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Google has added four capabilities to Gemini Live, letting spoken commands trigger background agents that work across Docs, Sheets and Drive, alongside hands-free Gmail control and a spoken daily brief. Its DMA settlement requires it to let rival assistants reach comparable functionality on Android by July 2027. Google has given its voice assistant the ability [] This story continues at The Next Web

Waystar has launched agents that interpret payer responses and automatically resubmit denied healthcare claims, which it calls the industrys first autonomous resubmission capability. Germany caps how many hospital invoices may be audited each quarter and charges a flat fee when one is reduced. An American company has built software that argues with insurers on its [] This story continues at The Next Web

Alibabas Qwen team has released Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, an open-weight preview of the architecture it intends to use for Qwen4, carrying 125B parameters but activating only 6B for each token. Its licence may not qualify for the EU AI Acts open-source exemption. Alibabas Qwen team has published the architecture it plans to build Qwen4 on. Qwen3.8-Flash-Next carries [] This story continues at The Next Web

Huawei has bid to build AI data centres for the Egyptian government. The US State Department is now trying to assemble a rival consortium from Nvidia, AMD and Microsoft. The tender offer proposes exporting 1,408 of Huaweis top-end Ascend 950-series chips for an AI training cloud. A further 600, either the same chips or the [] This story continues at The Next Web

MindRank, a Hangzhou drug developer built around AI, says its lead candidate went from programme initiation to Phase III trials in roughly four and a half years on about $23mn of cumulative research spending. If that holds up, it is the most concrete answer yet to a question the sector has been asking loudly and [] This story continues at The Next Web

Spain has drafted a decree that would require new data centres to source at least 80% of their electricity from renewables in every hour of operation, with loss of grid connection as the penalty for failing to comply. It is a markedly firmer position than the one Brussels has taken, having previously told Big Tech [] This story continues at The Next Web

Innovation does not usually die because an experiment fails. It dies when ownership disappears. Large software companies can build an ancillary tool, prove that it solves a real problem, and still starve it of attention once leadership redirects the team toward the flagship product or the next urgent initiative. My argument is simple: when a [] This story continues at The Next Web

Revolut is launching a euro-backed stablecoin, entering a market that European regulation has spent two years accidentally consolidating around a single American issuer. The neobank is also one of the 36 firms the ECB picked for its digital euro pilot, which means it is now building the private euro token and helping test the public [] This story continues at The Next Web

Japan is studying whether to move the settlement of stocks and government bonds onto blockchain infrastructure capable of running in real time around the clock, according to Nikkei, in a project involving the Financial Services Agency, the Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Japan, and the countrys three largest banks. It is the sort of [] This story continues at The Next Web

Nvidia is expected to report quarterly revenue of $92.18bn, close to double the same period last year and its fastest growth in seven quarters, with analysts forecasting a further rise to $104.20bn in the current quarter. The numbers are not really the issue anymore, because the scrutiny has moved to how much of that demand [] This story continues at The Next Web

Meta and state attorneys general have held settlement discussions amid the youth social media harm trial now underway in federal court in California, according to Bloomberg. The case is the largest of its kind, with 29 states pursuing the companyand four of them, California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey, party to the trial thatopened this [] This story continues at The Next Web

Adam Mosseri, who has run Instagram since 2018, told a federal jury in Oakland that the apps Take a Break feature helped, but not nearly as much as we hoped, as internal documents showed only 1.8% of teenagers used it. Metas public blog post at the time said more than 90% of users who turned [] This story continues at The Next Web

Menlo Park, CA, United States, August 25th, 2026, TechnologyWire FlowX.AI is among the first partners bringing specialized industry agents to Gemini Enterprise, with enterprise-grade AI built for complex, high-stakes work where making a mistake is not an option. FlowX.AI today announced that specialized FlowX.AI agents are available through Google Cloud Marketplace and as part of [] This story continues at The Next Web

Brazil has fined TikToks owner over the way it handled childrens data, and the ruling covers people who never had an account. The National Data Protection Agency imposed a penalty of 153.7 million reais on ByteDance on Tuesday, worth about $29.9m. It cited irregularities in the processing of data belonging to children and adolescents. TikTok [] This story continues at The Next Web

Intuit is moving Mailchimp out of its main business and into a segment of its own. The first standalone forecast it has ever published for the marketing tool is for no growth at all. Mailchimp will bring in $1,256mn to $1,266mn in fiscal 2027, Intuit said on Tuesday. That range runs from minus 1% to [] This story continues at The Next Web

SoftBank plans a record 1 trillion yen retail bond sale, about $6.3bn, the largest by any issuer in Japan, to fund investment commitments to OpenAI. Analysts say banks were reluctant to take the risk, leaving the deal dependent on retail investors. SoftBank has found a lender of last resort for its AI bet, and it [] This story continues at The Next Web

