Generative AI has already changed how companies draft, summarize and search for information. The next challenge is more complex: whether AI can coordinate work across business systems while preserving controls, auditability and human accountability. That is the central test for agentic AI. Unlike a chatbot that returns an answer, an agentic system can interpret a goal, […]

The British government has put its most contentious health-tech contract on notice. It is now formally reviewing the NHS’s £330mn deal with Palantir, and weighing whether to walk away in 2027. Technology minister Liz Kendall confirmed the review this week, telling Times Radio that “the current health secretary is reviewing every single aspect of that […]

The headline from Apple’s developer conference was a reborn Siri. The more interesting story sits underneath it: the AI models Apple built to run the thing, one of which is far too big to fit in an iPhone’s memory, yet runs on the device anyway. In a technical post published alongside WWDC, Apple detailed the […]

Four months ago, AI looked like it might gut the software industry. This week, one of its biggest investors declared the threat over. The truth sits somewhere in between. Speaking at the SuperReturn International conference in Berlin, Orlando Bravo, founder of Thoma Bravo, one of the world’s largest software-focused private equity firms with almost $200bn […]

A Shahed attack drone costs tens of thousands of euros. The missiles traditionally fired to shoot one down can cost a million or more. A French startup has raised €50mn to fix that maths. Alta Ares, a Paris-based defence-technology company founded in 2024, said on Tuesday it had closed a €50mn round led by Air […]

The cloud was supposed to make geography irrelevant. Microsoft’s latest round of job cuts in China shows how quickly that promise is coming apart. Microsoft is laying off hundreds of staff at its Azure cloud unit in China, according to affected employees who spoke to the South China Morning Post. Two sources put the number […]

AI is running out of power, and out of places to put it, on Earth. A Los Angeles startup wants to solve both problems by leaving the planet. Orbital, a space-infrastructure company building AI data centres in low Earth orbit, has raised a $5mn oversubscribed pre-seed round led by a16z speedrun, with a long list […]

France built its own encrypted messenger so civil servants would not have to trust WhatsApp or Telegram. Now that messenger has been breached, and the government and the attacker cannot agree on how much was taken. France’s National Cybersecurity Agency, ANSSI, detected a compromise of Tchap on 7 June, and the Digital Affairs Directorate (DINUM), […]

America wants to build robots, not just import them. A New York startup has just raised $200mn to do exactly that. Standard Bots has closed a $200mn round that values the company at $1bn, minting a fresh robotics unicorn. The financing was led by General Catalyst and RoboStrategy, a fund dedicated to robotics, and marks […]

Most startups raise money because they need it. NinjaOne has just raised more than $400m to make the opposite point. The Austin-based IT-operations company said on Tuesday that a fresh round of Series C extensions has more than doubled its valuation to $12.3bn, up from the $5bn it was worth only 16 months ago. The […]