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Xiaomi has opened a second front in its rapid march into carmaking, confirming on Thursday a new SUV series called Sky Nomad and offering the first proper look at the boxy family hauler that will lead it. The move pushes the smartphone maker squarely into Chinas most lucrative vehicle segment, and away from the sports-saloon [] This story continues at The Next Web

Honeywell Technologies raised its profit targets for the second half and full year of 2026 on Wednesday, though the increase is almost entirely mechanical, reflecting a one-for-two reverse stock split rather than a stronger business. The move came from the same industrial group whose quantum computing armstaged one of the years largest technology listings, and [] This story continues at The Next Web

A federal judge has approved the Securities and Exchange Commissions settlement with Elon Musk over his late disclosure of a Twitter stake, closing a case that has run for years. US District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan entered the consent judgment on Wednesday in Washington, DC, despite what she described as significant misgivings about the deal. [] This story continues at The Next Web

NATO is building a vast AI network along its eastern flank, designed to spot an attack early and strike back fast. The plan is called the Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative, and internal documents name one adversary outright: Russia. German tabloid BILD obtained the papers and shared them through the Axel Springer network, Business Insider reported. [] This story continues at The Next Web

An economics professor at Brown University suspects most of his class cheated with AI, and he has the numbers to make the case. Roberto Serrano watched his take-home midterm average hit 96 out of 100. When he switched the final to an in-person test, the average fell to 48. He has taken the story public, [] This story continues at The Next Web

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a directive on Wednesday demanding autonomous vehicle developers present solutions to a clear pattern of driverless vehicles interfering with first responders and law enforcement. Administrator Jonathan Morrison said vehicles have driven into active emergency scenes, blocked ambulances and firefighters, and failed to recognise flashing lights, flares, smoke, fire, [] This story continues at The Next Web

A busy 24 hours for AI and deep-tech money, from a $300m quantum bet to Paris voice AI and Europes energy startups. Here are the rounds worth knowing. The cash keeps flowing into AI and deep tech. The past day alone brought a $300m quantum raise, a fresh billion-dollar AI-agent valuation, and European bets on [] This story continues at The Next Web

Manna Aero, the Ireland-based autonomous drone delivery startup, is setting up a US operations and manufacturing centre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that will employ about 1,000 people over the next several years. Construction is underway, with manufacturing expected to begin in about a year. The expansion is fuelled by the $50 million in venture capital Manna [] This story continues at The Next Web

NATO wants a cloud it can trust under fire. Its technology agency has signed a contract worth about 200 million with Accenture and Italys Leonardo to build one. Accenture announced the deal on Tuesday, struck at the NATO summit in Ankara. NATO calls the programme the Protected Business Network. It will give the Alliance a [] This story continues at The Next Web

Cloudflare has spent a year arming websites against AI crawlers. Now it wants to help one crawl better. The company said on Wednesday it is running a research pilot with OpenAI to test whether its network data can make AI search more accurate. Cloudflare sits in front of more than a fifth of the web. [] This story continues at The Next Web

OpenAI wants the work that once belonged to consultants. Its deployment arm has agreed to buy Northslope, an applied-AI firm, the company told Axios in an exclusive on Wednesday. It did not disclose terms, and the deal still needs regulatory clearance. The purchase marks its second in two months. The OpenAI Deployment Company launched in [] This story continues at The Next Web

Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch and Mozilla president Mark Surman were making the case for open-source AIs reliability at RAISE Summit. Then the venue lost power, and their fireside chat finished almost in the dark. It was, in fairness, the perfect cue. Midway through a RAISE Summit fireside chat on open-source AI, the Master Stage lost [] This story continues at The Next Web

A year ago, Iluvatar CoreX was a Shanghai chipmaker that sold mostly to the Chinese state. This week it is trying to raise about $850m from investors who cannot seem to get enough of it, according to Bloomberg, riding a share price that has more than tripled since January. The rally is really the whole [] This story continues at The Next Web

Apple is spending big to make chips at home. It has committed to a multi-year Broadcom deal worth more than $30 billion, Apple announced on Wednesday. That makes it Apples largest US manufacturing pledge to date. The scale is the story. The deal should yield more than 15 billion US-made chips and support hundreds of [] This story continues at The Next Web

