Tech

The most consequential courtroom drama in AI history kicked off today in an Oakland federal courthouse. Elon Musk — world’s richest person, OpenAI co-founder — versus Sam Altman, the CEO who turned that nonprofit research lab into an $850 billion juggernaut. Between them: a nine-person jury, thousands of pages of internal documents, and a question that could define how artificial intelligence is governed for decades. Opening arguments started this morning. This one’s going to be messy. ...

What if the biggest breakthrough in AI isn’t a better chatbot — but an AI that doesn’t need human knowledge at all? That’s the bet David Silver is making. The man who created AlphaGo just announced that his startup, Ineffable Intelligence, has raised a staggering $1.1 billion in seed funding at a $5.1 billion valuation. It’s the largest seed round in European history, backed by Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed, Nvidia, Google, and the UK government’s Sovereign AI Fund. ...

The US government has always been able to spy on its citizens. But AI is making it so easy, so fast, and so comprehensive that even the lawmakers who built the surveillance infrastructure are getting nervous. Section 702 of FISA expires April 30, 2026. What’s playing out on Capitol Hill isn’t a routine renewal — it’s a fight over whether AI-enhanced surveillance should operate without meaningful oversight in a democracy. ...

Beijing just dropped a one-line bomb on the global AI industry. China’s National Development and Reform Commission ordered Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of Manus — the AI agent startup that was supposed to be Zuckerberg’s secret weapon. No negotiation. No diplomatic hedging. Just: reverse the deal. This isn’t a regulatory hiccup. It’s the moment the AI race officially split into two separate universes. What Made Manus Worth $2 Billion Manus builds general-purpose AI agents — software that doesn’t just chat but acts. It codes applications, runs market research, manages data analysis, and prepares budgets autonomously. Think of it as the generation after chatbots. ...

Three bombshells in 72 hours. OpenAI launched GPT-5.5. China’s DeepSeek dropped V4 at 85% less cost. Google committed $40 billion to Anthropic. The AI industry didn’t just shift — it lurched into a new phase where billion-dollar moves happen simultaneously and the gap between cutting-edge and affordable collapses faster than anyone predicted. GPT-5.5: The “Just Let It Work” Model OpenAI’s latest isn’t about raw intelligence gains. It’s about how the model works. ...

Your phone knows where you slept last night. Your email provider knows who you argued with this morning. Your browser knows what you’re worried about. Individually, these data points are mundane. Assembled by an AI system with access to government surveillance databases? They become the most detailed profile of your life ever constructed — and right now, Congress is fighting over whether to let that happen without a warrant. The FISA Fight Reaches Breaking Point Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lets the government collect communications of foreigners abroad without a warrant. When an American contacts someone overseas, their communications get swept up too. The government can then search those intercepted American communications — no warrant required. ...

AI has an energy problem. A massive one. Data centers now consume roughly 1,000 terawatt-hours of electricity annually — about as much as Japan. Every ChatGPT query, every image generation, every AI-powered search burns through watts at a rate that would make your electric bill weep. So when a team at the University of Cambridge publishes a chip design in Science Advances that could cut AI energy consumption by up to 70%, it’s time to pay attention. ...

April 24, 2026 might be the most consequential single day in the AI model wars. Within hours of each other, two of the year’s most anticipated systems went live: DeepSeek’s V4 — an open-source behemoth running on Huawei chips with a million-token context window — and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, which the company calls its “smartest and most intuitive model yet.” Neither was an incremental update. Both represent genuine leaps. And the fact that they dropped on the same day tells you everything about where this industry is right now. ...

There’s a moment in every tech revolution when the money stops making sense to normal people. For AI, that moment arrived this week. Google just committed up to $40 billion in Anthropic — the company behind Claude. This landed four days after Amazon announced its own $25 billion deal with the same company. Combined: $65 billion in potential investment from two competing tech giants, into a single startup, in one week. ...

The federal government is running a live experiment on 30 million Americans. An AI program called WISeR is delaying and denying medical care for seniors. The nation’s top health official says AI could make the FDA “irrelevant.” And somehow, nobody in charge sees the contradiction. The Quiet Launch That’s Ruining Lives In January 2026, CMS launched the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction Model — WISeR — introducing AI-powered prior authorization to traditional Medicare for the first time at scale. ...