Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence
UK government leads legal crackdown against AI chatbots
The United Kingdom government is leading a legal crackdown against AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Grok to make the internet safer for children. This comes after AI and social media came under fire for the potential to harm young people following the Grok chatbot generating sexualised images of women and children for weeks on X. This led to Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot coming under investigation by the European Commission. “The action we took on Grok sent a clear message that no platform gets a free pass,” UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said. “Today we are closing loopholes that put children at risk, and laying the groundwork for further action.” In the release, the UK government said chatbots will need to abide by illegal content duties in the Online Safety Act or face the consequences of breaking the law. It will also seek new legal powers designed to fast-track future protections for children’s well-being online. This would allow the government to act quickly on measures like setting a minimum age of 16 for social media use, similar to laws seen in Australia and Spain. In January, the UK already launched a consultation on banning social media for under-16s. Additionally, the country’s House of Lords, an unel
Artificial Intelligence
Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, to join OpenAI
The creator of artificial intelligence agent OpenClaw will join OpenAI, with OpenClaw’s services being folded into an OpenAI-supported foundation. OpenClaw, previously known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, is a free open-source agent that can perform tasks by linking to other AI models from companies like OpenAI. Its founder, Peter Steinberger, will continue to develop agents at OpenAI. “Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents,” wrote OpenAI founder Sam Altman. “We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings.” “OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support.” Altman did not disclose the terms of the deal. According to Steinberger, Meta also bid to buy OpenClaw. The project loses around US$10,000-20,000 each month, he said. Its agents are accessed within messaging apps, and can be directed to alter the user’s apps or files after connecting to an external AI model. China-based search engine Baidu began offering access to OpenClaw through its smartphone app on Friday and will roll out OpenClaw agents within its e-commerce business. Security experts have said that OpenClaw’s agents can be exposed to the wider
Artificial Intelligence
Baidu integrates OpenClaw into 700m user search app
Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) has embedded the open-source AI agent OpenClaw directly into its flagship search app - a platform with roughly 700 million monthly active users - ahead of China's Lunar New Year holiday. The integration, which went live last Friday, allows users who opt in to message the AI agent through Baidu's search interface to handle tasks like scheduling, file management and writing code. Previously, OpenClaw could only be accessed via messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram; however, Baidu is the first to extend its capabilities across its e-commerce and broader digital services.What's OpenClaw?ChatGPT put large language models in consumers' hands in late 2022. DeepSeek's R1 launch in January 2025 showed that a competitive model could be built for a fraction of the cost. OpenClaw shifts the focus from chatbots to autonomous agents - AI that executes tasks rather than generating responses. Built by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger and launched in November 2025, the project has been through three rebrands and a trademark complaint from Anthropic. It hit 180,000 GitHub stars in record time and drew 2 million website visitors in a single week. Both Meta and OpenAI have reportedly made acqu
Artificial Intelligence
Pentagon pushes AI into classified systems
The Pentagon is escalating its campaign to embed artificial intelligence (AI) deep inside America’s defence architecture, and it wants fewer strings attached. At a White House gathering this week, Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael made clear the military’s ambition: Deploy “frontier AI” - including the most advanced, cutting-edge models available - across both unclassified and classified systems. The Pentagon is reportedly “moving to deploy frontier AI capabilities across all classification levels”, an official who requested anonymity told Reuters. Simply put, that includes the secure networks used for mission planning and weapons targeting, not just back-office administration. This manoeuvre is being seen as less of a procurement exercise and more of a test of who ultimately controls the guardrails around powerful AI tools. For now, most tech groups working with the Defence Department offer versions of their models limited to unclassified environments; the lower-security systems are used by millions of staff for day-to-day tasks. OpenAI this week formalised access to its tools, including ChatGPT, on a Defence platform known as genai.mil, already rolled out to more than three million employees.
Artificial Intelligence
Anthropic hits US$380 billion valuation
The valuation of Anthropic has doubled to US$380 billion (A$535 billion) in just five months. This is the value placed on the privately-owned artificial intelligence (AI) model developer by its latest funding round, in which it raised $30 billion. The round was co-led by investors including D. E. Shaw Ventures, ICONIQ and MGX, the company said. “The investment will fuel the frontier research, product development, and infrastructure expansions that have made Anthropic the market leader in enterprise AI and coding,” Anthropic said in a news release. Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao said the message from Anthropic’s customers, including entrepreneurs, start-ups or the world’s largest enterprises, was that its Claude artificial assistant was increasingly becoming more critical to how businesses worked. “This fundraising reflects the incredible demand we are seeing from these customers, and we will use this investment to continue building the enterprise-grade products and models they have come to depend on,” Rao said. Revenue has grown from zero to an annual run-rate of $14 billion in three years, with this figure growing tenfold in each of those years. Anthropic is competing with ChatGPT developer OpenAI, which

