A policy analysis from June 2026 When Emmanuel Macron stood at the Grand Palais in Paris in March 2018 and launched France’s national AI strategy under the banner “AI for Humanity,” he was drawing on a report by mathematician and Fields Medal laureate Cédric Villani that argued France had the research talent, the institutional architecture,…

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Insider Brief Proception raised $11 million in seed funding and launched ProHand 1.0, a 22-degree-of-freedom robotic hand designed to help humanoids and other robots perform more human-like object handling. The round was led by First Round Capital with participation from Y Combinator and BoxGroup, and Proception said the funding will support hiring, production and development…

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Paul Meade, Apple’s vice president responsible for the Vision Pro headset and its AI-powered smart glasses programme, is departing the company to join OpenAI’s hardware division. The move represents a significant talent acquisition for OpenAI as it accelerates its push into consumer AI hardware. Meade led development of both the Vision Pro and Apple’s forthcoming…

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Enterprise software company Elastic has agreed to acquire Deductive AI, a startup specialising in AI-powered software reliability engineering, for up to $85 million, according to a person with knowledge of the deal. The acquisition marks a rapid exit for Deductive, which only emerged from stealth in November 2025 after raising a $7.5 million seed round…

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SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son has publicly questioned the viability of orbital data centers, arguing that the cost and timeline involved make them irrelevant to the AI industry’s immediate compute needs. Son made the remarks at a recent shareholder meeting, contending that the next few years of the AI race matter far more than…

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The Trump administration’s tightening grip on frontier AI model releases is creating a crisis that threatens the entire AI industry, not just individual companies. Following the withdrawal of Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable models from public availability, OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 has now been placed in a government-gated limited preview, with access approved on a customer-by-customer basis before…

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The Trump administration has begun softening its restrictions on Anthropic’s powerful cybersecurity AI models, allowing Mythos 5 to be made available to more than 100 specific US government agencies and companies. The directive, issued by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to Anthropic’s chief compute officer Tom Brown, confirmed that appropriate safeguards were in place to permit…

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Insider Brief LUMIQ has closed a strategic funding round led by Bajaj Finserv, one of India’s largest financial services groups, with participation from existing investor Info Edge Ventures, to scale its auto-decisioning platform LiteCone across financial institutions in the United States and Southeast Asia. The LiteCone platform deploys AI agents that read files, apply institutional…

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Read Online | Sign Up | Advertise Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. OpenAI just dropped its most powerful model ever. The only caveat? You can’t access it yet. With GPT-5.6 teasing Mythos-level capabilities, companies and governments worldwide are eager to get their hands on it. But with the U.S. controlling access, everyone…

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Three years into the productivity promise, there’s finally enough hard evidence to answer the question plainly: does working with AI actually make you more productive? Yes — spectacularly, for some people on some tasks. And no, or worse, for others. The gains are real. They’re just not flowing where the marketing said they would. This…

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