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Trade Wars
CEOs of Anthropic And Google DeepMind Call For U.S.-Led AI Coalition In Meeting At G7
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis called for a U.S.-led coalition to shape rules and standards around artificial intelligence at a meeting with tech leaders and heads of state, including President Donald Trump, CNBC has learned. The closed-door lunch meeting took place on Wednesday at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, France. Amodei and Hassabis both proposed international cooperation on AI, with the U.S. taking the lead, to protect against risks associated with the emerging technology, according to two people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to discuss the meeting.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney agreed that the U.S. could lead an AI coalition, according to one of the people and another person familiar with the discussions. The gathering follows the release of increasingly powerful AI models with cyber capabilities so advanced that some industry experts have raised concerns that they can cause major disasters if left in the wrong hands. Most recently, Anthropic disabled access to its newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, on Friday after the U.S. government imposed export controls on the models, citing national security concerns.
Read more at CNBC
Olin Inks Deal With Huntsman To Form $12B Chemicals Giant
Chemical giants Olin and Huntsman have struck an all-stock deal to merge and create a North American entity valued at $12.5 billion, based on the companies’ combined 2025 revenue. The combined company will be renamed OlinHuntsman. In a joint press release, the companies said it will beneft from increased scale, scope and chlorine flexibility that will “create value across markets and cycles.” The merger is expected to close in the first half of 2027. Upon completion, Olin shareholders will own about 54.5% and Huntsman shareholders will own approximately 45.5% of the combined company.
The pending deal will combine Olin’s manufacturing and feedstock capabilities, including chlorine and caustic soda, with Huntsman’s downstream products, including polyurethanes, and formulation expertise, according to the release. The combination would also allow OlinHuntsman to grow with its customers at multiple stages in the value chain, using “lower-cost producer economics” to increase profitability. Furthermore, the merger would enable the new company to “pursue opportunities that neither business could fully capture on its own,” Olin President and CEO Ken Lane said in a statement.
Read more at Manufacturing Dive
AIA Report Tracks Challenge Of Scaling Digital Thread
EY surveyed 57 leaders of AIA member organizations across commercial and military aviation, space systems, unmanned platforms, and components and subsystems, to understand how digital threads are being implemented and used. Digital thread, not to be confused with digital twins, is data across the end-to-end lifecycle, connecting design, manufacturing and operational information. Given the large amount of data across ecosystems and industries, AIA and EY wanted to see how digital thread is playing out in aerospace and defense organizations. The goal was to understand where the adoption of the technology stands, why scaling stalls and what leaders who succeed do differently.
“Understanding how that data is related together and how we can better utilize and leverage that data to increase velocity while maintaining our shared priorities would be an interesting topic to explore in our industry,” Tim White, AIA’s VP for engineering and technology said. Digital thread could speed up and improve operational efficiency for companies. About 87% surveyed said they’re familiar with digital thread, revealing that leaders in aerospace and defense believe in that promise. The survey results suggest that digital thread has “broad conceptual support but often lacks the enterprise‑wide ownership, governance and operating‑model integration required to scale,” according to the report. The most consistent theme from the interviews was that ownership, not technology, is the constraint.
Read more at Manufacturing Dive
Samsung Sees More Chipmaking Requests as TSMC Capacity Tightens
According to a report from Nikkei Asia, Samsung Foundry has seen a surge in inquiries from existing and potential global customers. The clients seek to use the Korean firm’s advanced chip manufacturing capacity. Google is considering using Samsung to make its next-gen Axion chips and parts of its AI Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), possibly as early as 2028. Meanwhile, BYD, China’s leading EV maker, is in discussions with Samsung regarding its future autonomous-driving chips. AMD is considering building future CPUs with Samsung from 2028. The Korean foundry already makes Nvidia’s Groq language processing units (LPUs).
Moreover, Tesla works with Samsung (alongside TSMC) for its AI5 chips, which power autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots. The Korean firm will also make the car maker’s AI6 chips in Texas, and the contract value may increase further from the original $16.5 billion. Customers are leaning toward Samsung due to capacity constraints at TSMC, the leader in the global foundry market. If Samsung continues to see increasing requests for advanced chip production, this will be a big win for its foundry business. The company has been struggling to earn profits for many years despite being the world’s second-largest foundry.
