Autonomous trucking startup Bot Auto says it has delivered its first "fully humanless" over-the-road commercial truckload in Texas, marking another key milestone for the American trucking industry.
Why it matters: The 230-mile run between Houston and Dallas was not a pilot or demonstration. It was a paid commercial delivery made directly to a customer's loading dock.
The House passed a 45-day clean extension of Section 702 of FISA — the government's warrantless surveillance authority — after the Senate failed to accept the House's long-term extension of the program.
Why it matters: The national security tool won't lapse Thursday night, but lawmakers are punting another thorny fight just weeks down the road.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is calling on Washington to collaborate with China on AI, breaking from a bipartisan approach that frames AI development as a race between the two countries.
Why it matters: Sanders, who is writing the progressive playbook on AI, is shifting the focus away from U.S.-China competition and toward international cooperation around AI safety.
Former Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia, a longtime Microsoft server boss, is backing JuliaHub, a startup that sees a role for AI agents designing complex products such as cars and airplanes.
Why it matters: JuliaHub is betting AI plus Julia, the open-source technical computing language, can challenge Simulink, MathWorks' decades-old tool for modeling and simulating complex systems.
Why it matters: The bluebuck — a member of the antelope family once found in modern-day South Africa — was hunted to extinction more than two centuries ago.
Citi is rolling out a new internal AI platform that lets employees create agents, tapping into top models within one secure system that can scale those agents across the firm.
Why it matters: The AI race is playing out on Wall Street as much as it is in Silicon Valley, and banks are racing to offer the best AI models to employees without compromising on safety.
What did investors take away from the four Big Tech companies reporting earnings late Wednesday? If you're going to spend big on AI, you better have the growth to justify it.
Why it matters: Investors are over CEOs hyping AI and ready for CFOs to start explaining the return on their AI spending.
NTT Data, a major data center operator, is buying carbon removal credits from startup Climeworks to help meet its climate goals, the companies exclusively shared with Axios on Thursday.
Why it matters: Surging energy demand from AI is increasing scrutiny of data centers' emissions — and could expand the pool of buyers for carbon removal as the sector faces setbacks.
The AI industry has entered an era of perpetual upheaval where market leaders are crowned — and dethroned — every few months.
Today's hottest company could be eclipsed by summer and the laggard could revolutionize the world.
Why it matters: As AI changes everything, keeping up with who's dominant and who's falling behind is becoming an existential question for investors, big businesses and regular users trying to guarantee their own futures.
Elon Musk portrayed himself in court this week as a leading advocate for AI safety — in contrast to what he described as the profit-consumed OpenAI that he's suing.
Why it matters: Musk's self-portrait as a guardian of AI safety clashed with OpenAI's counterargument: that Musk was fine with a for-profit OpenAI when he thought he could control it.
How the debate over Musk's motivations is resolved could be key to the outcome of the lawsuit the richest man in the world is waging against OpenAI.
