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

Google downplays AI's environmental impact in new study

AI and society

Meta's human-like chatbot personas can mislead users and result in real-world harm

AI and society

US think tank warns of "reverse brain drain" in China's AI sector

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AI and society
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According to Forbes, the AI startup Cognition is negotiating with investors for funding of over 300 million US dollars at a valuation of 10 billion US dollars. Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures are among those involved. As recently as March, Cognition was valued at 4 billion US dollars, led by 8VC, the company of Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. According to a source, the talks have not yet been finalized. Cognition is known for its programming agent Devin and recently acquired the rest of the AI coding start-up Windsurf after its founders unexpectedly switched to Google and OpenAI's planned takeover fell through.

Cognition, the AI startup behind the Devin coding agent, is reportedly in talks with investors to raise over $300 million at a $10 billion valuation, according to Forbes. Investors involved include Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures. Just in March, Cognition was valued at $4 billion in a round led by 8VC, the venture firm founded by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. The current negotiations are not yet finalized.

Cognition recently acquired the remaining assets of Windsurf, another AI coding startup, after Windsurf's founder unexpectedly joined Google and a planned acquisition by OpenAI fell through.

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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei admits his company is making compromises with authoritarian regimes in the race to build advanced AI.

"Unfortunately, I think 'No bad person should ever benefit from our success' is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on," Amodei wrote in an internal Slack message to staff, obtained by WIRED. "This is a real downside and I'm not thrilled about it."

Amodei acknowledged that Anthropic will seek investment from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, even though this would "enrich dictators." Previously, Amodei had argued that "Democracies need to be able to set the terms by which powerful AI is brought into the world, both to avoid being overpowered by authoritarians and to prevent human rights abuses within authoritarian countries." Explaining the shift, he pointed to the vast amounts of capital available in the Middle East: "There is a truly giant amount of capital in the Middle East, easily $100B or more. If we want to stay on the frontier, we gain a very large benefit from having access to this capital. Without it, it is substantially harder to stay on the frontier."

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The UK government has announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI focused on joint research into AI safety and potential investments in British AI infrastructure, including new data centers. OpenAI may also expand its London office. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said the goal is to position the UK as a global leader in AI. According to Technology Secretary Peter Kyle, the government wants AI to drive improvements in healthcare, education, and economic growth. Plans include investing £1 billion in computing power. The coalition is banking on AI to boost productivity by 1.5 percent per year, which could add £47 billion to the economy over the next decade.

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Nvidia announced at the RISC-V Summit China that it will open up its CUDA platform to support RISC-V processors. For the first time, CUDA will extend beyond x86 and Arm to include an open instruction set architecture. According to Nvidia, RISC-V CPUs can now serve as the central processing component in CUDA systems, including Jetson modules and specialized edge devices. The company showcased a reference architecture pairing RISC-V CPUs for operating system and logic tasks with Nvidia GPUs for compute workloads and DPUs for networking. This move could help expand CUDA's reach in markets like China.

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Meta will not sign the EU Commission's Code of Practice for General Purpose AI, citing legal uncertainty and stricter requirements than the planned EU AI law. Joel Kaplan, Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer, said the code could slow down AI progress in Europe and affect European companies.

"Europe is heading down the wrong path on AI."

Joel Kaplan

OpenAI, by contrast, said last week it will sign the code, viewing it as a workable way to meet EU rules and grow its presence in the region. Google and Anthropic have not stated their positions.

Some European AI companies, including Mistral, recently asked the EU to delay the AI Act for two years, but the Commission declined.

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AI in practice

Anthropic confirms technical bugs after weeks of complaints about declining Claude code quality

AI and society

Anthropic settles landmark AI copyright lawsuit for at least $1.5 billion

AI in practice

Microsoft presents its first large AI models and signals greater independence from OpenAI

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