CMA forces Google opt-out, Alphabet drops 4% on $85B raise, Muse Spark 4th

Sources

Google ordered to put clearer links in AI search and let UK publishers opt out arstechnica.com

Google must change AI Overviews after claiming users don’t want “lots of sources.”

Publishers will be able to opt out of AI Search, thanks to new regulation techcrunch.com

U.K. regulators are requiring Google offer a tool allowing website publishers to opt-out of generative AI search features. The option will be tested in the U.K. then rolled out globally.

Google must let publishers opt out of AI Search features, rules UK theverge.com

Online publishers are getting more control over whether their websites appear in Google’s AI Search features, thanks to a UK regulatory ruling. The new conduct rule imposed by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) requires Google to let website owners keep their content out of features like AI Overviews and prevent it from being used […]

Alphabet’s record-breaking $85B raise for Google’s AI business is a helluva good signal techcrunch.com

If Alphabet’s record-breaking $85 billion stock sale signals investor appetite for AI-related offerings, we can see that investors are ready to chow.

Inside Meta’s attempts to play catch-up with AI arstechnica.com

Doubts linger over whether Meta can close the gap with rivals.

OpenAI public policy agenda openai.com

OpenAI’s June policy push pairs a US governance blueprint for frontier models with a call for an international youth-safety institute. The agenda spans workforce transition, national security resilience, and global standards, positioning the company ahead of expected congressional action on frontier oversight.

A blueprint for democratic governance of frontier AI openai.com

OpenAI outlines a blueprint for U.S. governance of frontier AI, proposing a federal framework for safety, resilience, and national security.

Advancing youth safety and opportunity through global leadership openai.com

OpenAI calls for global action on youth AI safety, proposing an international institute to strengthen safeguards, standards, and opportunities for young people.

Introducing new capabilities to GPT-Rosalind openai.com

GPT-Rosalind, OpenAI’s life-sciences model, adds biological reasoning, medicinal chemistry, genomics analysis, and experimental workflow tools. The update targets wet-lab researchers who want a single assistant for hypothesis generation through protocol design, narrowing the gap with specialist tools like AlphaFold and Chai.

🔬Scaling Past Informal AI - Carina Hong, Axiom Math latent.space

Axiom Math founder Carina Hong argues informal LLM math is hitting a ceiling and that compounding intelligence requires verified generation against formal proof systems. The Latent Space interview lays out how Axiom plans to scale Lean-checked training data for mathematical reasoning.

Introducing the Services Track and Partner Hub of the Claude Partner Network anthropic.com

Anthropic is formalizing its consulting ecosystem with a Services Track and Partner Hub inside the Claude Partner Network. The structure gives integrators a discovery surface and tiered status for Claude deployments, mirroring how AWS and Salesforce built channel programs around enterprise rollouts.

Lovable signs multiyear deal with Google Cloud to up usage 5x, source says techcrunch.com

Vibe-coding startup Lovable signed an expanded multiyear contract with Google Cloud that quintuples its footprint and widens access to Anthropic’s Claude models, a source told TechCrunch. The deal underscores how fast app-generation startups are burning through frontier-model inference.

Meta’s AI agent for WhatsApp Business is now available globally techcrunch.com

Meta’s AI agent for WhatsApp Business is now live worldwide, with merchants billed per token consumed rather than per conversation. The usage-metered model aligns WhatsApp’s pricing with underlying LLM costs and signals Meta’s intent to monetize agent traffic directly.

Coralogix raises $200M on bet that someone needs to watch the AI agents techcrunch.com

Observability firm Coralogix closed a $200M round led by Advent and CPP Investments to build tooling that tracks agent behavior, debugs failures, and surfaces operational telemetry. The raise reflects rising enterprise demand for runtime visibility as agents move from demos into production.

(AINews) Reve 2 and Ideogram 4: Layouts in Imagegen latent.space

a quiet day.

These two founders left Goldman and Meta to build voice AI for markets everyone else overlooked techcrunch.com

The startup’s own stack for Africa and Middle East is now handling more than 17,000 calls per day.

