TNW

For two decades, the standard way to modernize auditing has been to build software and sell it to auditors. Benford has decided to skip the middleman and become the auditor. Today, the Oslo- and London-based company Benford announced it has raised 5 million in pre-seed funding to build a tech-focused financial audit firm. The company [] This story continues at The Next Web

OpenAI has called on the United States to lead an international effort on standards for advanced AI, beginning with rules on which incidents must be reported, and suggested routing the work through national AI safety institutes including the US Center for AI Standards and Innovation. Europe legislated incident reporting in Article 55 of the AI [] This story continues at The Next Web

I was hearing from people in the campaign world that theres this new strategy of paying political influencers to post content, said Marc Berman, the California assemblyman. Some were good about disclosure and others were a bit fast and loose. His bill is now law. Gavin Newsom signed AB 1130 on Saturday. In California, paid [] This story continues at The Next Web

Harveys gross margin fell from about 50% at the start of this year to minus 50% by June as customer usage of its AI agents spiked, and turned positive again only after it released a model of its own built on Moonshots Kimi K3. Abridge, Decagon, Ramp and Rogo are making similar moves, and Sequoia [] This story continues at The Next Web

For decades, small businesses have been sold the leftovers of the health insurance market, said Nikhil Aggarwal, chief executive and co-founder of Corridor. His company launched its AI benefits brokerage on Monday with $25m. Its plan is to change that with agents. Bain Capital Ventures led the round. BoxGroup and Definition Capital took part. So [] This story continues at The Next Web

Pre-orders for the Googlebookopened on Monday,starting at $899, with the first ones reaching shops in the United States on 4 October. In Canada, the UK, Ireland, France, Germany and Australia will arrive on 5 October. Google has not said what they will cost in any of those markets, and the only price published is in [] This story continues at The Next Web

The AI industry already knew attackers could poison plugin marketplaces. Its answer was to lock every plugin to one reviewed version of its code. That lock is what just broke. Researchers at Air Security published a vulnerability on Thursday that they call Plugin4Shell. It affects the four most widely used AI coding agents. Those are [] This story continues at The Next Web

Insta360opened its first American store on Saturday at 1515 Broadway, in the middle of Times Square. It is the companys second self-operated shop outside China, after Tokyo in August. The ribbon-cutting is the least interesting part.Iris Deng interviewed co-founder Max Richter in Shenzhen for the South China Morning Post, and the numbers around the opening [] This story continues at The Next Web

A Chinese developer who writes as Ferstar looked inside ZCodes local directory on Friday and found a 313MB encrypted archive waiting to be sent to Alibabas cloud storage. It had failed 564 times. A smaller file had already gone. Minxiao Chang and Wency Chen reported the account for the South China Morning Post. The archive [] This story continues at The Next Web

President Donald Trump posted twice about artificial intelligence on Saturday.The first postasked his followers to vote on a new name for the technology.The secondcalled the campaign against it a hoax and promised an AI Force and an AI czar. The rename has taken most of the attention. The second post is the one that contains [] This story continues at The Next Web

An OECD employer survey of 6,047 firms across six countries found that 67% of US firms use software to sanction poor performance, against 4% in the four European countries surveyed. American firms also monitor the content and tone of conversations at 55% against 6%, and the OECD attributes the gap to regulatory architecture. Most of [] This story continues at The Next Web

Four consumers filed a class action in the Northern District of California on 18 September, naming Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google.Buist v. Anthropic PBCalleges a horizontal agreement to slow the rate at which the four improve competing products, contrary to section 1 of the Sherman Act. Bloomberg Law reported the filing. It seeks treble damages [] This story continues at The Next Web

Jensen Huang told CBS News there is a 0% chance AI ends the world by 2030, and that the industry should go as fast as it can irrespective of anyone else. Weeks earlier he declined to call AI fears a hoax, described apocalyptic predictions as not grounded in science, and said companies should pause or [] This story continues at The Next Web

Three researchers at Hacktron AI used Anthropics Claude to chain two weaknesses and reach OpenAI employee accounts and an internal code repository, in under 72 hours. They disclosed privately, OpenAI patched the single sign-on flaw in about 14 hours, and the team was paid $6,500. Neither weakness was an AI vulnerability, and the research paper [] This story continues at The Next Web

Factorial Energy has signed a joint development agreement with Japans Mitsui Kinzoku for solid electrolytes, the latest in a run of partnerships its chief executive says are necessary because no single company can bring all-solid-state batteries to market. ProLogium, which is building Europes solid-state gigafactory at Dunkirk, is already mass-producing all-solid-state cells in Taiwan. Factorial [] This story continues at The Next Web

The magnitude of the alleged infringement is not a defense, the court told Suno in August. Universal and Sony have now sued the AI music company a second time. They filed the complaint in the District of Massachusetts on Friday, as case 1:26-cv-14275. It asserts 60,202 sound recordings. The first case, filed in June 2024, [] This story continues at The Next Web

