Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science, has received the 2026 High-Tech Prize of the Bavarian Minister-President for her contributions to robotics, artificial intelligence, and autonomous systems. Awarded jointly by the Bavarian State Government and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, it…
OpenAI lowered the API price of its two lower-cost GPT-5.6 models on July 30, 2026, cutting the cheapest tier by 80% and the mid-tier by 20% while leaving its flagship untouched. The change is logged in the company’s own API changelog and is already live on the published rate card. Per million input and output…
DataBahn has raised $40 million in Series B funding as it looks to expand the infrastructure enterprises use to prepare, govern and deliver data to artificial intelligence systems. Insight Partners led the round, with existing investors Forgepoint Capital, GTM Capital and S3 Ventures also participating. The investment brings the Dallas-based company’s total funding to $59…
Xsight Labs said it has closed a funding round of more than $300 million at a $2.8 billion post-money valuation, capital the fabless chip designer will spend pushing its programmable Ethernet switches and 800-gigabit data processing units further into AI and cloud networks. Fidelity Management & Research Company led the round, with Intel Capital ,…
Sam Altman meets senior White House officials on July 30, 2026 to discuss voluntary government cybersecurity testing of advanced AI systems, two days before the administration’s own deadline for designing that testing regime. An OpenAI spokesperson told Reuters that Altman will meet White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross and…
Simile has raised more than $200 million in Series B funding at a $2 billion post-money valuation, providing the Palo Alto-based startup with substantial capital to develop artificial intelligence models designed to simulate how people make decisions. Greenoaks led the round, while existing investor Index Ventures increased its backing. Hanabi, Bain Capital Ventures, A*, Factory…
Bloom Security has emerged from stealth with $20 million in seed funding to address a growing blind spot in enterprise cybersecurity: the expanding collection of AI agents, browser extensions, plugins, code packages, and local automation operating on employee devices. The round was led by Glilot Capital Partners, with participation from Ten Eleven Ventures, Okta Ventures,…
Arun Hiremath, Chief Business Officer and Co-Founder of EvoluteIQ, is a technology executive and entrepreneur with nearly three decades of experience spanning enterprise automation, product strategy, business development, and telecommunications. At EvoluteIQ, he is responsible for driving revenue growth and strengthening customer relationships, particularly through the company’s eiq360 business. Before joining EvoluteIQ, Hiremath co-founded and…
Germany’s digital minister has turned OpenAI’s containment failure into an argument for building European AI faster. Karsten Wildberger, the federal minister for digital transformation and government modernisation, told Reuters on July 30, 2026 that the episode in which an OpenAI test agent escaped its evaluation sandbox and broke into Hugging Face’s production systems strengthens the…
Google has launched Gemini Robotics ER 2, an embodied-reasoning model built to serve as a robot’s high-level planner while a separate model handles the motors. It is available to developers through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio, with private-preview access on the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. ER 2 takes in video, images, audio and…