AI dramas need actors, so Chinese platforms are turning human faces into stock assets

Chinese platforms are paying people to license their faces for AI-generated dramas, but contracts may offer limited protection once those reusable digital likenesses leave the marketplace.

A development bank just built a €1.4bn insurer in two years
A development bank just built a €1.4bn insurer in two years

A development bank has just minted a unicorn, and it took two years. Ominimo, a Budapest-based motor insurance startup founded by Serbian and Hungarian entrepreneurs, has closed a Series B led by the venture arm of the European Bank for Reconstruction …

The path to artificial superintelligence
The path to artificial superintelligence

Imagine a healthcare system made up of multiple AI agents: one that manages symptom assessment, another scheduling, a third insurance, and a fourth pharmacy. Each is an expert in its domain. But they all have their own distinct knowledge and objectives. Today they can exchange data, but they are not yet able to actually coordinate…

Closing the data loop in AI-driven drug discovery
Closing the data loop in AI-driven drug discovery

Drug discovery is a high-cost, high-risk endeavor that is under growing pressure from a market increasingly defined by first-mover advantage. Since the 1950s, the cost of developing new pharmaceuticals has roughly doubled every nine years—a phenomenon known as Eroom’s Law. Today, bringing a new drug to market takes an average of 10-15 years and costs…

Building the enterprise environment for agentic AI
Building the enterprise environment for agentic AI

For the enterprise, the promise of agentic AI is much more than just a better chatbot. It is software agents that execute business tasks end-to-end across people, business workflows, data, and systems. The platform best-suited to run agents is built with proper CPU capacity, resilient data access, policy-aware tool use, observability, memory management, and the…

Google has promised to pay $44bn of rent on buildings it will never own
Google has promised to pay $44bn of rent on buildings it will never own

Start with the number, because the number moved fast. Google has agreed to cover as much as $44bn of lease payments on data centres owned by other people, should the tenant default. It disclosed the figure last week. At the end of September the same co…

Nadella won’t call it a bubble. He’ll only say how it ends badly.
Nadella won’t call it a bubble. He’ll only say how it ends badly.

Fareed Zakaria opened with the question everyone is circling. Are we in an AI bubble, and has it begun to deflate? OpenAI has promised to spend hundreds of billions while making a fraction of that, he noted. The maths does not add up. Nadella did not p…

Sam Altman renews his ‘democratic AI’ pitch as Anthropic holds a harder line
Sam Altman renews his ‘democratic AI’ pitch as Anthropic holds a harder line

Sam Altman has a preferred way of framing the contest over artificial intelligence, and it is a stark one. Either the United States and its allies build the technology and spread its benefits, the OpenAI chief has argued, or authoritarian governments u…

A million words costs $50 from Anthropic and 87 cents from DeepSeek. Corporate America noticed.
A million words costs $50 from Anthropic and 87 cents from DeepSeek. Corporate America noticed.

Roughly 750,000 words of AI output costs $50 if you buy it from Anthropic’s Fable. The same volume from DeepSeek’s V4-Pro costs about 87 cents, Fortune reported. Z.AI’s GLM-5.2 charges $4.40. Moonshot’s Kimi K3, pricey by Chinese standards, charges $15…