On Friday, the U.S. ordered Anthropic to deny foreign nationals access to the company's newest artificial intelligence models. With the recent crackdown on Anthropic, the White House has given global leaders another reason to panic about their place in the technology race. On Friday, the U.S. ordered Anthropic to deny foreign nationals access to the company's newest artificial intelligence models. The export ban asserted a broad, unprecedented authority over the technology. Until then, conversations in Europe about losing access to U.S. tech -- sometimes posed as a presidential "kill switch" -- were theoretical. To many on the continent, Friday's move underscored the dire need to find alternatives to American AI, and fast.

News consumers around the world are now turning more to social media and video platforms than traditional outlets for information, a report has found. News consumers around the world are now turning more to social media and video platforms than traditional outlets for information, a report said Tuesday, warning that old-style business models are under threat. The year 2026 marks "a significant milestone: for the first time, social media and video network consumption is now ahead of other news sources as the most widely used source of news globally," at 54%, wrote Jim Egan, lead author of the report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The annual report from the institute, attached to the University of Oxford, is a closely-watched tracker of trends reshaping the news media. Researchers based their findings on online surveys of almost 100,000 people in 48 countries, run earlier this year by pollster YouGov. This year's edition found 54% of respondents said they got news from social media or video platforms in the week before the survey -- rising to 56% if AI chatbots like ChatGPT were included.

Macron's G7 legacy hangs on fickle AI funding and data centers With less than a year left in office, Emmanuel Macron wants to be remembered as the French president who put Europe back in the technology race. His decade-old ambition to turn France into a "startup nation" never fully delivered. Now Macron sees a second chance by positioning France as Europe's artificial intelligence powerhouse, leveraging the nation's abundant supply of nuclear energy for data centers. He convinced SoftBank Group to invest as much as €75 billion ($87 billion) in French projects. His advisers have dubbed the AI effort "Project Marengo," a reference to Napoleon Bonaparte's victory over an Austrian army in 1800 at the battle of the same name, won through speed and decisive action. Marengo was also a political victory, securing Bonaparte's hold on power.

Crypto token's 50% wipeout shows magnitude of AI-hacking threat The same artificial intelligence tools helping developers audit code in cryptocurrency are also lowering the barriers for attackers, creating an arms race across the industry, researchers say. When Eli Ben-Sasson helped create the Zcash cryptocurrency nearly a decade ago, the cryptographer worried about human adversaries. He didn't expect that machine intelligence would one day expose a flaw that had eluded years of expert human judgment. That reality rattled investors recently after a security researcher working with Zcash used Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 to uncover a critical vulnerability that had gone undetected for more than four years. After Zcash disclosed the flaw on June 4, the token -- which traded at far higher levels just weeks earlier -- tumbled about 50% as traders reassessed the security of one of crypto's most prominent privacy networks. The exploit struck at the heart of Zcash's value proposition.

Starmer to confirm social media ban for U.K. teens ahead of G7 meet U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is expected to confirm a social media ban on children under 16 on Monday morning. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer will start a crucial week for his premiership by announcing a package of strong restrictions designed to protect British teenagers from online threats. Starmer is expected Monday morning to confirm a ban on children under 16 using major social media platforms, as well as other measures including curfews on older teenagers and tough regulations on chatbots. He will then depart for a Group of Seven summit at Evian-les-Bains, France, where he faces awkward questions following last week's resignation of his defense secretary and uncertainty around the U.K.'s military budget. A ban on young teenagers using social media is popular with the U.K. public despite concerns around how effectively it can be enforced. The Labour government's new range of restrictions -- including some against chatbots and online games -- will go further than laws in Australia, according to a person familiar with the situation, where a ban on social media for teens came into effect last year.

Why it's nearly impossible to build a robot without China Building on the country's electric vehicle industry, Chinese companies are making robot parts at a scale and price point others can't match. Japan led the world in robotics for decades. More than 50 years ago, Japanese researchers captured imaginations with the first robot capable of grasping objects and walking on two legs. In 1984, a team in Japan built one that could read sheet music and play the piano. When Honda unveiled its first humanoid in 2000, it seemed to cement the country's lead.

Japan and Canada can work more closely together to accelerate the real-world adoption of artificial intelligence, an expert at a Toronto-based, cutting-edge research institute says. "AI will be the technology that will power the future," Cameron Schuler, chief commercialization officer and vice president of industry innovation at the Vector Institute, said in a recent interview. "There are lots of opportunities for Japan and Canada to collaborate," he also said, naming manufacturing, financial services, life sciences and other industries as promising areas of cooperation. 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 tension between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is the driving force in today's biggest technological revolution. SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK - If not for the intense rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI, the generative AI boom might not have arrived so quickly. In late 2022, OpenAI caught wind that Anthropic was working on an AI-powered chatbot. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman immediately directed employees to fast-track a competing product, four people familiar with the matter said. Two weeks later, the company released ChatGPT, sparking a technological revolution that promises to overhaul the global economy and the way humans interact.

As AI spreads across workplaces, China is also having to contend with chronic weakness in the jobs market. China's rapid adoption of artificial intelligence in the workplace has prompted an unusually blunt call from a state-run newspaper to protect labor rights, as Beijing considers how to contain risks posed by the new technology. In an editorial published on Thursday, the Workers' Daily -- the official mouthpiece of China's umbrella trade union organization -- urged government agencies to mount an active response as new threats emerge to the rights of employees. It called on regulators to improve labor standards and strengthen oversight of AI algorithms, including by giving a greater say to trade unions and workers' representatives. "The benefits of technological advancement should be shared by society as a whole, rather than becoming a tool for a small number of employers to undermine workers' rights," the editorial said.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei speaks during the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January. Electronics maker NEC said Thursday that major Japanese financial institutions, including Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group and MS&AD Insurance Group Holdings, will participate in its strategic collaboration with U.S. startup Anthropic in the field of artificial intelligence. The partnership aims to improve the quality of financial services for customers using AI and to strengthen measures against cyberattacks. The other companies are Sumitomo Life Insurance, Daiwa Securities Group, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Group, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank and Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance. Using Anthropic's AI technology, the partners will work not only on developing new services but also on improving productivity by streamlining business processes at each company.