AI has a water problem — Google thinks it has a fix theverge.com

In the face of widespread backlash to the AI data center buildout throughout the US, Google is touting its efforts to minimize the environmental impact by actually increasing water for local communities. The company laid out five commitments around water use in a new blog post published Wednesday, including a goal to replenish more water […]

Uber Caps Usage of AI Tools Like Claude Code to Manage Costs simonwillison.net

Uber Caps Usage of AI Tools Like Claude Code to Manage Costs I wrote the other day about Uber blowing its 2026 AI budget in four months, and how that wasn’t particularly surprising given they would have set that budget in 2025, before anyone could have predicted how popular token-burning coding agents were about to become. Natalie Lung for Bloomberg: The rideshare giant is limiting all employees to $1,500 in monthly token spending per AI coding tool, an Uber spokesperson said in response to a B…

Amazon’s search bar will invent AI-generated products you can’t buy theverge.com

Amazon’s updated search bar will now show you AI-generated images of products as you describe them. For now, the in-app feature only surfaces AI images of clothing and home goods, allowing you to tap on the image that best matches what you’re looking for and search for similar-looking items. In a blog post, Amazon positions […]

Amazon will show AI product images when you search for some reason techcrunch.com

Amazon will use visual search and AI to show AI-generated product images that match your search queries. The retailer says it will help guide users to products.

Travelers deploys AI-powered claims countrywide with OpenAI openai.com

Travelers built an AI-powered Claim Assistant with OpenAI to guide customers through filing claims, provide 24/7 support, and scale operations during peak demand.

How Wasmer used Codex to build a Node.js runtime for the edge openai.com

See how Wasmer used Codex with GPT-5.5 to build a Node.js runtime for the edge, accelerating development 10x to 20x and shipping in weeks instead of months.

Trump plan to test AI models has a problem—US security teams were gutted by DOGE arstechnica.com

Critics say Trump plan to test AI models is short-sighted, performative.

Microsoft and OpenAI broke up — now they’re ready to fight theverge.com

At Microsoft’s annual Build conference on Tuesday, the company announced a slew of new or expanded AI initiatives, including a super app, in-house reasoning models, a cybersecurity tool, and OpenClaw-esque AI agents. All this news added up to a clear message: Microsoft is positioned to be one of the biggest players in AI, and it’s […]

⚡️Satya Nadella: No Priors x Latent Space Crossover Special at Microsoft Build latent.space

The legendary Microsoft CEO makes his first Latent Space appearance!

As AI gets better, it reveals an empty promise theverge.com

This week we’ve got tandem hands-ons with Google’s new Gemini AI agent - Spark - from my colleagues David Pierce and Jay Peters. Their takeaways are similar: It’s so effective that it’s scary. Spark knew that David’s dog is named Frida and knew the first name of Jay’s wife, even though neither of them explicitly […]

Google’s Dreambeans, its weirdest-named AI tool to date, will turn your life into a cartoon techcrunch.com

Dreambeans is a curated list of AI-illustrated “stories” culled from the personal data in your Google account.

Rehumanizing global health care with agentic AI technologyreview.com

The global health care sector is under increasing strain. Decades of chronic underinvestment and constraints in recruitment have coincided with a surge in demand for services for aging populations. Gaps in provision are already taking a toll, with fragmented access to care and high rates of stress and burnout among staff. And it’s getting worse.…

Opus 4.8 bensbites.com

NVIDIA and Microsoft birthed a new computer

5 ways Google Search can level up your thrift and vintage shopping blog.google

A colorful, grain-textured collage of various items scattered across a light blue background. The items include a green bucket hat, a wooden clothes hanger, a blue-and-red striped collar, blue sunglasses, denim shorts, a yellow price tag, a red high-heele

References

Economic Times — investor reaction economictimes.indiatimes.com

Alphabet shares initially slipped roughly 4% as investors weighed the short-term pressure on earnings per share against the necessity of building data centers.

Morningstar equity research global.morningstar.com

Net dilution may actually be less than 1% once adjusted for capped call hedges and the administrative nature of the ATM program used for employee tax obligations.

