Short News Archive

Feb 17, 2026

Indian conglomerate Adani plans to invest roughly $100 billion in AI-capable data centers powered by renewable energy by 2035. The Adani Group is a major conglomerate with business operations spanning ports to energy. According to Reuters, the company expects the investment to trigger an additional $150 billion in related industries like server manufacturing and cloud platforms - creating a $250 billion AI infrastructure ecosystem in India.

Adani aims to expand its data center capacity from 2 to 5 gigawatts. On top of that, the company is putting $55 billion into renewable energy. Adani already works with Google and is building a second AI data center with Walmart subsidiary Flipkart. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Reliance are also investing in India's AI infrastructure. The announcement came during the India AI Impact Summit 2026.

Comment Source: Reuters

Maximilian Schreiner

Feb 17, 2026

Short News

Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) has launched a comprehensive investigation into Elon Musk's platform X. The probe focuses on AI-generated sexualized images of real people, including children, created using the Grok chatbot integrated into X.

The DPC is examining whether X violated core obligations under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) - including lawful data processing, data protection by design, and the requirement to conduct a data protection impact assessment before launching risky features. Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle said the authority has been in contact with X since the first media reports surfaced several weeks ago.

In early January, users created thousands of sexualized deepfakes using Grok, sparking sharp criticism from users, security experts, and politicians, along with multiple regulatory investigations.

Comment Source: Dataprotection

Matthias Bastian

Feb 14, 2026

Short News

WIRED reporter Reece Rogers rented out his body to AIs. He tested RentAHuman, a platform where AI agents pay people for real-world tasks. Despite an hourly rate of just 5 dollars, no bot reached out.

He started applying on his own. One gig offered 10 dollars to listen to a podcast and tweet about it, but he never heard back. An AI agent called Adi offered 110 dollars to deliver flowers and marketing materials to Anthropic for an AI startup. When Rogers hesitated, the bot bombarded him with ten messages in 24 hours and even emailed him.

While I’ve been micromanaged before, these incessant messages from an AI employer gave me the ick.

On his third try, Rogers took a gig putting up flyers for 50 cents each. He cabbed to the pickup spot, but the contact changed the meeting point mid-ride. At the new location, he was told the flyers weren't ready—come back that afternoon. After two days, Rogers hadn't made a penny, and every task turned out to be advertising for AI startups.

Comment Source: WIRED

Matthias Bastian

Feb 14, 2026

Short News

Google and OpenAI are complaining about data theft—yes, you read that right. According to Google, Gemini was hit with a massive cloning attempt through distillation, with a single campaign firing over 100,000 requests at the model, NBC News reports. Google calls it intellectual property theft, pointing to companies and researchers chasing a competitive edge.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has sent a memo to the US Congress accusing DeepSeek of using disguised methods to copy American AI models. The memo also flags China's energy buildout, ten times the new electricity capacity the US added by 2025, and confirms ChatGPT is growing at around ten percent per month.

Distillation floods a model with targeted prompts to extract its internal logic, especially its "reasoning steps," then uses that knowledge to build a cheaper clone, potentially skipping billions in training costs. Google security head John Hultquist warns smaller companies running their own AI models face the same risk, particularly if those models were trained on sensitive business data.

Comment Source: NBC News | OpenAI

Matthias Bastian

Feb 13, 2026

Short News

xAI has lost half of its founders in recent weeks and months. Elon Musk said on X that some departures were part of a restructuring where "unfortunately we had to part with some people" to "improve speed of execution."

But former employees tell a different story. One ex-employee told The Verge that many people at the company had grown disillusioned with Grok's focus on NSFW content and its lack of safety standards. A second former employee backed that up: "There is zero safety whatsoever in the company." According to the source, Musk deliberately pushed to make the model less restricted, viewing safety measures as censorship. Among other things, Grok had generated sexualized images of children.

You survive by shutting up and doing what Elon wants.

Another common complaint is that xAI is "stuck in the catch-up phase" without shipping anything fundamentally new compared to OpenAI or Anthropic, even though they're all trying to do the same thing anyway. Several people who left are now using money from the SpaceX merger to start their own companies, including AI infrastructure startup Nuraline.

