Category: Biz Tech

Cisco is closing in on a deal to buy Astrix Security for as much as $350 million, according to multiple reports, in a sign that one of the world’s largest networking and security groups is moving faster to secure the fast-growing risks created by AI agents and other non-human identities inside large organisations. The talks, first reported on April 10, value the Israeli startup at roughly three to four times the capital it has raised so far, though neither company

Apple’s higher-memory Mac mini and Mac Studio models are becoming harder to buy in several markets, as pressure on the global memory supply chain collides with strong demand for AI hardware and growing industry talk of fresh desktop upgrades later this year. Apple continues to sell both desktop lines, but availability has tightened most visibly around customised configurations with larger memory allocations rather than entry-level machines.That shift matters because Apple’s desktop buyers often choose those machines precisely for heavier

OpenAI has accused Elon Musk of staging a last-minute legal manoeuvre ahead of a jury trial due to begin on 27 April in Oakland, California, deepening a dispute that has grown from a fight over the company’s founding ideals into one of the most consequential courtroom battles in artificial intelligence. The latest exchange came after Musk amended his claims against OpenAI and Microsoft, widening the remedies he wants and prompting OpenAI to argue that he is trying to disrupt the

Elon Musk’s X is preparing to launch XChat as a standalone messaging app for iPhone and iPad on 17 April, turning what had been a feature inside the social platform into a separate product aimed at users seeking private, app-first communication. Apple’s App Store listing identifies X Corp. as the developer, describes the service as fully end-to-end encrypted, and says it is built as a focused space for conversation without adverts or tracking.That move matters beyond a product release.

Google has removed Doki Doki Literature Club from the Play Store, setting off a dispute over how major app platforms police games that deal with suicide, depression and psychological distress. The takedown affects the Android version of the cult visual novel, which had only reached mobile devices in December, and comes despite the game carrying a mature rating on Google Play and longstanding content warnings in its official listings.The move has drawn a sharp response from creator Dan Salvato and

Samsung Electronics is weighing a semiconductor packaging and testing project in Vietnam that could be valued at about $4 billion, a move that would deepen the country’s role in the global chip supply chain and expand Samsung’s manufacturing base in one of its most important overseas hubs. Reporting over the past two days has shown that the company is discussing a semiconductor project with Vietnamese authorities, while separate reporting has put the likely investment at roughly $4 billion, with Thai

Metso has launched a new line of flip-flow screens aimed at one of the harder jobs in minerals processing and aggregates production: separating fine, dry and often moisture-laden material without pushing operators towards water-intensive screening. The Finland-based group said its new GFF Series is designed to improve classification accuracy, lower circulating loads and support more energy-efficient plant performance in both mining and sand manufacturing.The launch, announced on April 10, adds another layer to Metso’s screening portfolio at a time

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has sued Colorado in federal court, opening a fresh front in the widening US battle over how far states can go in policing the use of advanced algorithms in decisions affecting jobs, housing, education, healthcare and finance. The complaint, filed on April 9, seeks to block enforcement of Colorado’s Senate Bill 24-205 before it takes effect on June 30, arguing that the law violates constitutional protections for speech, is too vague to enforce fairly

Meta Platforms has unveiled Muse Spark, its first new flagship artificial intelligence model in about a year, marking a pivotal moment in Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to restore the company’s standing against OpenAI, Google and Anthropic after a period of criticism around its earlier Llama releases. Muse Spark began rolling out on 8 April through the Meta AI app and the meta. ai website in the United States, with integration into WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and Meta’s AI glasses due in

Amazon’s Sparrow robot is moving the company’s automation drive beyond lifting shelves and sorting parcels into one of warehouse robotics’ hardest jobs: selecting individual products of different shapes, sizes and surfaces from bins and placing them into totes for the next stage of fulfilment. Introduced as an AI-enabled picking arm, Sparrow marked a notable step in Amazon’s effort to automate item handling while keeping human workers in roles that require judgement, exception management and oversight.Smarter item picking changes warehouse

OpenAI is projecting a steep new revenue path built around advertising, with the ChatGPT maker expecting about $2.5 billion in ad revenue in 2026 and as much as $100 billion annually by 2030, according to a report by Axios citing investor presentation material. The same projections indicate ad sales could climb to $11 billion in 2027, $25 billion in 2028 and $53 billion in 2029, underscoring how central advertising may become to the company’s commercial model as it tries to

CoreWeave has expanded its artificial intelligence infrastructure relationship with Meta to $21 billion, extending a partnership that underlines how the biggest technology groups are leaning on specialist cloud providers to secure the computing power needed for the next phase of AI development. The enlarged agreement, announced on April 9, runs through December 2032 and builds on a prior deal valued at about $14 billion struck in September.The new arrangement centres on AI inference workloads, the stage at which trained

