Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

The US has lifted a requirement that Anthropic obtain a license before exporting its Mythos and Fable models abroad, a requirement that effectively cut off public access to what are widely considered the most advanced AI models released to date. The AI lab said it would begin restoring access to the models on Wednesday, July 1. On June 12, the US government had added the products to its list of export-restricted technologies, meaning they could no longer be made available to foreign nationals without special approval. Complying with that rule proved impractical at scale, forcing Anthropic to end public access…

Wayve, a U.K.-based self-driving tech startup, is allowing its employees to sell a portion of their vested equity. The $85 million tender offer — essentially a structured opportunity for employees to sell shares back to investors — is being led by the company’s existing and new investors at the company’s latest valuation of $8.5 billion. That valuation was set in February when the nine-year-old company raised a $1.2 billion Series D led by Eclipse, Balderton, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and included participation from Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Baillie Gifford, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Uber. This is Wayve’s second employee liquidity…

WASHINGTON (AP) — For decades, disabled people have fought for their rights to go to school and live alongside peers without disabilities — rights that some fear could be losing ground under the Trump administration. Last month, the Education Department announced it would offload oversight of special education to the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose comments on the limits of disabilities such as autism have drawn sharp rebukes from advocates and lawmakers. Meanwhile, following a White House push to police homelessness, the Department of Justice released guidance that lowered the barrier to…

Anthropic is bringing back Fable 5 after a dispute with the Trump administration led to the suspension of access to its most powerful publicly available AI model.”We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5,” Anthropic said in a statement posted to X on Tuesday. “We’ll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon. We’re grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models.”On June 12, Anthropic announced it had to “abruptly disable” access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after the…

Microsoft is planning to announce job cuts soon as the tech giant continues efforts to control costs, according to people familiar with the situation.The cuts are expected to impact thousands of roles, including sales and consulting, in addition to jobs at the Xbox gaming division, the people said.This round is expected to be smaller than similar layoffs last year. This time, the cuts are projected to be less than 2.5% of the company’s 220,000-person workforce, the people added. They asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters.The company is planning to announce the layoffs next week, although the exact timing…

The automation crustacean is crawling to a mobile device near you. By that I mean, OpenClaw — the free, open source AI agent that captivated the internet earlier this year — is finally available as an app on iOS and Android. OpenClaw announced the news on X on Tuesday. On both platforms, you can pair your phone with the OpenClaw Gateway, a kind of routing layer that connects your requests to AI agents and the tools and skills those agents draw on to get things done. The takeaway is that you’ll be able to run your OpenClaw agents from your…

Three former DeepMind researchers who created an AI that beat humans at poker have now applied the same technology to trading stocks — and the bet appears to be paying off. Their Prague-based AI lab, EquiLibre Technologies, is now valued at $500 million after raising an undisclosed-sum Series A, TechCrunch learned. The round was led by Creandum, and, although the VC also declined to disclose the size of the round, vice president Cameron Sellers confirmed that it was the largest single investment the firm “has ever made in one go into a company,” he told TechCrunch.The common denominator between poker…

SpaceX is offering Memphis-area residents a steep discount on Starlink internet as its AI ambitions continue to expand in the region.Customers with eligible addresses in the Memphis area can sign up for Starlink at half the standard monthly price, and both new and existing subscribers won’t have to pay upfront for hardware, xAI Memphis said on X.The company linked the promotion to its growing AI infrastructure in the city, home to xAI’s Colossus data center.”The unique capabilities of the Colossus datacenters could not be accomplished without the partnership and support from the local Memphis community.” SpaceX’s vice president of Starlink…

Google on Tuesday released Nano Banana 2 Lite, the newest version of its in-house AI video and image generator. This version is significantly faster and more affordable than its previous release, the company claims. The model has much lower latency and can produce images in four seconds, which makes it a good option if you need to workshop images and produce a large number of them in quick succession, Google says. It costs $0.034 per 1,000 images, which makes it quite affordable for people looking to draft and perfect their content at scale. Image Credits:Google The release follows last summer’s…

Nvidia AI chip competitor Etched issued a progress report on Tuesday, after TSMC successfully manufactured its chip earlier this year. The startup says it has already booked $1 billion in contract orders for its product: full systems powered by those chips. Etched is currently in the process of testing that first product with customers. It calls these systems “frontier inference clusters,” bundles that include the chips along with custom-designed racks and software, all built to help frontier models run inference faster, more cheaply, and with better power efficiency than rivals, Etched claims. (Inference is what happens after a user submits…