The US-China AI split hardened this week. Beijing branded Anthropics Claude Code a security back-door, just as US lawmakers moved against American firms that lean on cheap Chinese models. China has told companies to drop Anthropics Claude Code. Its Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said its cybersecurity platform found the coding tool carries a [] This story continues at The Next Web

Entire, the developer-platform startup founded by former GitHub chief executive Thomas Dohmke, has launched a preview of a distributed Git network built for the age of AI coding agents. The pitch is to spread code hosting across regions rather than lean on a single central provider. The reasoning is a familiar strain in the agent [] This story continues at The Next Web

Jeff Bezos is opening Blue Origin to outside money at last, in a round that values the rocket firm at $130 billion, CNBC reports. It follows Elon Musks record SpaceX IPO and pits the two space fortunes against each other again. Blue Origin is raising outside capital for the first time. Jeff Bezoss rocket company [] This story continues at The Next Web

Britains tech secretary backs driverless cars and British AI startups. The likely next prime ministers team has doubts, and her own job is on the line. Liz Kendall wants Britain to back its own AI companies before someone else does. In a Sifted podcast, Kendall, the UKs science and technology secretary, made a pointed case [] This story continues at The Next Web

At the Raise summit in Paris, two enterprise leaders asked why AI agents keep stalling in pilots. Their fix starts with people, not models. Most enterprises stall. Their AI agents run in pilots and never reach production. That was the blunt diagnosis from Daniel Dines, chief executive of UiPath. He spoke at the RAISE CxO [] This story continues at The Next Web

Fleek, a London startup building the software plumbing behind the global secondhand clothing trade, has raised $25m in Series B funding to scale the AI it uses to sort, grade and price used garments. The round takes the companys total funding to $45m. It was led by Burda Principal Investments, an early backer ofVintedand a [] This story continues at The Next Web

Lovable, the Swedish vibe-coding startup, is in talks to raise $300m at a $13.2bn post-money valuation,Sifted reports, citing two people familiar with the deal. The figure would roughly double the $6.6bn valuation it commanded at its$330m Series B in December. The round is still under discussion rather than done, so the numbers could shift, and [] This story continues at The Next Web

For a few hours on Wednesday morning, chunks of Australias daily infrastructure simply stopped answering. A nationwide outage at Telstra, the countrys largest carrier, cut phone service for thousands of customers, froze tap-to-pay terminals and brought regional trains to a halt. The disruption began at about 4.30am and spread through systems that most people never [] This story continues at The Next Web

ResMed has agreed to sell MatrixCare, its home-health and senior-care software business, to the private equity firm Frazier Healthcare Partners for $490m in cash. The deal lets the medical-device maker part with a unit it had owned for years to focus on the machines that remain its core. MatrixCare is a decent-sized business in its [] This story continues at The Next Web

OpenAI has been cleared to release its most advanced model widely, after the US government signed off on a broader rollout of GPT-5.6 that had been held back for weeks under Washingtons new oversight regime for frontier AI. Until now the model had been available only through arestricted preview to about 20 partnerswhose names were [] This story continues at The Next Web

The New Zealand government has ruled out restricting or banning VPNs as part of its planned under-16 social media ban. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Education Minister Erica Stanford both moved to kill the idea after a rapid privacy backlash,TechRadar reports. I can reject that outright. Theres no plan to ban VPNs at all, Luxon [] This story continues at The Next Web

Toyota will invest $3.6bn to expand its San Antonio plant and move some Tacoma pickup production from Mexico to Texas. The carmaker announced the plan on Monday, adding a second assembly line,according to CNBC. President Donald Trump quickly claimed the move as proof his trade policy is working. Thats what tariffs do, properly used, he [] This story continues at The Next Web

Google, Meta, Spotify and Sony have taken Belgium to Europes top court. They say its copyright law forces platforms to pay creators far beyond what the EU intended. Four of the biggest names in tech asked the EUs Court of Justice on Tuesday to rein in Belgium. They say the country rewrote who gets paid [] This story continues at The Next Web

