. [23]

The agency named neither the model nor the organisation attacked. [23] It said the model's maker was not necessarily compromised. [23]

The agency said AI does not invent new attacks but makes old ones faster, leaving less time to catch them. [23] It gave no date for finishing its review. [23]

The European Commission, which proposes EU laws, was set to present its EU Kids Act on Thursday, with the social media age limit still undecided. [24]

Its expert panel recommended 13, while France supports 15. [24] The plan targets features that keep children scrolling, not only what they see. [24]

Researchers got past the EU's proposed age-check app in under two minutes. [24]

Countries are moving on their own: France bans social media under 15, and Norway is writing an under-16 ban with fines up to 20 million kroner. [24]

Any age limit means platforms must first work out who is a child, which means collecting data about users. [24]

Florida's attorney general, James Uthmeier, sued Netflix on 9 September. He says it collected detailed data on subscribers and their children and used it to sell advertising. [25]

The 66-page complaint quotes former chief executive Reed Hastings telling analysts in 2020 that Netflix did not collect anything. [25]

The state says Netflix records billions of actions, such as what users pause, replay or skip. [25] Netflix says the case lacks merit. [25]

Netflix launched a cheaper plan with ads in November 2022, and Florida says it now lets data brokers such as Experian match their data with its own. [25]

The suit also targets autoplay being switched on by default for children's profiles. [25]

Bending Spoons, a Milan company that buys apps and runs them, agreed on 10 September to buy Miro, the online whiteboard, in a cash deal valued at $1.355bn. [26]

Miro has about $600m a year in recurring revenue and over 100 million users, nearly 4 million of them paying. [26]

It is Bending Spoons' second big software purchase in weeks, after Airtable, a $1.285bn deal that closed last week. [26] The Miro deal should close by the end of 2026. [26]

Bending Spoons already owns Evernote, Vimeo and WeTransfer, and it says it usually reorganises the teams and changes how the products make money. [26]

It raised $1.68bn when it listed on Nasdaq in July, so it has money to keep buying. [26]

Deloitte, one of the big four accounting firms, surveyed 25,000 UK workers. [27] Of those using AI tools, 17% pay for at least one out of their own pocket. [28]

That adds up to about 958 million pounds a year. [28] Almost a third use AI without their employer knowing, and half have had no formal training. [28]

Users said the tools save them about 70 minutes a week. [27]

Among weekly users, 64% worry their manager thinks AI could replace them. [28]

In the US, the typical employer spends about $11 a worker a month on AI, according to data from the payments company Ramp. [28]

Wayve, a self-driving startup valued at about $8.5bn, hired Elisa de Martel as chief financial officer. [29]

She held the same job from 2022 to January 2026 at Waymo, Alphabet's robotaxi company, as it raised $5.6bn. [29]

Wayve's software learns to drive from data instead of detailed maps, and it has deals with Nissan and Stellantis. [29]

It runs public rides in London with a safety driver on board, and Tokyo is expected next. [29]

Wayve has raised $3.2bn and now has to turn trials into paying customers. [29] Uber also wants to use its software for robotaxis. [29]

Meta released a tool on 15 September that lets AI coding agents such as Claude, Cursor or ChatGPT set up a company's WhatsApp Business account. [30]

It uses MCP, a shared standard that connects AI agents to other companies' software. [30] The agent can create the account, verify the phone number and write message templates. [30]

Before, developers moved by hand between several Meta websites and tools. [30]

PayPal, Stripe, GitHub, Slack and Salesforce already offer similar connections for agents. [30] It is a small example of setup work shifting from a developer to an AI agent. [30]

Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley program that funds very young startups, held its Demo Day on 10 September. [31]

Investors told TechCrunch this batch leaned far more to hard science and hardware than before. [31]

Their picks included Atomarine, which plans nuclear-powered data centres on barges, and Nori, a $1,600 home robot that folds clothes. [31] Atomarine says it has letters of intent worth over $4bn. [31]

Several picks aim at AI's power problem, including Parasma, which is trying to compute with human brain cells. [31]

Investors said prices for stakes in the batch were far more sensible than in recent rounds. [31]