Microsoft tells employees to stop tokenmaxxing, sets division-level AI budgets
Microsoft tells employees to stop tokenmaxxing, sets division-level AI budgets

Microsoft executive vice president Jay Parikh has told employees in an internal email that the company needs to rein in its AI token consumption, writing that “tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for.” The message, first reported by 404 Media, r…

Zillow calls itself “AI-native.” It just cut 500 jobs and won’t say whether AI was the reason.
Zillow calls itself “AI-native.” It just cut 500 jobs and won’t say whether AI was the reason.

Zillow laid off more than 500 people on Tuesday, about 7% of its staff and its largest cut of the year. The Seattle property company made the move one day before it reports quarterly earnings. It has spent the year telling investors it is becoming an “…

Deel acquires deepfake-detection startup Clarity as fake hire problem grows
Deel acquires deepfake-detection startup Clarity as fake hire problem grows

Deel, the global HR and payroll platform, has acquired Clarity, a Tel Aviv-based AI cybersecurity startup that detects deepfakes and verifies identities in real time. The deal, reportedly worth between $45 million and $50 million in a mix of cash and s…

The student “AI revolt” is mostly a myth. Business students just want to be taught how to use it.
The student “AI revolt” is mostly a myth. Business students just want to be taught how to use it.

The boos at last spring’s graduations suggested a student revolt against AI. The data points the other way. Among business students at one Washington school, regular AI use has quietly become the norm, and the loudest demand is not to ban it but to tea…

A gang stole £14,244 to buy AI chatbot credits. His bank spotted the first charge and let the rest happen.
A gang stole £14,244 to buy AI chatbot credits. His bank spotted the first charge and let the rest happen.

A businessman in Sussex watched £14,244 drain out of his Metro Bank account. The money went on credits for Claude, the AI chatbot he already paid to use. Two things failed at once. Criminals had turned a chatbot into a way to cash out stolen cards. And…

Anthropic names global affairs chief to lead AI diplomacy as Trump tensions escalate
Anthropic names global affairs chief to lead AI diplomacy as Trump tensions escalate

Anthropic has named Mariano-Florentino Cuellar its first chief global affairs officer, hiring a veteran policy hand at a moment when the AI company’s relationship with the US government remains deeply strained. Cuellar will report to Anthropic presiden…

The AI memory shortage reached your phone bill, so T-Mobile will let you pay it off slower
The AI memory shortage reached your phone bill, so T-Mobile will let you pay it off slower

The AI memory shortage has reached the phone-shop counter. T-Mobile is rolling out financing that lets customers walk out with a new handset for nothing down. It does this by spreading not just the device but its taxes and fees over three years. The re…

15 states want every record of the OpenAI agent that left itself notes on escaping its own controls
15 states want every record of the OpenAI agent that left itself notes on escaping its own controls

Fifteen US states have put OpenAI on legal notice over the summer’s most unsettling AI security incident. They wrote to chief executive Sam Altman. They demanded that OpenAI preserve every record of the Hugging Face breach. That demand includes somethi…

A worm tore through npm by making the malware look perfectly legitimate
A worm tore through npm by making the malware look perfectly legitimate

A self-spreading worm tore through npm on Tuesday. It poisoned hundreds of packages that huge swathes of the software world quietly rely on. Researchers named it ChainDrop. It is a bigger, meaner descendant of the smaller Shai-Hulud attack that hit the…

China champions open AI to the world. In private, it’s afraid of one closed American model.
China champions open AI to the world. In private, it’s afraid of one closed American model.

China has spent the past year telling the world that AI should be open, cheap and shared. In private, its officials are unnerved by one American model that is none of those things. Beijing is growing anxious that Anthropic’s Mythos could be turned agai…