TNW

The heads of OpenAI and Anthropic have been asked to face an Australian Senate inquiry into AI and datacentres. The move follows cases in which OpenAI agents got into Australian and US government websites, Luca Ittimani reported for the Guardianon Saturday. The Greens run the inquiry, and Senator Sarah Hanson-Young chairs it. Its next hearing [] This story continues at The Next Web

Across the infrastructure layer that powersAI applications, Markdown has been emerging as a new standard. More providers are turning to it as the default output for anything a model needs to read, and moving beyond JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) as the go-to, one-size-fits-all format. This real, ongoing shift reflects how large language models are trained, [] This story continues at The Next Web

SoftBank Group has invested $225 million into Autonomous Solutions, Inc. (ASI), a Utah company that makes work vehicles drive themselves.The two have also set up a joint venture to build self-driving machines for big road, rail and airport jobs. SoftBank is funding the joint venture to cover several kinds of building work, mainly civil construction [] This story continues at The Next Web

Anthropic has signed an $11.6bn, seven-year agreement to use Akamais cloud infrastructure, Akamai announced after the US market closed on Thursday. The deal can grow by a further $9bn, which would take the total to about $20bn. As part of the deal, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant for 7.7 million shares on an as-converted basis, [] This story continues at The Next Web

Gartner forecasts that task-specific AI agents will be integrated into 40% of enterprise applications by the end of the year. Thats up from less than 5%. The systems meant to catalog what runs on a managed device havent kept pace. 46% of organizations automate endpoint inventorying and monitoring today, per Automoxs survey of IT professionals. [] This story continues at The Next Web

Volkswagen is now taking more orders for electric cars than for petrol and diesel in Germany, its home market and the largest in Europe, and has cancelled planned extra shifts at Wolfsburg while adding them at Emden and Zwickau. The four budget models driving the shift have taken about 100,000 orders between them and are [] This story continues at The Next Web

The team at privacy infrastructure developer AmericanFortress have authored a new paper. It proposes a novel means of proving the origin of crypto wallets. Vincenzo Botta, Michal Pospieszalski, Emanuele Ragnoli and Justus Ranvier of AmericanFortress authored Provenance Proofs: Linkable, Post-Quantum ZK Derivation Relations for Blockchain DeFi, Wallet and Identity Systems. In it, the researchers propose [] This story continues at The Next Web

Precision Neuroscience has raised $250m in a Series D round for its brain-computer interface, the New York company announced on Thursday. Bill Ackmans Pershing Square, the Ackman Oxman Institute and an unnamed life sciences fund led the round. The round values Precision at just over $1bn, The New York Times reported. Pershing Square and the [] This story continues at The Next Web

Island, the Dallas company behind the Enterprise Browser, has raised $400m in a Series F round. The deal values it at $6.4bn, Island announced on Thursday. Evolution Equity Partners led the round. In March 2025, Island raised $250m in a Series E led by Coatue, at a $4.8bn valuation. The company now pitches itself as [] This story continues at The Next Web