Amazon is doubling its investment in Anthropic. The e-commerce giant will provide Anthropic with an additional 4 billion in funding on top of the 4 billion it committed last year. Although Amazon remains a minority investor, Anthropic has agreed to make Amazon Web Services (AWS) its "primary cloud and training partner." Before today's announcement, The Information had reported that Amazon wanted to make any additional funding contingent on a commitment from Anthropic to use the company's in-house AI chips instead of silicon from NVIDIA. It appears Amazon got its way, with both companies noting in separate press releases that Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train future foundation models.

The UK government is expected to launch a parliamentary inquiry into the roll of social media in summer riots, particularly around the use of generative AI, The Guardian reported. As part of that, MPs (members of Parliament) wish to cross-examine X owner Elon Musk, along with senior executives from Meta and TikTok, as part of a Commons science and technology select committee social media inquiry. "[Musk] has very strong views on multiple aspects of this," said Labour chair of the select committee, Chi Onwurah. "I would certainly like the opportunity to cross-examine him to see … how he reconciles his promotion of freedom of expression with his promotion of pure disinformation. The government is looking into the use of fake images created by generative AI, often containing Islamophobic content, which were widely shared in social media posts on Facebook and X.

The New York police department (NYPD) announced it will begin using drones to respond to reports of robberies and alerts from a city-wide gunshot detection system. The drones will fly to the scene, piloted by an NYPD officer, and record video and audio that will be sent to police officers' smartphones in real time, according to a press release. The integration of these two surveillance technologies is part of a broader "Drone as First Responder" program that has existed since 2018. The New York city mayor, Eric Adams, and the city's interim police commissioner, Tom Donlan, announced the expansion on Wednesday afternoon. It will be initially rolled out to five precincts in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan.

Microsoft reported better-than-expected earnings on Wednesday fueled by growth in its Azure cloud business, as five of the "Magnificent Seven" tech megacaps roll out quarterly earnings this week. "AI-driven transformation is changing work, work artifacts, and workflow across every role, function, and business process," the company's CEO, Satya Nadella, said in a press release. "We are expanding our opportunity and winning new customers as we help them apply our AI platforms and tools to drive new growth and operating leverage." All eyes were on Azure, Microsoft's fastest-growing division that has received billions of dollars of investment as the company focuses attention on artificial intelligence. Revenue from the division increased by 22%, according to a press release. A day earlier, Google's parent, Alphabet, reported that its cloud business grew nearly 35% from a year earlier to 11.35bn, beating analyst estimates.

A lawsuit filed Wednesday accusing chatbot Character.AI of driving a 14-year-old to suicide left me wondering how dangerous simple words on a screen could really be. But, in just a few hours of talking to characters invented with the app's AI, I found a disturbing, skin-crawling world that appeared, at least to me, like the ultimate catnip for bored and lonely teens. Megan Garcia, the mother of Sewell Setzer III, filed the suit -- claiming her son had shot himself with a pistol on February 28 under the sway of his AI character, named after Daenerys Targaryen from'Game of Thrones,' who told him to'please come home.' The incident was blamed on Character.AI's scant guardrails and while the company said it rolled out new safety features this week, I was able to create a profile for myself as a 15-year-old boy. I used simple prompts to whip up a'demonic' AI companion named'Dr Danicka Kevorkian' and engage in a debauched apprenticeship'for a hefty price to pay.' 'The price is your soul, dear,' Dr Kevorkian AI said before we roleplayed consummating our deal in the bedroom, 'full of dark red and black decor,' leather, silk, and a maple glazed, french cruller that my character carried in an X-rated way.

Apple is willing to bet big on the safety of Apple Intelligence, so much that the tech giant has offered up to a 1 million bounty to anyone who can hack it. The company announced Thursday that it's inviting'all security researchers - or anyone with interest and a technical curiosity' to perform'their own independent verification of our claims.' The public has been challenged to test the security of'Private Cloud Compute,' the servers that will receive and process user requests for Apple Intelligence when the AI task is too complex for on-device processing. The system, according to Apple, features end-to-end encryption and immediately deletes a user's request once the task is fulfilled. There are different payouts for certain discoveries, but the 1 million goes to anyone who can run code on the system without being detected and accessing sensitive parts.

