Tom's Hardware, citing Politico, reports that Anthropic is lobbying for a federal AI safety bill. The government could block a model's release only if it risks $1 billion in damages or killing or injuring more than 50 people, from bioweapons, AI-enabled cyberattacks or a lab losing control of a model. An independent evaluator registered with the Commerce Department would check labs and report risks within 72 hours. A federal judge in Washington, DC would then decide whether to halt the release. No other agency could order a lab to stop. An Anthropic spokesperson said the bill reflects its Advanced AI Framework and called these 'sensible policies'.
Anthropic says it is committing 5% of its shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new entity. With pledges from co-founders and staff, the total comes to about 20%. The company says the fund's stake grows by 2% for each 50% rise in Anthropic's valuation.
The Financial Times, citing sources, reports that Anthropic is asking law firms about deal negotiation tactics. The goal is AI agents that negotiate on people's behalf and deal with other AI agents on the other side. Anthropic has not announced this.
A court filing shows Disney agreed to hire more than 60 Character.AI workers, the majority of its staff. It would pay them about $180M over three years, plus $30M in retention awards. TechCrunch reports that the filing says the vast majority of staff offered jobs accepted. Disney's offer is a first bid that sets a floor, so another company could still bid higher. A bankruptcy judge must approve the deal.
DeepSeek's documentation describes two new paid tools. A Search tool returns web results from DeepSeek's own search engine, and a Fetch tool turns a single web page into plain text. They cost $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests and are meant for AI agents that need live web content.
The Telegraph reports that Microsoft cancelled its deal with Nscale to be the main tenant of a planned data centre in Essex, UK. Microsoft was to rent 23,000 Nvidia AI chips there. The site may not get grid power until the 2030s, and the move threatens Nscale's planned multibillion-dollar stock market listing.
The New York Times reports that interest on CoreWeave's bonds has gone above 15%. Insuring SoftBank's debt has got more expensive, and some Oracle debt is trading at around 80 to 90 cents on the dollar. Separately, the Financial Times cites a count of 47+ large US data centre projects delayed, withdrawn or blocked this year, and an analyst estimate that only about 35% of the planned US pipeline is credible.
Reuters, citing sources, reports that Nvidia asked Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron to make the base dies for its custom NVHBM memory using TSMC's 3-nanometre process. The base die is the bottom layer of a stacked memory chip. Samsung agreed, which would be its first use of TSMC.
In an interview with Joanna Stern, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella discussed the new Surface Laptop Ultra, which runs on Nvidia's RTX Spark chip. He also talked about Microsoft's plan to make Windows a safer system for running AI agents.
Rep. Ritchie Torres introduced the Power To The Players Act. It would direct the FTC to write rules so buying a game gives you ownership, not a license. Online games would need an offline mode before their servers shut down. Torres cited NBA 2K25, whose online servers are shutting down two years after release. Detailed bill text has not been released.
Next: 4 engineering blogs from the same day.