SoftBank gets upsized $11.9 billion loan in OpenAI funding push SoftBank Group secured an $11.87 billion two-year loan from about 20 banks to support its investment in U.S. artificial intelligence firm OpenAI, exceeding its earlier $10 billion target. SoftBank Group secured an $11.87 billion loan to support its investment in U.S. artificial intelligence firm OpenAI, people familiar with the matter said, up from its earlier target of $10 billion. The Japanese conglomerate sealed the two-year facility last week, attracting commitments from around 20 banks, said the people, asking not to be identified because they're not authorized to speak publicly. The financing comes as some executives are now voicing the need to slow the pace of AI development due to escalating risks from the technology. OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said in an interview with Fortune that his company wouldn't proceed with a public offering this year as it addresses safety-related concerns.

Xi pitches AI Vision at BRICS summit as China duels with U.S. Chinese President Xi Jinping has sought to turn the annual BRICS summit into another platform for championing Beijing's vision for artificial intelligence, as it vies for global influence over the technology with the U.S. China will lead the creation of what Xi called a BRICS "community" for open-source AI. Speaking on Sunday in New Delhi, he said the initiative will "support the cooperation in developing and applying large language models," as well as holding AI seminars and training courses for members of the club of major emerging economies. A day earlier, Xi welcomed BRICS nations to join a new group of nearly 30 countries set up by Beijing and called the World AI Cooperation Organization. BRICS must "strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing," he said.

Leaders of the world's biggest artificial intelligence platforms said it's time to slow the development pace of their most advanced -- and most lucrative -- models, citing escalating risks of the technology. Anthropic PBC Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei issued a lengthy blog post Saturday saying his company would implement new safety steps such as third-party evaluators while calling on the industry to support a broader downshift. OpenAI chief Sam Altman quickly pledged to adopt Amodei's suggestion of "independent evaluators with employee-like access," while Elon Musk, who runs xAI Corp., wrote, "Dario is right." In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

The industry ministry said Friday that it has selected 18 regions as green transformation strategy areas. The ministry will support the regions by easing regulations on land use and providing subsidies, aiming to attract companies and investment from Japan and abroad as part of efforts to strengthen the industrial competitiveness of regional economies. Demand for data centers is growing with the spread of generative artificial intelligence, while operating them requires enormous amounts of electricity. The ministry aims to attract large-scale data centers requiring around 1 gigawatt of power to regions rich in decarbonized energy sources to revitalize domestic investment and local industries. The ministry designated nine of the 18 regions as areas for concentrating data centers.

I came to like Jensen Huang's character, and bet everything on him, Shoichiro Irimajiri said in an interview. Shoichiro Irimajiri, former president of what is now Sega Co., said in a recent interview that he had decided to invest $5 million in then-fledgling U.S. chipmaker Nvidia in the late 1990s because he was impressed by the character of its CEO, Jensen Huang. Irimajiri, 86, was head of then-Sega Enterprises when he persuaded the company's top executives to rescue the struggling Nvidia, which has since become one of the world's biggest companies. "I came to like Jensen Huang's character, and bet everything on him," Irimajiri said in the interview. Sega contracted Nvidia to develop a graphics processing unit for the Dreamcast game console it was developing to compete with the PlayStation console released by then Sony Computer Entertainment.

A military mechanic with the call sign Chimera watches his fellow soldiers prepare new vehicles for field use in a workshop in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine. KHARKIV REGION, Ukraine - In a cramped workshop near the front line in northeastern Ukraine, military mechanic "Chimera" is helping prepare his unit's robot forces for battle. Lined up in a row, the four-wheeled unmanned vehicles known as "Hyenas" will crawl toward Russian lines with their payload of explosives and attack an enemy dugout or halt an advance. Similar models have captured Russian prisoners, said Chimera, 44, who asked to be identified by his call sign. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

In some municipalities in Hokkaido to be designated as national strategic special zones, autonomous tractors will be allowed to travel on public roads without a driver onboard. The government decided Thursday to designate 19 municipalities in the Tokachi region of Hokkaido, including the city of Obihiro, as national strategic special zones to promote artificial intelligence-powered agriculture. The government will apply special deregulation measures to the areas, including simplifying the procedures needed to operate robot tractors autonomously on public roads and spraying pesticides with drones. Under current laws, robot tractors capable of autonomous operation must have a driver when traveling on public roads, such as from a warehouse to a field. When multiple tractors are used on vast farmland, each tractor must be crewed, thus preventing farmers from fully realizing the benefits of the labor-saving technology.

MW's robotic arms with claw-like hands can fold laundry and carry groceries while moving along ceiling-mounted rails. Tokyo-based startup MW is offering homes with built-in robotic housekeeping arms, a counter to a global embrace of humanoids. MW aims to sell its first robot-equipped home in Tokyo by 2028 and build as many as 10,000 units a year by 2035, the equivalent of 5% of new homes now being built in Japan, according to CEO Shuzo Narita. Japan helped pioneer bipedal robots decades ago, but MW is taking a different path from the humanoid boom now sweeping China and much of the rest of the world. Instead of trying to build a human-shaped machine capable of navigating obstacles in a lived-in space, the startup is embedding robotics into buildings.

In a report published on Thursday, Anthropic cataloged a litany of misuses of its artificial intelligence models, including the chatbot Claude, over the past eight months. Anthropic on Thursday said it had disrupted several allegedly malicious uses of its Claude models over the past eight months, including a suspected Russia-linked cyber espionage campaign and efforts by Chinese artificial intelligence firms it accused of trying to extract and replicate Claude's capabilities. Cybercriminals and state-backed hackers were increasingly using AI not just to assist with tasks but to orchestrate and execute large portions of cyberattacks, Anthropic said in its latest Threat Intelligence report. It added that humans were often overseers rather than hands-on operators. "The use of AI went beyond simple questions and responses from a chatbot but rather involved the use of multi-agent frameworks executing" tasks, it said.

U.S. lawmakers call for new AI rules after Anthropic researcher's safety warning An Anthropic researcher has accused OpenAI and Anthropic of racing toward artificial intelligence advancements without acting responsibly. U.S. lawmakers this week called for new rules to govern artificial intelligence, after an Anthropic researcher went public with his concerns about the technology escaping human control. The reaction was broader than after previous statements from OpenAI and Anthropic staffers about safety concerns, drawing input from lawmakers who do not often forcefully engage in debates over how to govern AI. The lawmakers' statements came in response to concerns raised this week by Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who accused OpenAI and Anthropic of racing toward AI advancements without acting responsibly. Coxon said he was leaving the AI industry, and his allegations spread rapidly on the social media platform X, with Anthropic scientist Evan Hubinger later chiming in on X, saying Coxon was "correct."