Anthropics Claude AI is showing signs of overload again. On Monday morning, users trying to work with Claude encountered failed requests and a 529 Overloaded error. The message says the problem is a temporary server-side issue, then sends users to Anthropics status page. A screenshot shared with TNW shows the error appearing in the Claude [] This story continues at The Next Web

Galbot says its robot completed more than 100 consecutive autonomous tennis rallies against former world number 15 Zheng Jie at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. The rally count, the autonomy claim and the robots identity all rest on the companys own account. A robot spent Saturday rallying with a former Wimbledon semi-finalist. The [] This story continues at The Next Web

Forrester reports that 55% of employers regret laying off workers for AI and expects half of AI-attributed layoffs to be quietly reversed, with jobs returning offshore or at significantly lower wages. In Europe, a revised directive will require consultation before such decisions, backed by financial penalties. The companies that cut jobs for AI are having [] This story continues at The Next Web

Alibaba is placing HK$80bn, about $10.2bn, of new shares in Hong Kong and says all net proceeds will go to AI infrastructure and capabilities. It comes days after the company reported a 75% fall in quarterly net profit driven by that same spending. Alibaba is going to the market for money to spend on AI, [] This story continues at The Next Web

A proposed class action filed in San Francisco alleges Ouras sleep staging is generated by AI estimates rather than measurement, and names Finnish parent Oura Health Oy as a defendant. Oura says it stands behind its science and accuracy claims. The number Oura puts on its own product pages is now the subject of a [] This story continues at The Next Web

An anonymous model called Ox Alpha appeared on OpenRouter last week, free to use with a million-token context window, and developers have been impressed. OpenRouters own listing says prompts and completions are retained by the unidentified provider. A model that nobody will take credit for is being tested across the industry. Ox Alpha appeared on [] This story continues at The Next Web

Nvidias largest customers have been notified that servers containing its AI chips will rise in price by more than 15% in many cases from early next year, driven by memory costs. The company reports quarterly earnings next week. Nvidias biggest customers have been told what the memory shortage is going to cost them. Servers containing [] This story continues at The Next Web

An Apollo analysis of 321 occupations found that wages in jobs highly exposed to AI grew 6.7% more slowly after 2023, with no statistically significant employment effect. The gap was 10.7% in the lowest-paid quartile and absent in the highest. The first measurable mark AI has left on the labour market is not unemployment. Apollos [] This story continues at The Next Web

Premier League clubs are playing this season without gambling brands on the front of matchday shirts, forcing eight of the 20 to find new partners at once. Fulhams went to ClickHouse, an American data infrastructure company valued at $15bn. The most valuable advertising space in world sport has changed hands, and some of it went [] This story continues at The Next Web

For the longest time, the tech industrys unofficial motto was if the product is free, you are the product. Most of us just accepted it. But after a decade of data scandals, tracking revelations, and privacy blunders, that logic is starting to feel dated. Weve hit a tipping point. A quiet but powerful shift is [] This story continues at The Next Web

Aptera has partnered with Shanghais Launch Design on a manufacturing programme worth up to $44mn, covering tooling, testing and pilot production. Aptera pays two-thirds of the costs, while its latest filing reports $10.1mn in cash and substantial doubt about continuing as a going concern. Aptera has finally found someone to build its solar car. The [] This story continues at The Next Web

Google says its Gemma family of open models has passed a billion downloads. Developers have published more than 100,000 Gemma variants over the past two years, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. Clement Farabet, a vice president at Google DeepMind, and Olivier Lacombe, a product director there, wrote it. Google calls the [] This story continues at The Next Web

Meta has launched Pocket across the United States. The app it is based on shut down the same day. Pocket had been testing quietly in Brazil since July. It is now available to everyone in the US. Pocket lets people type a prompt and get back a small interactive thing, which Meta calls a gizmo. [] This story continues at The Next Web

Chinas market regulator has ordered a recall of more than 4 million vehicles, including nearly 2.98 million Teslas, because interior emergency door releases blend into the surrounding trim. The remedies are warning labels and software updates, ahead of a 2027 standard banning concealed handles. China has recalled more than four million cars because a lever [] This story continues at The Next Web

They started selling online at 15. Their company, Siml, now runs over 1,000 stores. Nurtilek Raimzhanov and Zuhayr Abdullazhanov met in high school and have been best friends ever since. They were fifteen when the pandemic hit, and they decided to sell something online. In their case, hand sanitizer. It worked well enough to become [] This story continues at The Next Web

Meta is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year buying access to AI models through Microsofts cloud. The company runs trillions of tokens a week through Azure, Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified. That makes Meta one of Microsofts largest AI customers. Both companies declined [] This story continues at The Next Web

Astromech has raised $20mn at a $3.8 billion valuation to build AI that predicts how living systems will change. The company says its models learn from 3.8 billion years of biological history. The valuation and the training window are the same number, and nobody has said whether that is a coincidence. Bob Nelsen led the [] This story continues at The Next Web

