Technology Industry
IBM shares suffered their worst day in 25 years after Anthropic said its Claude Code tool could modernise COBOL – the language still behind 95% of US ATM transactions – in quarters rather than years, stoking fears AI will erode IBM’s mainframe business.
Researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have built ReAAP, a reconfigurable processor that pairs a smart software compiler with adaptable hardware to run deep neural networks up to 5.7x faster than a leading GPU and 3.3x faster than an ARM CPU.
Northwestern University researchers jet-printed flexible artificial neurons that fire like real brain cells – realistic enough to trigger live mouse neurons – pointing toward neuromorphic chips that could one day cut the punishing energy cost of AI.
OpenAI’s new policy paper proposes a “public wealth fund” that hands every citizen a stake in AI-driven growth – but critics argue it just ties the public’s wellbeing to the tech industry’s boom-and-bust cycles instead of expanding tested safety nets.
Prometheus, the physical-AI startup co-founded by Jeff Bezos, has raised $12 billion at a $41 billion valuation to build a “Robo-Engineer” that designs and manufactures everything from jet engines to drugs – even as Bezos bets the result will be a labour shortage, not mass unemployment.
Researchers warn that AI capabilities are increasingly discovered rather than designed, and that the window to understand how these black-box systems reason is closing as their influence grows.
Anthropic is lobbying the White House to reverse a foreign-access ban on its Mythos and Fable 5 models — a ban reportedly set in motion after Amazon’s CEO raised concerns with the Trump administration.
Complying with a Trump-administration export-control directive, Anthropic has suspended all foreign-national access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — and disabled the models for everyone, including US users.
Anthropic has made Fable 5, the first commercial model from its advanced Mythos class, available to the public — while reserving the unrestricted Claude Mythos 5 for vetted cybersecurity partners.
Cisco has launched Cloud Control, a toolset that lets companies build their own armies of defender AI agents, a response to a world where cyberattacks increasingly come from swarms of hostile agents.
Chinese researchers say a nine-qubit quantum system beat a 10,000-node classical network at weather prediction for under 1% of the cost, a hint that compact quantum machines could undercut today’s giant AI data centres.
With AI bills running far ahead of budgets, companies are turning to model routing, sending easy tasks to cheap models, in a shift that could squeeze the economics of OpenAI and Anthropic.