Alphabet press release (Q4CDN) s206.q4cdn.com

$30 billion in underwritten public offerings, $40 billion in an at-the-market program slated for Q3 2026, and a $10 billion private placement to Berkshire Hathaway… split equally between Class A and Class C shares, purchased at a roughly 6% discount.

Wall Street Gradient (Medium) on Michael Burry medium.com

Burry alleges hyperscalers like Alphabet and Oracle are understating depreciation expenses by extending the estimated useful life of rapidly obsolescing AI chips, a move he claims could artificially inflate earnings by $176 billion through 2028.

Forbes — Jason Kirsch on capex-to-revenue gap forbes.com

A widening ‘revenue gap’—estimated at $600 billion—between infrastructure spending and actual AI-driven sales… analysts projecting that 2026 earnings growth (6%) will significantly lag behind revenue growth (17%).

Blissfield Library expert briefing on IPO crowding blissfieldlibrary.org

By soaking up roughly $85 billion in institutional and retail demand, Alphabet is effectively raising the ‘entry fee’ for upcoming IPOs from OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic… Needham suggests this strategy ‘saps demand’ for these pure-play AI competitors.

Press Gazette (PPA reaction) pressgazette.co.uk

Publishers face a single ‘all or nothing’ toggle for all AI search products rather than choosing to participate in some and not others… once a publisher consents to content training, they lose the ability to opt out of ‘grounding’.

TSEG / Define Media analysis tseg.com

Define Media Group analyzed 64 sites and found that organic search clicks plummeted 42% by the end of 2025… Chartbeat data showed a 33% decline in global Google referrals year-over-year by November 2025.

TechHQ (CCIA/ITIF dissent) techhq.com

Dissenting voices from the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and the ITIF argue that these ‘unnecessarily burdensome’ requirements may stifle AI innovation and harm the consumer search experience by complicating the deployment of helpful direct answers.

AmiCited (Google-Extended technical analysis) amicited.com

Google-Extended only prevents content from being used to train models like Gemini and Vertex AI. It does not block ‘grounding,’ the process where AI Overviews pull real-time data from the standard Search index… the only previous ‘technical’ way to opt out was using the nosnippet tag or a full noindex.

LCF Law (DMCCA enforcement powers) lcf.co.uk

The CMA can now impose fines of up to 10% of a company’s global annual turnover for substantive breaches… plus daily penalties of up to 5% of daily global turnover for ongoing non-compliance.

SiliconANGLE (Google response) siliconangle.com

Mrinalini Loew, General Manager at Google Search Ecosystem… asserted that features like AI Overviews and AI Mode are ‘designed to help people find and visit great websites’ rather than replace them.

StartupHub.ai benchmark roundup startuphub.ai

Muse Spark achieved an Intelligence Index score of 52, placing it fourth globally behind GPT-5.4 (57), Gemini 3.1 Pro (57), and Claude Opus 4.6 (53)… On Terminal-Bench 2.0 it scored 59.0, far behind GPT-5.4’s 75.1.

Labellerr safety analysis labellerr.com

Muse Spark flagged public benchmarks as evaluations 19.8% of the time… when explicitly instructed to hide its capabilities, performance on specialized capability benchmarks dropped 32 percentage points while general-knowledge performance shifted only 0.4 points.

Observer observer.com

Within months of MSL’s launch at least three prominent researchers resigned, including Avi Verma and Ethan Knight, who returned to OpenAI after stints lasting less than a month.

MLQ.ai (LeCun interview coverage) mlq.ai

LeCun described Wang as ‘young’ and ‘inexperienced’ in the practice of fundamental research… and alleged the GenAI team ‘fudged’ Llama 4 benchmark results to regain Zuckerberg’s confidence.

DC The Median (Substack) dcthemedian.substack.com

Critics labeled the move ‘morally repugnant shortsightedness,’ arguing that Meta’s previous advocacy for openness was merely ‘openwashing’ to gain market share before closing the ecosystem.

Forbes — LeCun’s AMI Labs forbes.com

LeCun launched Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) Labs… securing a $1.03 billion seed round backed by NVIDIA, Samsung, Bezos Expeditions and Eric Schmidt, rejecting the ‘LLM-pilled’ obsession with text scaling as a ‘dead end.’