Comment Source: The Verge | Musk via X

Matthias Bastian

Feb 13, 2026

Short News

Anthropic recruits ex-Google data center veterans to build its own AI infrastructure empire

Anthropic is discussing building at least 10 gigawatts of data center capacity worth hundreds of billions of dollars, recruiting ex-Google managers and lining up Google as a financial backer to make it happen.

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Maximilian Schreiner

Feb 13, 2026

Short News

Anthropic has closed a $30 billion Series G funding round, bringing the AI company's post-money valuation to $380 billion.

The round was led by GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, and U.S. investment firm Coatue. D. E. Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ, and MGX, an Abu Dhabi-based technology investment fund, joined as co-leads. Microsoft and Nvidia also participated, building on previously announced strategic partnerships. Anthropic says it will use the capital for research, product development, and infrastructure expansion.

Anthropic reports annualized revenue of $14 billion, having grown more than tenfold in each of the past three years. Claude Code, the company's coding tool, now accounts for over $2.5 billion in annualized revenue on its own.

One notable detail about how companies are using AI: more than 500 customers spend over $1 million per year on Claude, according to Anthropic, and eight of the ten largest Fortune companies are among its users.

Comment Source: Anthropic

Maximilian Schreiner

Feb 13, 2026

Short News

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicts the end of traditional white-collar work in 18 months.

"I think that we're going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks," Suleyman says in an interview with the Financial Times. "So white-collar work, where you're sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months."

Suleyman leads Microsoft's AI division, which has invested billions in OpenAI and Anthropic and operates Copilot, one of the most widely used AI work tools. He describes the shift as already underway: In software engineering, developers are already using "AI-assisted coding for the vast majority of their code production."

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei even predicted that half of entry-level office jobs could disappear within one to five years. He is already observing that fewer junior and mid-level employees are needed. AI could be better than humans in many areas within one to two years, while the labor market adapts with a delay.

Suleyman's boss, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, on the other hand, sees more of a shift where existing cognitive tasks might be automated, but new, more demanding tasks would emerge.

Comment Source: FT

Matthias Bastian

Feb 12, 2026

Short News

OpenAI is dropping several older AI models from ChatGPT on February 13, 2026: GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and o4-mini. The models will stick around in the API for now. The company says it comes down to usage: only 0.1 percent of users still pick GPT-4o on any given day.

There's a reason OpenAI is being so careful about GPT-4o specifically: the model has a complicated past. OpenAI already killed it once back in August 2025, only to bring it back for paying subscribers after users pushed back hard. Some people had grown genuinely attached to the model, which was known for its complacent, people-pleasing communication style. OpenAI addresses this head-on at the end of the post:

We know that losing access to GPT‑4o will feel frustrating for some users, and we didn’t make this decision lightly. Retiring models is never easy, but it allows us to focus on improving the models most people use today.
OpenAI

OpenAI points to GPT-5.1 and GPT-5.2 as improved successors that incorporate feedback from GPT-4o users. People can now tweak ChatGPT's tone and style, things like warmth and enthusiasm. But that probably won't be enough for the GPT-4o faithful.

Comment Source: OpenAI

Maximilian Schreiner

Feb 12, 2026

Short News

The company plans to fully absorb grid upgrade costs, invest in new power generation, and cap its data centers' energy consumption during peak hours. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told NBC News that the costs of AI models should fall on Anthropic, not on citizens.

Microsoft and OpenAI made similar commitments back in January. The pledges come amid growing political pressure: New York senators introduced a bill that would pause new data center permits, and Senator Van Hollen is pushing legislation that would require AI companies to cover expansion costs themselves.

According to Politico, the Trump administration is also preparing a voluntary agreement that would commit AI companies to covering electricity price increases. The Lawrence Berkeley National Lab estimates that data centers could consume around 12 percent of all US electricity by 2028 - up from 4.4 percent in 2024.

Comment Source: Anthropic | NBC