DataBank and Goodman Group have formed a 50-50 joint venture to build a 32MW data centre in Vernon, California, betting that one of the most capacity-starved digital infrastructure markets in the United States will stay tight as demand from artificial intelligence, cloud and enterprise customers keeps rising. The project is due to begin operations in December 2026 with an initial 6MW, with the remaining capacity scheduled to come online in phases through September 2027.The site, at 3094 E Vernon

Lumen Technologies has used its latest letter from chief executive Kate Johnson to sharpen a message it has been building for more than a year: the company wants investors, customers and partners to see it less as a legacy telecom carrier and more as a high-capacity digital networking platform built for artificial intelligence workloads. In the letter, Johnson said 2025 was a “pivotal year”, set out plans to make Lumen the “trusted network for AI”, and argued that the group’s

Google has begun rolling out vertical tabs and an upgraded reading mode to the desktop version of Chrome, adding two widely requested features aimed at users juggling large numbers of open pages and those seeking a cleaner full-screen reading experience. The company said the changes are arriving for Chrome on desktop platforms including Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS, with availability expanding gradually rather than landing for all users at once.Desktop Chrome gets a cleaner layout with the new tools focused

Anthropic has launched Project Glasswing, a controlled cybersecurity programme that gives a select group of large technology, finance and security organisations access to its unreleased Claude Mythos Preview model to identify and help fix serious software vulnerabilities in widely used systems. The company says the model has already uncovered thousands of significant flaws across operating systems, browsers and other foundational software, but has stopped short of making it generally available because of the risk that such capabilities could be misused

Alchemy, the blockchain infrastructure company often described in the sector as a crypto equivalent of cloud back-end provider AWS, has launched AgentPay, a new tool aimed at solving a fast-emerging problem in machine commerce: AI payment systems are being built on different rails and often cannot work with one another. The company says AgentPay gives merchants and service providers a single integration layer so they can accept payments from multiple agentic payment protocols without rebuilding their existing APIs.The timing matters

Kuka is stepping up its push into the United States and Asia as its leadership warns that too many manufacturers in Europe are moving too slowly on artificial intelligence, creating an opening for competitors in markets where automation spending and industrial policy are advancing at a quicker pace. The shift, outlined by chief executive Christoph Schell, comes as the Augsburg-based robotics group tries to reposition itself around what it calls “Automation 2.0” while navigating weak factory demand in parts of

 Google has quietly introduced a free iPhone app that pushes its on-device AI ambitions further into everyday productivity, offering voice dictation that works without a network connection while automatically cleaning up spoken text into more polished prose. The app, Google AI Edge Eloquent, is listed on Apple’s App Store as a Google-developed productivity tool for iPhone, described as free and built around local processing using the company’s Gemma technology.The launch is notable because Google has said little publicly about it,

Sony Interactive Entertainment has entered an agreement to acquire Cinemersive Labs, a UK-based machine learning and computer vision company, in a move that signals a deeper push into AI-driven graphics, rendering and visual tools for PlayStation. Sony said the team will join its Visual Computing Group and help advance visual computing inside games, with work aimed at enhancing gameplay visuals, improving rendering techniques and raising visual fidelity for players.The deal, announced on April 2, adds another specialist UK technology

GoDaddy has teamed up with LegalZoom to launch a system designed to give AI agents a verifiable identity on the open web, as companies move from chatbots towards software that can act, transact and communicate with other systems with less human intervention. The tie-up, announced on 2 April, centres on GoDaddy’s Agent Name Service, or ANS, which uses domain name system records and public key infrastructure certificates to assign agents a human-readable name and cryptographic proof of origin.LegalZoom said

OpenAI has asked the attorneys general of California and Delaware to investigate Elon Musk, accusing the billionaire and his associates of improper and anti-competitive conduct as a legal fight over the company’s structure moves towards a jury trial in Oakland later this month. The dispute marks a sharp escalation in a feud that has come to symbolise the wider struggle over who controls advanced artificial intelligence and under what public obligations.The letter, sent to California Attorney General Rob Bonta and

Dubai, UAE — At the forefront of Middle East’ innovative medical community is the name of talented surgeon Dr. Vardan Khachatrian, a visionary specialist and celebrity doctor, whose methods are increasingly shaping expectations across high-end patient segments not only in MENA region, but globally.Industry observers note a growing demand for natural, long-lasting results with minimal visible intervention, particularly among international patients travelling to Dubai for advanced procedures. Within this context, Dr. Vardan Khachatrian’s approach — anchored in controlled tissue handling