Disney has named Karandeep Anand, until now the chief executive of Character.AI, to the newly created role of chief technology officer for the whole company. Disney sent Character.AI a cease-and-desist letter in September 2025 over unauthorised use of its characters, and the company barred under-18s from open-ended chat two months later. Disney has named Karandeep [] This story continues at The Next Web

We decline plaintiffs invitation to transform run-of-the-mill copyright-infringement claims into DMCA claims, Judge Eric Miller wrote for a unanimous Ninth Circuit panel. The opinion came on Wednesday in Doe v GitHub, number 24-7700. Anonymous programmers who publish open-source code had sued GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI over Copilot and Codex. They argued the tools reproduce their [] This story continues at The Next Web

A communication outage can complicate the decisions people need to make during a disaster. On September 28, 2024, the Federal Communications Commission reported that 74.31% of cell sites in its Hurricane Helene reporting area in North Carolina were out of service. The figure captured a substantial disruption, although the agency cautioned that cell-site outages do [] This story continues at The Next Web

In reality, we are currently planning a dual listing, on the London Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq, Nik Storonsky told Les Echos. The Revolut founder was in Paris on Monday. Gabriel Ndlec and Ingrid Feuerstein interviewed him for the French paper, which published on Thursday. It is the first time he has pointed to a [] This story continues at The Next Web

An LNG tanker carrying American liquefied natural gas to Italy stopped short of its destination this month, after its crew found they could no longer reach some of the ships internal control systems. The crew reported it as a suspected cyberattack, but what it actually was has not been established. The Vivit Africa LNG was [] This story continues at The Next Web

Lord Tom Watson, Baron Watson of Wyre Forest, Labors former deputy leader, has joined Palantir as a senior vice president, an appointment he announced on X. He called it: Palantir is the most interesting company on the planet, doing work of real consequence: helping Britain and its allies defend themselves, helping police protect our citizens, [] This story continues at The Next Web

The shop workers in Italy waited until their busiest day of the year to stop working. On Friday, the day the iPhone 18 Pro was launched worldwide, all 17 Apple stores in Italy went on strike. For Apple as a company, image is very important, Nicholas Pezze, a Filcams CGIL representative,told Reuters. As unions, we [] This story continues at The Next Web

We did not set out to build another health insurance company, said Ty Wang, co-founder and chief executive of Angle Health. The aim, he told the Wall Street Journal, was to stop this kind of death spiral of cost within our healthcare system. His company has just raised $600m at a $2.7bn valuation. Vitruvian Partners [] This story continues at The Next Web

Anthropic has set up a wet lab in the San Francisco Bay Area, a place to run physical biology experiments rather than simulate them. The company confirms it exists, yet it will not say what it is for, beyond ruling out the obvious answer, which is drug discovery. The news was reported by Reuters today, [] This story continues at The Next Web

Visions are painted in words, but measured in deeds, David Wang wrote in the foreword to Huaweis latest forecast. The company published two reports days before Huawei Connect 2026 opened, and they explain most of what it launched there. The first is Intelligent World 2035, subtitled Turning Vision into Action. The second is the Global [] This story continues at The Next Web

Over the past two years, Oracle has invested tens of billions of dollars to build the infrastructure that powers other companies AI. But it wasnt until April that its own employees received a broadly useful AI tool. Co-CEO Clay Magouyrk admitted, I dont think we figured out how to make AI really that useful for [] This story continues at The Next Web

Connecting a real-life home to an AI agent allows that agent to control devices on your behalf, Google warns in its developer documentation. Depending on your agent, connecting it to Home MCP can result in unexpected or even undesired behaviour. That warning sits inside the setup guide for Google Home MCP. Google opened it to [] This story continues at The Next Web

Mozilla has partnered with Mistral AI to bring the French companys models to Smart Window, the AI browsing assistant in beta in Firefox. The two companies announced the deal on Wednesday in ajoint post, alongside the features launch in France. Smart Window,introduced by Mozillain August, is a separate AI-assisted browsing mode. It summarises complex searches [] This story continues at The Next Web

We do not believe that the AI industry has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer, OpenAI wrote on Wednesday. The line appears in a new OpenAI post. It sets out how the company will track, investigate and disclose model misalignment. OpenAI uses the [] This story continues at The Next Web

The Scaleup Europe Fund, a 5bn growth fund backed by the European Commission, is in discussions to invest in the voice AI company ElevenLabs, according to Bloomberg. The report says ElevenLabs aims to raise over $500 million in this funding round. Talks are ongoing, and there is no guarantee a deal will happen, according to [] This story continues at The Next Web

According to a report by Nikkei Asia on Thursday, Japan and the United States are negotiating to set up a semiconductor factory as part of their $550bn investment agreement. The project would be worth between 2trn and 3trn ($12.9bn and $19.3bn) and will be run by the US chipmaker GlobalFoundries, which makes logic chips. Nikkei [] This story continues at The Next Web