OpenAI is recruiting an investment-banking expert to help train its AI on the trade. Thejob listingseeks a subject matter expert with at least two years of investment experience for its Applied AI team in San Francisco. Base pay runs from $185,000 to $205,000, with equity on top,Business Insider reports. That equity sweetener carries new weight [] This story continues at The Next Web

Scotlands governing party wants to freeze every new datacentre in the country. If ministers agree, a core pillar of the UKs AI strategy could stall. The Scottish government is weighing a sweeping moratorium on new datacentres. Last Sunday, the Scottish National Party (SNP) voted to freeze all new builds, the Guardian reports. The motion now [] This story continues at The Next Web

Meta launched Muse Image on Tuesday, its first image-generation AI model built under the Superintelligence Labs division led by Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang. The model is rolling out inside the Meta AI chatbot and will be embedded across Instagram and WhatsApp. Users can generate images from text prompts or alter existing pictures. The most [] This story continues at The Next Web

Waymos robotaxis had a rough Fourth of July. In San Francisco they ran out of charge, snarled traffic for hours, and one drove over a lit firework and caught fire. Over the holiday weekend, driverless Waymo cars became the story instead of the technology. In San Francisco, dozens stalled in the gridlock after the Golden [] This story continues at The Next Web

Chinas open AI models have been a gift to developers everywhere. Now Beijing may pull them back in. Chinese officials have discussed limiting who outside the country can use the nations best AI models, Reuters reports. The Ministry of Commerce ran the meetings over the past month, and Alibaba, ByteDance, and the startup Z.ai took [] This story continues at The Next Web

Hackers are constantly looking for new ways to gain access to businesses and its rare that its through the front door. For most organisationscybersecuritystill focuses on protecting internal systems and preventing unauthorised access through measures such as firewalls, encryption and employee training. However, this approach assumes that attackers are trying to gain access directly. It [] This story continues at The Next Web

Axos is buying Arc Technologies, an AI-native fintech that banks tech startups, and bolting its software onto a chartered bank. Axos Financial, a US digital bank with about $29bn in assets, has agreed to acquire Arc Technologies, the company announced. Arc runs a financial platform for technology and growth companies, bundling cash management, debt financing, [] This story continues at The Next Web

The internet fractured one giant audience into thousands of tight-knit communities, and the brands paying attention are following the trust, not the follower count. Having run performance-based influencer marketing campaigns across more than 2,000 brand partnerships, Tallinn-basedOdiencehas started to notice some patterns. One of them, harder to ignore than the rest, is that creators driving [] This story continues at The Next Web

For years, electricity costs at the Belden Brick Company in Sugarcreek, Ohio, barely moved. Last year they jumped by 90%, driven largely by the data centres multiplying across the region to feed the AI boom. The 141-year-old manufacturer, whose bricks feature in landmarks including the Alamo and the University of Notre Dame, traced most of [] This story continues at The Next Web

AI agents can write code and answer questions, but they still fall apart on long, messy jobs. A Mountain View startup just raised $40M to build the training grounds that fix that. Bespoke Labs, which builds the environments that train and test AI agents, has raised $40 million, the company announced. The total spans a [] This story continues at The Next Web

DeepSeek is designing its own artificial-intelligence chip, according to a Reuters reportpublished on Monday that cited people familiar with the matter. The move, if it holds up, would push Chinas most closely watched AI lab from writing software that runs on other companies silicon to specifying the silicon itself. The Hangzhou startup has spent the [] This story continues at The Next Web

Nobel Prize-winning economist has poured cold water on the idea that artificial intelligence will haul Western economies back into an era of rapid productivity growth, warning that the fast-growth years may already be gone for good. Christopher Pissarides, who shared the 2010 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics and teaches at the London School of Economics, [] This story continues at The Next Web

Expeditions, the Warsaw-based venture firm backed by BAE Systems and the NATO Innovation Fund, has closed a 197m ($225m) fund to back the next wave of European defence startups. The raise caps a boom that has seen defence prime BAE commit 50M to outside VCsandventure capital pour into the continents defence techat record speed. The [] This story continues at The Next Web