LinkedIn is facing mounting privacy questions after an investigation branded “BrowserGate” alleged the Microsoft-owned professional network scans thousands of browser extensions and gathers detailed device information from visitors without clear consent, raising fresh scrutiny over how large platforms monitor users and enforce their rules. Independent testing by a cybersecurity news outlet said it confirmed that LinkedIn’s site loads code able to detect more than 6,000 extensions in Chromium-based browsers, alongside a wider set of system characteristics.At the centre of the

 Telegram has rolled out a broad product update that adds a private AI writing tool, a major expansion of polling functions, support for Live Photos and Motion Photos, and a new system that lets bots create and manage other bots, in a move that sharpens the platform’s push into AI-assisted messaging and developer automation. The update was announced on March 31, 2026, with related bot-management changes added to Telegram’s Bot API on April 3.At the centre of the release is

Google has disclosed a coordinated takedown of UNC2814, a suspected China-linked cyber-espionage group, after investigators tied it to intrusions at 53 organisations in 42 countries, with telecommunications providers and government bodies forming the core of the victim set. The campaign centred on a custom backdoor called GRIDTIDE, which used Google Sheets as a covert command-and-control channel, allowing malicious traffic to blend with ordinary cloud activity rather than exploiting a flaw in Google’s products.The operation was made public on 25

Anthropic’s acquisition of Seattle startup Vercept, little more than a year after the company emerged from stealth, has become one of the clearest signs yet that the contest for elite artificial intelligence talent is reshaping the sector as quickly as the technology itself. The deal folds Vercept’s team and technology into Anthropic’s push to make Claude better at “computer use”, the industry term for AI systems that can navigate live software, spreadsheets and web interfaces much like a human operator.

Cash briefly replaced cards and QR payments across parts of Russia on April 3 after a widespread disruption hit banking and payment services, an outage that Telegram founder Pavel Durov said was triggered by Moscow’s efforts to block virtual private networks as part of a broader clampdown on online communications. The disruption affected shoppers, commuters and businesses, and has sharpened scrutiny of how far the Kremlin’s drive for tighter internet control is starting to spill into everyday economic life.The

3Commas has launched QuantPilot, a new AI-driven crypto trading platform aimed at giving retail traders access to tools more commonly associated with quantitative desks, as competition intensifies among trading software providers seeking to simplify strategy design, market research and execution. The company said the product is now in early access, with a public waiting list open through quantpilot. com, and positioned it as a no-code system that can turn plain-language prompts into backtested and deployable trading strategies.The Tallinn-founded firm,

Microsoft has rolled out three first-party artificial intelligence models aimed at speech transcription, voice generation and image creation, stepping up its push to offer developers and companies a broader in-house alternative to rival tools. The new systems — MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-Image-2 — are available through Microsoft Foundry, while the company’s MAI Playground has opened access for trials in the United States.The launch puts the spotlight on MAI-Transcribe-1, which Microsoft says is designed for enterprise-grade speech-to-text work across 25

du said its National Hypercloud has received certification and endorsement from the UAE Cybersecurity Council, a step the company described as making it the first compliant, secure and sovereign cloud infrastructure approved for deployment across both public and private sectors in the UAE. The announcement places the telecom group at the centre of a fast-moving contest over where sensitive data is stored, who controls the infrastructure, and how far cloud adoption can expand in government and highly regulated industries without

Alibaba has launched Qwen3.6-Plus, the latest entry in its Qwen model family, positioning it as a tool built to help companies move from chat-based assistants to AI systems that can execute multi-step work across coding, reasoning and visual tasks. The release lands as the group deepens its push into agentic AI for both enterprise clients and consumer applications, with the model set to power Alibaba Cloud’s Model Studio as well as its wider AI ecosystem.Alibaba said Qwen3.6-Plus is designed

Google’s YouTube is facing mounting pressure from child development experts and advocacy groups to stop artificial intelligence-generated videos from being shown or recommended to young children, opening a fresh front in the debate over how large platforms police automated content aimed at minors. A coalition led by Fairplay has urged YouTube chief executive Neal Mohan and Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai to keep such material off YouTube Kids, arguing that machine-made clips can distort children’s understanding of the world, weaken

Voltify has raised $30 million in seed funding to push an ambitious plan to electrify freight rail without the cost and disruption of stringing overhead wires across vast rail networks, positioning the startup at the intersection of climate technology, industrial infrastructure and freight logistics. The company said the round was co-led by venture capital firm Aleph and Fortescue, with backing from Menomadin, J-Impact, The Dock and other investors, as it seeks to turn a concept that has drawn attention in