Pages from the Anthropic website and the company's logo are displayed on a computer screen in New York on 26 February 2026. Pages from the Anthropic website and the company's logo are displayed on a computer screen in New York on 26 February 2026. Anthropic reaches valuation of $965bn, beating OpenAI to become world's most valuable AI firm Claude's parent company's $65bn in latest funding round underscores vast sums of money still flowing into industry Anthropic, the AI firm behind the Claude chatbot, announced on Thursday it had raised $65bn in funding to value the company at $965bn post-money. The move makes Anthropic the world's most valuable AI startup, eclipsing its competitor OpenAI. The deal marks an exceedingly successful period of growth for Anthropic, which was once considered to be a smaller player in the global AI arms race.

The real image, which the police station has since shared, shows the officers in normal clothes and no female officer in the picture at all. The real image, which the police station has since shared, shows the officers in normal clothes and no female officer in the picture at all. Picture was created by administrator in charge of station's Facebook account who wanted to create'friendlier image' It was an arresting image and an irresistible story. A group of tough Thai police officers - five men and one woman - all wearing elaborate festival-style dresses, surrounding a drug dealer they had caught while undercover. The image, released by local police, was so compelling that it found its way on to the front page of the UK's Daily Star, as well as in picture stories in the Telegraph, the Sun and the New York Post. The Sun wrote: "The burly crew of five men and one woman slipped into skin tight sequins and feathers for the covert mission in Thailand ."

At the first-ever TIME100 AI Leadership Forum in New York City on Wednesday night, three leaders from music, fashion, and entertainment spoke during an onstage panel about how AI has changed how they worked creatively and the role they see for AI in the arts, moderated by TIME deputy editor Kelly Conniff. Across the board, the panelists agreed that AI is best used as partner and collaborator and cannot replace the distinctly human parts of the creative process. However, they can help users gain deeper knowledge, and shorten the more tedious parts of the brainstorming and ideation process. Christopher Brearton, partner at independent studio AGBO, said that using AI tools could look like leaving a story idea meeting with not only a rough plot and characters but also a quick mockup with images and videos of what it might look like. "Having an AI tool to help open that aperture and expand and continue the creative momentum, and not have breaks in your creative process, has been really fundamentally changing what we do," he said.

A panel of executives spoke at the TIME100 AI Leadership Forum on Wednesday night in New York City about the ways artificial intelligence is reshaping the business landscape, and how they're shepherding their companies into a technologically capricious future. Included on the panel at the TIME forum, which spotlighted AI-driven business leadership, were Nigel Vaz, the chief executive officer of Publicis Sapient, a tech-consulting firm that uses AI to help modernize business and a sponsor of Wednesday's event; Deepa Soni, the executive vice president and chief information officer of New York Life Insurance Company; and Ravi Radhakrishnan, the executive vice president and chief information officer of American Express. Vaz began the conversation discussing the "exponential" capability of AI to transform and enhance companies' abilities to problem solve and become more efficient. For his company, AI is a tool used to extract value and optimize performance for clients by reducing time and cost. Many of them, he notes, must bridge the gap between their relatively outdated technology and increasingly more useful AI tools--what he referred to as their "tech debt."

High-fidelity simulation models are widely used to analyze complex stochastic systems, but their high computational cost motivates the development of cheaper surrogate models that approximate the simulation model's input-output relationship. In parallel, reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful framework for making online decisions in stochastic environments, with increasing attention being given to the use of simulation models as training environments for RL models. We investigate a class of surrogate models suitable for accelerating RL training in settings where the reward structure, model parameters, or system dynamics change over time and explore their interactions with simulation models and RL models. Through numerical experiments on a stochastic service system modeled via discrete-event simulation, we demonstrate that leveraging surrogate models can substantially accelerate RL training and re-training.

We consider the problem of learning a counterfactually fair regressor. We adopt a causal uncertainty view in which counterfactual fairness is defined with resampled noise. We focus on obtaining theoretical fairness guarantees for a new post-processing estimator. We begin by showing that counterfactual fairness is equivalent to satisfying demographic parity conditional on the latent variable. This allows us to provide a closed-form expression of the optimal fair regressor via a barycentric quantile map. In order to handle continuous latent variables, we propose a discretized post-processing method. Then, under mild regularity assumptions, we prove high-probability finite-sample fairness guarantees for our estimator, providing an unfairness decay at rate $\tilde O(n^{-1/3})$, and establishing a matching risk bound of order $\tilde O(n^{-1/3})$. We provide a matching lower bound on the excess risk of almost fair predictions. Finally, we extend our results to the setting of relaxed counterfactual fairness. We validate our approach on real-world and synthetic data.

According to federal prosecutors, Michele Spagnuolo made more than $1 million on the prediction market platform using confidential information about Google Search traffic. A Google security engineer has been charged with crimes stemming from allegedly placing trades on Polymarket using confidential internal information from the tech giant. Michele Spagnuolo, a 36-year-old Italian citizen, was arrested this morning in New York, as first reported by ABC News. Spagnuolo is charged with one count each of commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. He has worked at Google since 2014 and was based out of the company's Zurich, Switzerland, offices.

Elizabeth Warren is a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. Senator Elizabeth Warren speaks on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street on April 17, 2025 in New York City. Senator Elizabeth Warren speaks on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street on April 17, 2025 in New York City. Elizabeth Warren is a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. Americans are hanging on by their fingernails in an economy that funnels wealth to the ultra-rich and leaves crumbs for working people.

Today, TIME convenes the first-ever TIME100 AI Leadership Forum in New York City, featuring a series of conversations exploring how artificial intelligence is shaping the future of our world across business, policy, ethics, society--and beyond. "We are proud to convene the inaugural TIME100 AI Leadership Forum, bringing together influential leaders from the TIME and TIME100 AI communities at a pivotal moment for artificial intelligence. These conversations are essential to ensuring innovation is guided by responsibility, insight, and purpose, and we are grateful to our partners, Amazon One Medical and Publicis Sapient, for supporting this important convening," said TIME CEO Jessica Sibley "At TIME, our mission is to spotlight the people and ideas shaping the future. The TIME100 AI Leadership Forum brings that mission to life by convening leaders at the center of AI and the shifting landscapes across industries, while exploring the opportunities, challenges, and responsibilities that will define the next era of innovation," said TIME Executive Editor and Chief Strategy Officer Dan Macsai The TIME100 AI Leadership Forum is the newest extension of TIME's growing Leadership Forum series, which brings together the world's most influential leaders for dynamic conversations around the ideas and innovations shaping our future. Following the TIME100 Health, Climate, and Women of the Year Leadership Forums, the inaugural AI forum builds on TIME's expansive coverage of artificial intelligence and its annual TIME100 AI list, which recognizes the 100 most influential people shaping the future of AI.

Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical warns AI threatens humanity, but history shows technological progress lifts living standards. Why the pope and Bernie Sanders may be wrong about AI.