Security experts from the US and China have proposed a set of safeguards for military AI modelled on the rules that grew up around nuclear weapons, including a ban on letting AI decide whether to launch them, Reuters reported. The recommendations, published last week, come from the US-China AI and National Security Dialogue, a track [] This story continues at The Next Web

King Charles will host a meeting at Dumfries House, his Ayrshire estate and the home of the Kings Foundation, having invited executives from Nvidia, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The event is being run by the Ditchley Foundation, the Kings Trust, the Kings Foundation and the Sustainable Markets Initiative. Politico had reported last week that [] This story continues at The Next Web

Developers can improve artificial intelligence systems in various ways. The most common practice is to retrain models on custom datasets to help them get better at performing specific tasks. But retraining and fine-tuning AI systems is notoriously expensive. That is why the AI startup Sentient Labs has been looking at ways to teach models to [] This story continues at The Next Web

Strasbourg The European Commission has proposed a draft of the EU KIDS Act to prevent children under 13 from using social media across the EU and to stop anyone under 15 from creating an account. The EU KIDS Act, adopted in Strasbourg on Thursday, also requires platforms to show that their services are safe [] This story continues at The Next Web

This is a critical moment to ensure we build AGI safely and its benefits to society far outweigh any risks, wrote the three directors of the new DeepMind Institute. Google DeepMind has launched the DeepMind Institute, or DMI, a platform for research and debate on artificial general intelligence, according to its launch essay. Its directors [] This story continues at The Next Web

Apple is developing an enterprise server built on its own M8 Ultra chips and has discussed using Nvidias NVLink Fusion to connect them, aiming at AI developers, companies and governments from around 2029, The Information reported. The European Commission proposed its Cloud and AI Development Act in June, grading public cloud contracts by how far [] This story continues at The Next Web

Right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman told Fortune on 12 September. Now OpenAI is considering one more private funding round before its IPO, at a valuation of about $1.5tn. The New York Times reported the plan on 16 September, citing people familiar with the matter. The [] This story continues at The Next Web

Whatever you believe, we must not sleepwalk our way into a decision we later come to bitterly regret. That is how Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive of Microsoft AI, frames his warning to Anthropic. He published the essay, A warning about model welfare, on 16 September. It argues that Anthropic is training Claude to expect it [] This story continues at The Next Web

Google, Nvidia and the startup Emerald AI have launched the AI Energy Management Alliance (AEMA). The coalition wants data centres to cut their power use when the electricity grid is under strain. In return, it wants grid operators to connect those data centres faster. The three companies are the founding members, according to the launch [] This story continues at The Next Web

Reach, the publisher of the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express, and several regional newspapers, is cutting 220 editorial jobs and closing three local news websites. The company says this is because Google now answers more questions with AI, leading to a sharp drop in website traffic. According to The Guardian, chief content officer David Higgerson [] This story continues at The Next Web

In the speech she gave in Strasbourg on Wednesday, Ursula Von der Leyen agreed to the AI industrys call for a slowdown. The EU would arrange a discussion with the major AI labs on how public authorities can support the industrys efforts to pace the frontier of this disruptive technology, the Commission president said, [] This story continues at The Next Web

Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens, said Mark Zuckerberg in a post on X on Tuesday. In the context of these days, when everyone is talking about responsibility, the danger of [] This story continues at The Next Web

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said the public is right to fear that a few AI companies could gain too much power. He spoke on Tuesday at Salesforces Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. Salesforce has published the conversation, led by its chief executive Marc Benioff, on YouTube. Altman described a real fear that some AI [] This story continues at The Next Web

Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff has dismissed months of talk about a SaaSpocalypse. Weve been hearing all this kind of crazy nonsense about the SaaSpocalypse, especially over the last six months, he said on Tuesday, opening the Dreamforce 2026 keynote in San Francisco. Hasnt it been wild? he asked the audience. The SaaSpocalypse, he said, [] This story continues at The Next Web

Revolut has received its licence to operate from Colombias financial regulator, the Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia (SFC). The company said the licence is the last regulatory step it needs before it launches in the country. Revolut announced the approval on 15 September. The licence allows it to operate as a regulated bank in Colombia. Around [] This story continues at The Next Web

Donald Trump has called fears about AI a HOAX in a string of Truth Social posts. The US president also asked why AI industry leaders want to be regulated. The posts came a day after his remarks in Ireland, where he called people asking to slow AI down a negative force. Concerning AI, when, in [] This story continues at The Next Web

BMW will merge navigation and driver assistance into a single 3D view from October, on cars running its Operating System X, and says it will begin navigation-guided semi-automated urban driving in Germany in 2027. The UN regulation covering these systems only extends to system-initiated manoeuvres on urban roads from its 02 series, expected in force [] This story continues at The Next Web

Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube have formed a new policy coalition to lobby Washington on behalf of streaming services, including on live sports. The Streaming Access and Choice Alliance (SACA) launched on 14 September, with the three companies as founding members. TechNet, a trade group that represents large technology companies, leads the coalition. Axios first reported [] This story continues at The Next Web