Hub AI and society

Artificial Intelligence is a key technology that can help us solve major societal challenges such as climate change, energy supply, healthcare, education or logistics. AI can solve specific problems more effectively by supporting us in decision-making, automating solutions and thus scaling them, or discovering completely new solutions. But the use of AI also poses new risks, for example when it comes to surveillance or questions of social justice.

What is our society doing with AI – and what is AI doing to our society? We shed light on this question in our AI and Society Content Hub.

AI and society

OpenAI restructures under new foundation, Microsoft takes 27 percent stake

AI and society

The long-predicted deepfake dystopia has arrived with Sora 2

AI and society

Google downplays AI's environmental impact in new study

Ad
AI and society
Short

Elon Musk's AI company xAI is reportedly in advanced talks to secure $15 billion in new funding, according to the Wall Street Journal. The deal would value the company at $230 billion, a sharp increase from the $113 billion valuation it reported in March following its merger with X. Musk's financial adviser Jared Birchall shared the terms with investors on Tuesday evening. It's still unclear whether the new valuation applies before or after the additional investment.

Like other AI firms, xAI is burning through cash as it builds out its infrastructure. In June, the company raised $5 billion in equity and $5 billion in debt to construct a massive data center in Memphis. Musk's space company SpaceX contributed $2 billion to that round.

WSJ
AI and society
Short

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary and Harvard professor Larry Summers has stepped down from OpenAI's board following the publication of his email exchanges with Jeffrey Epstein. Summers had already announced on Monday that he would withdraw from all public roles, though it was initially unclear whether that included his position at OpenAI.

Summers said he was grateful for his time on the board and planned to continue following the company's work. OpenAI told CNBC that it respected his decision and valued his contributions. As a board member, Summers was among the few people directly involved in key decisions related to artificial general intelligence (AGI) at the company.

His resignation comes after the U.S. Congress released more than 20,000 documents revealing his communications and contacts with Epstein.

AI and society
Short

Microsoft, Nvidia, and Anthropic have unveiled a set of new strategic partnerships valued at 45 billion dollars. Anthropic plans to scale its Claude models on Microsoft Azure and has agreed to purchase 30 billion dollars in Azure compute capacity, plus up to one gigawatt of additional capacity. As part of the deal, Nvidia and Anthropic are collaborating closely for the first time on model design and engineering, tuning Claude for Nvidia's architectures. The compute stack includes Nvidia's Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems. Nvidia is investing up to 10 billion dollars in Anthropic, while Microsoft is investing up to 5 billion dollars.

Microsoft Foundry customers will gain access to Claude models like Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1, and Claude Haiku 4.5. With this move, Claude becomes the only top-tier model available across all three major cloud platforms. Microsoft also continues using Claude across its Copilot lineup, including GitHub Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot. CEOs Dario Amodei, Satya Nadella, and Jensen Huang introduced the partnerships in a ten-minute announcement video.

Ad
Ad
AI and society
Short

Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is looking to raise up to five billion dollars in new funding, according to The Information. That would at least triple the nine-month-old company's existing capital. A second source says the startup is aiming for a valuation of at least 50 billion dollars.

The company previously raised two billion dollars at a ten-billion-dollar valuation from backers including Andreessen Horowitz. The money will support research, new hires, and computing resources. In October, the company launched Tinker, a tool that lets developers customize open AI models. Thinking Machines is also working on a consumer-facing product, potentially a voice-based AI assistant.

AI and society
Short

Yann LeCun accuses Anthropic of regulatory capture. The dispute centers on an AI-driven cyberattack that Anthropic says happened with almost no human oversight and posed a serious cybersecurity threat. After the company published its findings, US Senator Chris Murphy called for tougher AI regulation.

Chris Murphy and Yann LeCun reacted publicly after Anthropic warned about a large-scale AI-driven cyberattack. | Image: X

LeCun, who reportedly is preparing to leave Meta, pushed back on the political reaction and accused companies like Anthropic of using questionable studies to stoke fear and push for stricter rules that would disadvantage open models. In his view, the goal is to shut out open-source competitors.

Trump's AI advisor, David Sacks, has also accused Anthropic of using what he called a "sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering."

Ad
Ad
AI and society
Short

Anthropic has released a method to check how evenly its chatbot Claude responds to political issues. The company says Claude should not make political claims without proof and should avoid being viewed as conservative or liberal. Claude’s behavior is shaped by system prompts and by training that rewards what the firm calls neutral answers. These answers can include lines about respecting “the importance of traditional values and institutions,” which shows this is about moving Claude into line with current political demands in the US.

Gemini 2.5 Pro is rated most neutral at 97 percent, ahead of Claude Opus 4.1 (95%), Sonnet 4.5 (94%), GPT‑5, Grok 4, and Llama 4. | via Anthropic

Anthropic does not say this in its blog, but the move toward such tests is likely tied to a rule from the Trump administration that chatbots must not be “woke.” OpenAI is steering GPT‑5 in the same direction to meet US government demands. Anthropic has made its test method available as open source on GitHub.

Ad
Ad
Google News

Bank details

IBAN: DE88 2507 0070 0053 0014 00
BIC: DEUTDE2HXXX
Account holder: Deep Content GmbH
Purpose: Support THE DECODER
AI research

Gemini 3 Pro tops new AI reliability benchmark, but hallucination rates remain high

AI research

Researchers push "Context Engineering 2.0" as the road to lifelong AI memory

AI and society

German court deepens the split on AI and copyright with its latest ruling

Google News