Month-old Deepmind spinout nears $4bn on ‘future capability’ bet Tech A British AI startup founded just last month by three former Google Deepmind researchers is nearing a $4bn (£2.9bn) valuation – despite having no product or website. Emulate is in advanced talks to raise as much as $700m in a seed funding round led by Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners in a deal that [...]
Amazon says it buys books in bulk to ‘improve products’ Tech Amazon has said it buys books through commercial channels to develop its products after an investigation traced a bulk order of rare books to a facility where workers reportedly destroy and scan physical copies. “Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,” an Amazon spokesperson [...]
Even Claude says AI watermarking is no ‘silver bullet’ AI Claude has questioned whether watermarking AI-generated text can ever provide a foolproof way to identify machine-written material, just days after its maker, Anthropic, began embedding invisible marks into the chatbot’s own output. Asked by City AM whether AI-generated content should be watermarked, Claude warned that simple marks can be “cropped, screenshotted, or edited out”, while [...]
Google backs publisher model as Apple considers price tag for news August 14, 2026 Google said it backs the established system for paying news publishers, even as Apple considers a radically different model that would tie payments to how often its AI assistant uses journalism. The search giant considers itself the only major tech platform with a structured approach to paying publishers at scale, City AM understands, with licensing [...]
ChatGPT to follow Claude’s watermark pledge – but Grok to swerve it August 12, 2026 Elon Musk’s Grok is poised to swerve rivals’ plans to ‘watermark’ all artificially-generated content, City AM understands, after refusing to sign up to a European push forcing firms to make AI content traceable. xAI was the only major large language model maker to shun a European Union-led move to tighten AI transparency rules that means [...]
AI firms targeting London’s rare book shops in ‘dystopian’ hunt for training data July 29, 2026 London’s rare book shops appear to have been targeted by AI companies searching for books to train their models, after court documents revealed Anthropic bought, scanned and destroyed millions of physical books as part of a controversial project to feed an insatiable demand for training data. One London-based seller of rare books told City AM [...]
UK government probes OpenAI breach after ‘unprecedented’ hack July 22, 2026 The UK government is probing the first known case of an artificial intelligence model breaking out of a controlled test by itself and hacking another company’s systems. Officials at the government-backed AI Security Institute (AISI) are investigating the security breach at OpenAI and whether similar incidents could occur at other top developers, a spokesperson told [...]
Government accelerates social media crackdown with midnight curfews July 14, 2026 Teenagers will face a default midnight social media curfew and stripped-back social media feeds under the government’s latest crackdown on addictive online features – but they will be able to switch the restrictions off themselves. Tech secretary Liz Kendall has announced social media platforms will disable auto-play and infinite scroll-style recommendations and restrict overnight access [...]
GSK says AI is reshaping drug pipeline as Nuvalent deal hits shares June 9, 2026 GSK has said agentic AI is already affecting every asset in its pipeline, as pharmaceutical firms race to use the technology to cut the cost and risk of developing new medicines. Speaking at London Tech Week in Tuesday, Eyal Itskovits, GSK’s director of AI and machine learning, said that the technology has officially become a [...]
UK firms are spending billions on AI – but getting extra admin in return May 14, 2026 UK companies are pouring copious amounts of money into AI, while their employees spend nearly a full day each week doing work that AI was supposed to eliminate, new research has found. According to Workday, one in four UK workers loses seven or more hours a week moving information between systems, chasing down data and [...]