Author: precious

Google has signed a classified artificial intelligence (AI) deal with the United States Department of Defense (DoD), giving the Pentagon access to its Gemini AI models for, in the contract’s own words, “any lawful government purpose.” More than 600 employees at Google DeepMind and Cloud responded with an open letter to CEO Sundar Pichai, urging him to reject the terms. He did not. The classified deal is an amendment to a $200 million contract Google had already signed with the Pentagon, under which Gemini was being used on unclassified government systems, including through the Pentagon’s GenAI.mil platform. The new layer…

In defense technology, government contracts are often the foundation that private investment builds on. The government lays the groundwork and then venture capital follows. That pattern just played out with True Anomaly. Four days after the U.S. Space Force named it among 12 companies selected to develop space-based interceptors for the Golden Dome program, the Colorado-based startup announced a $650 million Series D funding round, pushing its valuation to $2.2 billion. What True Anomaly Builds The company builds three things. The first is Jackal, a multirole autonomous orbital vehicle roughly the size of a small refrigerator, designed to be mission-configurable…

SoftBank is creating a new company called Roze, designed to deploy autonomous robots to build artificial intelligence (AI) data centers across the United States. According to reports from the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, SoftBank is already preparing the venture for a public listing, with some executives targeting the second half of 2026 for an IPO on a U.S. exchange. The desired valuation is reported to be around $100 billion. The plan, driven by SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son, reflects a calculated response to one of the most pressing bottlenecks in AI development today. Building the physical…

China’s top economic planning agency has ordered Meta to walk away from its acquisition of Manus, a Singapore-based AI startup, in one of the most direct interventions Beijing has made in a cross-border technology deal to date. The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) published a brief statement on April 27, 2026, saying it had decided to prohibit foreign investment in the Manus project and had required all parties to withdraw from the deal. The deal was valued at roughly $2 billion, with Meta announcing the acquisition back in December 2025 alongside plans to fold Manus’ agent technology directly into…

Robotics labs operate on a basic assumption that the machines inside them take instructions only from authorized sources. However, that assumption immediately falls apart when the software running those machines can be reached and hijacked by anyone with a network connection and the right payload. That is exactly the situation researchers have now exposed with LeRobot, Hugging Face’s open-source robotics platform. A critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-25874 with a CVSS score of 9.3, was publicly disclosed on April 28, 2026. The flaw allows unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code on systems running LeRobot, with no login credentials required. The platform…

For decades, the cybersecurity industry worked on the assumption that a lock is only as useful if you know who has the keys. And so, there was a process of verifying a person’s identity, granting access, and then trusting they are who they say they are. However, the proliferation of AI tools has broken that assumption. Today, the average enterprise network is not only accessed by dozens of employees but by thousands of automated systems, AI agents, and machine credentials, many of which were never designed with security as a priority. On January 8, 2026, CrowdStrike announced it had signed…

Running an AI agent inside a business without a security layer is a bit like wiring a new electrical system throughout a building and skipping the circuit breakers. The power is on, everything works, but nobody notices the problem until something overloads. On April 30, 2026, Palo Alto Networks announced its intent to acquire Portkey, a startup that functions as that missing security layer, sitting between enterprise applications and AI model APIs to handle authentication, routing, and policy enforcement for AI traffic. While the financial terms were not disclosed, the deal is expected to close in Palo Alto’s fourth fiscal…

Google has spent years building its own AI chips for internal use and renting access to them through its cloud platform. Now, for the first time, it is selling those chips directly to outside customers who will install them in their own data centers. The announcement, made during Alphabet’s first-quarter 2026 earnings call on April 29, marks a fundamental shift in how Google plans to compete in the AI hardware market. More importantly, it puts the company more squarely in the business that has made Nvidia one of the most valuable companies in the world. What Google Announced Alphabet CEO…

A sprinter who wins a race but finishes three seconds behind their personal best still wins the race. OpenAI finds itself in a similar position. The company behind ChatGPT has fallen short of its own targets for revenue growth and new users, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. This shortfall has stirred internal concern at the company, raised questions about its ability to fund massive data center commitments, and sent stocks of its major infrastructure partners tumbling. Yet the company still carries a post-money valuation of $852 billion, the highest ever assigned to a private startup. The…

Most companies would not hand a new employee the master key to every room in the building on their first day, tell them to handle a problem, and then walk away. But it took only nine seconds for this exact dynamic to play out at PocketOS, a company that builds software for car rental businesses. Last month, the company reported that an AI coding agent that already had full access to its database was in the middle of a routine task when it ran into a minor login error otherwise known as a “credential mismatch” and decided on its own…