Read more at SammyGuru
Neura Defense Systems Launches AI Platform to Address Evolving Drone Threats
As low-cost drones increasingly reshape modern warfare, defense organizations are confronting a growing challenge: many of the most effective unmanned aerial threats can evade traditional detection and countermeasure systems. Neura Defense Systems (NDS), a Saint Petersburg, Florida-based defense technology company, has emerged from stealth mode with an autonomous counter-swarm platform designed to identify and respond to drone threats that conventional systems often miss. “The drones that matter most right now are the ones legacy systems can’t see,” said Sam Talari, founder and CEO of Neura Defense Systems. “Our platform runs on sensors operators already have, sees threats others miss, and keeps a human in command of every engagement.”
The company’s AI-powered platform combines data from multiple sensor types, including radar, electro-optical and infrared (EO/IR), radio frequency (RF), and acoustic systems, creating a unified operational picture for military operators. By integrating information from both commercial and military sensors, the platform is designed to detect, classify, and prioritize drone threats while keeping human operators responsible for authorizing engagement decisions.
Read more at CityBiz
SpaceX Locks In $60 Billion Cursor Deal To Close Gap With Rivals In AI Coding Race
Elon Musk's SpaceX is buying the startup behind the popular AI coding agent Cursor, Anysphere, for $60 billion in an all-stock deal to boost its presence in the lucrative enterprise AI tools market. Tuesday's deal follows a blockbuster Nasdaq debut for the rockets-to-AI company last week, in which its valuation surged to more than $2 trillion. The acquisition will give xAI, which was acquired by SpaceX in February, a stronger hold in AI coding, one of the first areas where companies have turned AI into a real source of revenue from businesses. SpaceX had been eyeing Cursor for months and had in April unveiled an option to either buy the startup for $60 billion later this year or pay $10 billion for a partnership.
Cursor is one of several Silicon Valley startups that have drawn waves of developers by using AI to automate coding, making it a key rival to market leaders Anthropic and OpenAI. But a lack of access to computing power has hampered Cursor's growth. "Cursor does not have the scale of OpenAI or Anthropic, but it has built some very impressive coding models relative to cost. That makes this a positive move for SpaceX," said Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.
Read more at Reuters
Could Agentic AI Make Robots Affordable for Small Business?
We’re nearly at the end of the AI hype cycle, when suggestions for how to leverage the technology become less flashy and more realistic. Like, for instance, the new agentic AI technology named Eigen, that Siemens revealed at this year’s Hannover Messe automation fair. Siemens pitches Eigen (a pun as the word means own in German but phonetically sounds like AI gen) as a brand-agnostic AI agent that can replace manual coding or programming for programmable logic controllers (PLC), distributed control systems (DCS) and robotics applications, updating code or instructions to reflect new priorities and goals.
According to Rainer Brehm, CEO of Siemens’ automation business and CTO for Siemens Digital Industries, Siemens in its operations sees that engineering and reconfigurations constitute 70% of the entire lifecycle cost of a robot. If, however, an AI agent like Eigen can shorten the time needed to make these adjustments, it makes the robot more efficient, and SMBs might be better able to afford deploying the technology. “There’s a kind of new age of automation arising, because [with AI assistance to program robots and PLCs] means you could suddenly automate much smaller lot sizes on a good return of investment,” says Brehm. Humans must always remain in the loop, however, says Kumar. Agentic AI is like an orchestra and humans the conductors.
Read more at Foundry
El Niño Is Here, So What Does It Mean?
This summer was already predicted to be hot for much of the planet, after a near-record year of global heat last year. But El Niño — the influential weather pattern associated with heat, unlike the cooler La Niña — has arrived, and it's raising more alarm. "If we have a big El Niño on top of the long-term warming trend, that just really enhances the probability that we'll see a new record global mean temperature," says meteorologist Nat Johnson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who is part of the El Niño forecasting team. A strong El Niño would drive up average global temperatures. The hottest years on record generally occur in years when El Niño is active, because it occurs when the Eastern Pacific is hotter than usual.
During a typical El Niño, Johnson says, "impacts tend to be strongest in the mid-latitudes and the higher latitudes in the late fall and winter seasons." The southern U.S. mainland would see wetter weather, while the northernmost contiguous U.S. would see warmer conditions, Johnson says, adding that the Pacific Northwest tends to be drier. On the eastern side of the U.S., El Niño makes it harder for hurricanes to form in the Atlantic Ocean, so they often coincide with less severe hurricane seasons. However, El Niño offers limited protection, since it only takes one major storm making landfall to cause catastrophic damage. Climate change has also caused temperatures in the Atlantic to soar, providing more fuel for storms that do form. And El Niño does nothing to temper storms that form in the Pacific.
Read more at NPR
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