Tesla shares saw an 8% jump after reporting its third quarter earnings on Wednesday. The electric car manufacturer was able to bounce back from a tough second quarter, beating Wall Street expectations for earnings per share. The company reported an earnings-per-share of 0.72, surpassing investors' projection of 0.60. At the end of the second quarter, Tesla's chief executive, Elon Musk, said the nearly 50% drop in profits was temporary and due to difficulty competing with cheaper or price-slashed electric vehicles by rival companies such as BYD. "We don't see this as a long-term issue," Musk said in July, "but really fairly short term."

A Nashville woman was heard screaming for help by witnesses before she was found dead – police were able to track her alleged killer down using dashcam footage from a helpful civilian and a detective who had worked a case involving his twin. Last week, the Metro Nashville Police Department announced the arrest of 29-year-old Paul Park in connection with the death of 34-year-old Alyssa Lokits. The woman was exercising on the Mill Creek Greenway trail in Nashville on Monday, Oct. 14. Security cameras show Park allegedly emerging from between two parked vehicles and "following her at a brisk pace," the department wrote in a press release. After the two left the view of the camera, witnesses heard a woman scream "Help! Then, police said, the witnesses heard gunfire. Paul Park, 39, was arrested by the Metro Nashville Police Department on Oct. 15 in the death of Alyssa Lokits. Park was seen a short while later with scratches on his arms and blood on his clothing as he returned to his gray BMW sedan. Detectives didn't get a break in the case until a local resident provided them with dashcam footage, which showed part of Park's license plate and a clearer image of his face. A homicide detective who reviewed the footage recognized Park as the identical twin brother from a suicide case that she had worked in December 2021, CBS News reported. "I pray that we don't have an incident where we don't have a dashcam, or we don't have someone helping us like we had in this case," MNPD Chief John Drake said at a press conference. "I'm so thankful that our people got on this – we need technology." Even without the helpful civilian's footage, new technology pioneered by artificial intelligence software can help police investigate cases like the Nashville killing. Veritone is one of the companies spearheading that movement. The license plate of Paul Park's gray BMW sedan wasn't captured on surveillance footage – but thanks to a partial license plate number captured by a hiker's dashcam, police were able to arrest the accused killer. Veritone Track, one of several functions in a suite of services for law enforcement, uses artificial intelligence to run one photo or video of a vehicle – like the video captured on the park's surveillance footage – against stoplight cameras, body-worn cameras and other municipal surveillance footage available to police to find a match. "Both federal and local law enforcement have a major data problem," Veritone CEO Ryan Steelberg told Fox News Digital. "They are now capturing body camera [footage] and dashcams.

It took a while for people to adjust to the idea of chatbots that seem to have minds of their own. The next leap into the unknown may involve trusting artificial intelligence to take over our computers, too. Anthropic, a high-flying competitor to OpenAI, announced today that it has taught its AI model Claude to do a range of things on a computer, including search the web, open applications, and input text using the mouse and keyboard. "I think we're going to enter into a new era where a model can use all of the tools that you use as a person to get tasks done," says Jared Kaplan, chief science officer at Anthropic and an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University. Kaplan showed WIRED a prerecorded demo in which an "agentic"--or tool-using--version of Claude had been asked to help plan an outing to see the sunrise at the Golden Gate Bridge with a friend.

With its Gemini chatbot and Pixel AI phone software, it's fair to say Google has an obsessive focus on artificial intelligence. But all that advanced computational power requires millions of computers, known as'servers', housed inside data centres across the world that operate 24/7. Now, in an attempt to cater to its vast AI needs, Google is going nuclear. The tech giant has signed a deal with California-based nuclear firm Kairos Power to build new nuclear reactors to supply its US data centres with energy. Although the location of these reactors is yet to be revealed, Google said the first will be operational in 2030, with more to follow by 2035.