Artificial Intelligence
Alphabet debt sale raised again to US$30 billion
Debt sale for Alphabet, Google's parent company, has gotten bigger for the second time this week and is now expected to reach over US$30 billion. Sources familiar with the matter reported the increase, just two days after Alphabet already raised it to $20 billion. This was reportedly due to a huge show of interest, with orders reaching $100 billion. The huge global bond issuance, including some century-long dated ones in the UK, is to drive the company's AI investment, with plans to focus on data centres. Alphabet is the first company to issue a century bond in three decades, after Motorola back in 1997. Alphabet shares fell by 1.78% to US$318.63 during Tuesday's U.S. session. The company maintains a market cap of $3.85 trillion.
Artificial Intelligence
Google parent plans US$15bn bond raising to fund AI
Alphabet Inc has attracted US$100 billion (A$140.9 billion) of orders for a $15 billion bond sale as it joins other technology firms in funding infrastructure investments to meet demand from the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, according to Bloomberg. Google’s parent company wants to raise the funds through a U.S. high-grade dollar bond sale, Bloomberg wrote in this article. The Google parent is selling bonds in up to seven parts, according to its regulatory filing, which did not disclose the size of the sale. It is also considering raising funds in Switzerland and the United Kingdom for the first time, including rarely seen 100-year bonds, Bloomberg reported Cloud-computing companies are expected to make more than $630 billion of investments in total this year, mostly related to AI, according to this Reuters story.. Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) class C shares closed $1.30 (0.40%) higher at $324.40 on Monday (Tuesday AEDT), capitalising the company at US$3.93 trillion (A$5.53 billion)
Artificial Intelligence
Anthropic tackles rival as AI ads war heats up
Anthropic has ignited a word of words in the artificial intelligence (AI) world with an expensive television advertisement being aired prior to and during the Super Bowl on Sunday (Monday AEDT). The AI model developer is believed to have paid up to $US8 million for an advertisement on behalf of its Claude large language model in which it criticises the decision of rival OpenAI to include advertising with its AI-powered ChatGPT chatbot. This prompted an immediate response from OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman, who called it ‘deceptive’. The commercial will play to an expected audience of up to 130 million people at half-time in the National Football League game at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California starting at 3.30 pm PST (11:30 am GMT Sunday, 10:30 am AEDT Monday). The advertisement first aired in the week prior to the game, featuring a muscular man with a robotic Chatbot-like voice, providing advice on building strength and then promoting shoe inserts, has the punchline: "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” Super Bowl LX (60) features the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks. Altman said he laughed at the ad, which he found funny, but wondered why Anthropic would go for something “
Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI announces Frontier enterprise AI platform
OpenAI will introduce a new enterprise artificial intelligence platform known as Frontier, the company said today, as it seeks to expand its business customer base and compete with rival Anthropic. Frontier will allow companies to create and manage AI agents to autonomously perform tasks, according to OpenAI. Enterprise customers represent around 40% of its business, its executives told CNBC last month, with the company planning to reach 50% by the end of the year. “Today, we’re introducing Frontier, a new platform that helps enterprises build, deploy, and manage AI agents that can do real work,” wrote OpenAI. “Frontier gives agents the same skills people need to succeed at work: shared context, onboarding, hands-on learning with feedback, and clear permissions and boundaries. That’s how teams move beyond isolated use cases to AI coworkers that work across the business.” The platform will be available to a small number of customers today before rolling out widely across the coming months. OpenAI also revealed a new coding AI model known as GPT-5.3-Codex today. According to the company, it features enhanced coding and reasoning abilities at faster speeds, and early versions of the model were used to debug its own tra

Artificial Intelligence

UK government leads legal crackdown against AI chatbots

Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, to join OpenAI

Baidu integrates OpenClaw into 700m user search app

Pentagon pushes AI into classified systems

Anthropic hits US$380 billion valuation

Alphabet debt sale raised again to US$30 billion

Google parent plans US$15bn bond raising to fund AI

Anthropic tackles rival as AI ads war heats up

OpenAI announces Frontier enterprise AI platform

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