Apple paid Ireland $17.1bn in tax last financial year. That is around 40% of everything it paid in corporate income tax anywhere in the world. The figure comes from a company filing that breaks Apples tax down country by country, Reuters reported from Dublin. Apple paid $43.2bn in income taxes worldwide in the year to [] This story continues at The Next Web

Apple Music will start showing listeners which songs were made with AI. The disclosure behind those labels also stops being optional. Apple emailed music industry partners on Thursday to announce Made With AI Labels, Billboard reported after obtaining the message. Any track a content provider tags as materially generated using AI will carry a visible [] This story continues at The Next Web

The Dutch data protection authority has decided to fine Uber 825mn, or about $966mn, for shutting down driver accounts by automated systems without telling the drivers properly. It is the second-largest penalty ever issued under the General Data Protection Regulation. Reuters reported the decision after reviewing a document dated 17 August. The regulator, known as [] This story continues at The Next Web

Starcloud has raised $250mn to put AI compute in orbit, and a large part of the money is earmarked for rockets it cannot yet book. The Series A extension values the company at $2.3bn post-money, the company said. Its total raised now stands at $450mn. Starcloud was founded in 2024, and its March round valued [] This story continues at The Next Web

Micron is putting $10bn into a research lab built on the premise that AI has permanently changed what memory is worth. The company announced Micron Research Labs on Thursday, headquartered in Boise, Idaho, with a planned $10bn over the next decade. It is separate from the more than $250bn Micron has committed to American manufacturing [] This story continues at The Next Web

Nvidia is in early talks with the Korean AI chip designer Rebellions about a technical partnership, an investment or possibly an acquisition, Bloomberg reported on Friday. Jensen Huang met Rebellions co-founder and chief executive Sunghyun Park at Nvidias Santa Clara headquarters this week, people familiar with the matter told the news agency. They asked not [] This story continues at The Next Web

New York has more tech workers than the San Francisco Bay Area for the first time since CBRE started counting 13 years ago. The property firms Scoring Tech Talent 2026 report, subtitled AI Realignment Underway, puts the New York metro at 394,300 tech talent jobs in 2025 against 375,730 in the Bay Area. New York [] This story continues at The Next Web

Patreon has published a roadmap of new and revamped features. TechCrunch counted 30 of them. The most consequential line in the post is an admission. To the smaller creators on Patreon: the lack of discovery youre seeing right now is not your fault. Its ours, chief executive Jack Conte wrote in a long post to [] This story continues at The Next Web

Samsung Electronics approved the largest shareholder return in South Korean corporate history on Friday. Its shares then fell as much as 2.6% in post-market trading. The board signed off on a Samsung shareholder return of between 90 trillion and 110 trillion won for 2026. That is roughly $65bn to $80bn. It is about five times [] This story continues at The Next Web

YouTube Premium is getting more expensive across Europe. This time the company is asking subscribers to agree, rather than simply imposing the increase. A price-change notice seen by TNW went to a Romanian subscriber on Friday. It puts the individual plan up from RON 29.00 to RON 32.00 a month, a rise of about 10%. [] This story continues at The Next Web

Adobe Fireflys audio tools became generally available on Thursday. Generate Music, Generate Speech and Generate Sound Effects now sit beside the image, video and design tools in its creative AI studio. Each runs on a different model. Generate Music uses the Firefly Music Model and produces original tracks tuned to a videos length and mood. [] This story continues at The Next Web

The United States conducted 178 orbital launches and re-entries last year, but the White House now wants at least a thousand a year by 2030. President Donald Trump signed a memorandum on Thursday directing federal agencies to clear the path to that number, largely by getting out of the way. It instructs them to speed [] This story continues at The Next Web

Brazil is spending 2.3bn reais, about $444m, on two AI supercomputers. One will be built with Huawei, the other is expected to go to Nvidia, and that is the entire point. The strategy is not to depend on a single company, technology or country, the Lula government said in setting out the plan, which is [] This story continues at The Next Web

Pew found strong signs of AI authorship in around 10% of a random sample of webpages in July 2026, rising to more than a third among pages published since ChatGPTs release. Commercial domains carry most of it, at about 10% of .com against roughly 1% of .edu and .gov. About a tenth of the web [] This story continues at The Next Web

At just 23, Sean Grindal is betting on an idea he has watched take shape across a decade in software: that the hardest part of AI tools is no longer what they can do, but how few people can figure out how to use them. In a category racing to add features, he believes the [] This story continues at The Next Web

Bilibili has relaunched its international app without identity verification, plans an English-language website and is hiring community managers in six cities including London. The company says content on its international and Chinese sites will be the same. Bilibili is making a serious attempt at the world outside China. The video platform has relaunched its international [] This story continues at The Next Web

Anthropic expects its IPO to match or exceed SpaceXs record $75bn raise, and could file publicly as soon as the end of this month. It made a net loss of almost $42bn in 2025, five times the year before. Anthropic expects its stock market debut to match or beat the largest one ever held. SpaceX [] This story continues at The Next Web