Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

A U.S. judge on Tuesday ruled that a customs officer improperly canceled the visa of a Russian-born scientist and Harvard University researcher charged with smuggling frog embryos in the U.S. The opinion said Customs and Border Protection officers have limited authority to cancel visas and can’t do so for suspected smuggling of biological samples. The cancellation of Kseniia Petrova ‘s visa was arbitrary and capricious, U.S. District Court Judge Christina Reiss said in her written ruling. “The undisputed facts reveal that Ms. Petrova’s visa was impermissibly canceled because of the frog embryo samples and for no other reason,” Reiss wrote.…

Anthropic said on Tuesday that it has halted the broader release of its newest AI model, Mythos, due to concerns that it is too good at finding “high-severity vulnerabilities” in major operating systems and web browsers. Loading audio narration… “Claude Mythos Preview’s large increase in capabilities has led us to decide not to make it generally available,” Anthropic wrote in the preview’s system card. “Instead, we are using it as part of a defensive cybersecurity program with a limited set of partners.”The announcement is a major step for Anthropic, which in February weakened a safety pledge about how it would…

Bible stories like Jonah and the Whale would be part of a new Texas public schools reading list that drew an overflow crowd to Tuesday’s state education board meeting. Religious leaders, teachers, parents and students spent hours arguing about the reading list for the state’s 5.4 million kindergartners to 12th-graders. The debate comes as the country’s long-standing wrangling over the role of religion in public schools continues to drive legislation and legal action. Nationally, President Donald Trump has pledged to protect and expand religious expression in public schools. And Texas, a red state that is home to about one in…

Asia AI data center provider Firmus on Monday announced a fresh $505 million raise led by Coatue at a $5.5 billion post-money valuation. With this round, Firmus has raised $1.35 billion in six months, it says. The Singapore-based data center company previously raised AU$330 million (approximately $215 million) at an AU$1.85 billion ($1.2 billion) valuation from investors, including Nvidia. Firmus is developing an energy-efficient “AI factory” network of data centers in Australia and Tasmania, a project it dubs Project Southgate. It is using Nvidia’s reference designs for building these efficient data centers. These new data centers will use Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform —…

Intel will join SpaceX and Tesla in an effort to build a new U.S. semiconductor factory in Texas, although the scope of its contributions are unclear. “Our ability to design, fabricate, and package ultra-high-performance chips at scale will help accelerate Terafab’s aim to produce 1 TW/year of compute to power future advances in AI and robotics,” Intel said in a corporate post on X. Intel hasn’t shared any more information. Elon Musk announced in March a team-up between the two tech companies he leads to develop chips for AI compute, satellites, and SpaceX’s mooted space data center and to support…

Anthropic on Tuesday released a preview of its new frontier model, Mythos, which it says will be used by a small coterie of partner organizations for cybersecurity work. In a previously leaked memo, the AI startup called the model one of its “most powerful” yet. The model’s limited debut is part of a new security initiative, dubbed Project Glasswing, in which 12 partner organizations will deploy the model for the purposes of “defensive security work” and to secure critical software, Anthropic said. While it was not specifically trained for cybersecurity work, the model will be used to scan both first-party…

TikTok’s advertising team is undergoing another big shake-up. Loading audio narration… Khartoon Weiss, the lead exec for TikTok’s North American ads business, is exiting the company, four people familiar with the matter told Business Insider.Weiss, who pitched TikTok’s suite of ad products to marketers onstage at its NewFronts event last month, joined the company almost six years ago from Spotify. She oversaw TikTok’s global agency and accounts teams before being promoted to lead the North America division of the global business solutions team in March 2025, following the departure of advertising head Blake Chandlee.Digiday first reported on Weiss’ exit.Weiss’ exit is…

On Tuesday, Amazon announced that Uber was expanding its contract for AWS cloud services to run more of its ride-sharing features on Amazon’s chips. Uber will particularly expand its use of AWS’s Graviton (a low-power, ARM-based server CPU) and start a new trial testing Trainium3, AWS’s Nvidia competitor AI chip. This deal is a bit less about a long-term threat to Nvidia than it is a thorough thumbing of the nose by Amazon at AWS’s cloud competitors, Google and Oracle. While Uber historically ran its own data centers, back in 2023, the ride-hailing company famously signed giant, multi-year cloud computing…

After years of development, Sony has finally taken the wraps off its latest advancement in TV technology. The tech, called True RGB, will be used in new Sony TVs coming later this spring. True RGB promises big gains in picture quality over regular old Mini LED and QLED sets. It even has a leg up over OLED in a few areas, particularly color and brightness.At the core of True RGB is its advanced backlight system, which uses red, green, and blue LEDs to produce a wider, purer, and brighter range of colors than typical TVs that use only white or blue light.…

AI research lab Anthropic announced Monday that it signed a new agreement with Google and Broadcom for increased processing and compute capacity to power its Claude AI models. This reworking of its compute deals comes as demand for its AI models continues to soar. The deals would expand Anthropic’s use of Google Cloud’s tensor processing units, or TPUs, the company’s advanced AI chips, and is an expansion of the deal the companies struck in October 2025 for more than a gigawatt of compute capacity. This new compute capacity will come online in 2027, Anthropic said in the blog post. The…