Meet the AI vegans | Arwa Mahdawi ↗
A growing movement of “AI vegans” is opting out of artificial intelligence tools for ethical, environmental and cognitive reasons. They worry that reliance on AI erodes critical thinking, exploits creatives and guzzles energy. While abandoning AI entirely may be extreme, the trend urges us to track our digital carbon footprint and think twice before every AI request.
Australia’s potential surrender of creative content to tech giants for free is shocking. Labor must decide where it stands | Josh Taylor ↗
Australia’s Productivity Commission has backed a proposal to let AI firms freely mine copyrighted works, arguing it won’t change much but could help smaller players. Big tech giants like Google and Meta have lobbied hard for this text and data mining exception, while news, music and film industries warn it devalues their work and amounts to digital piracy. Critics say Labor must clarify its stance on copyright reform as AI chatbots drain traffic from content creators without offering payment or compensation.
ChatGPT firm OpenAI could be valued at $500bn in share sale – business live ↗
OpenAI is negotiating a secondary share sale that could value the company at $500 billion—up from a $300 billion valuation in March. The move would allow current and former employees to cash out as investors like Thrive Capital eye stakes. Amid the AI boom, OpenAI’s annual recurring revenue has surged to $12 billion, with $20 billion expected by year-end. It also unveiled free, customizable ‘open-weight’ AI models to challenge Meta and China’s DeepSeek.
Arts and media groups demand Labor take a stand against ‘rampant theft’ of Australian content to train AI ↗
Australia’s creative and media sectors have warned that proposed Productivity Commission reforms—potentially exempting “text and data mining” from copyright—would let big tech train AI on local work without payment. Arts bodies, unions and opposition MPs say such changes amount to intellectual property theft that could undermine licensing deals and a $9bn music industry. They’re calling on the Albanese government to safeguard creators with clear compensation rules.
News Corp warns Trump AI is eviscerating sales of The Art of the Deal ↗
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp warns that AI tools are cannibalizing sales of Donald Trump’s books—most notably The Art of the Deal—by feeding on his ideas without paying for the rights. In its latest earnings report, the media giant urged respect for intellectual property and announced “advanced negotiations” with AI firms, balancing partnerships with legal action. The move comes amid growing tensions between News Corp and the Trump White House, following lawsuits over alleged libel in the Wall Street Journal and shifting AI regulations under his administration.
Lib Dems call for urgent regulation of YouTube ads after wave of scams ↗
The Liberal Democrats are urging stricter regulation of YouTube ads after a surge of scams—deepfake endorsements, fake competitions and bogus investment offers—slipped through with minimal oversight. Although YouTube ads fall under the same Advertising Standards Authority rules as TV, they face no pre-approval or real-time checks. Lib Dems want Ofcom to gain powers to pre-clear ads, levy fines for repeat offenders and use penalties to support scam victims. YouTube insists it enforces strict ad policies but argues it shouldn’t be treated like a broadcaster.
Clay confirms it closed $100M round at $3.1B valuation ↗
Clay raised a $100 million Series C at a $3.1 billion valuation led by CapitalG, confirming an earlier report. The deal brings total funding to $204 million after a $1.25 billion Series B and a $1.5 billion employee tender. The eight-year-old AI sales startup, used by OpenAI and Canva, expects $100 million in revenue this year.
For the first time, OpenAI models are available on AWS ↗
OpenAI’s new open-weight models are headed to AWS for the first time, arriving soon in Amazon’s Bedrock and SageMaker services through a direct partnership. This strategic move boosts AWS’s AI portfolio, putting it on par with Microsoft’s Azure for hosting top-tier OpenAI tech. Enterprises can now seamlessly experiment with OpenAI’s capabilities on AWS, expanding options beyond Azure and Anthropic-backed Claude.
OpenAI takes on Meta by launching free and customisable AI models ↗
OpenAI has released two open-weight large language models—gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b-two—that anyone can download and fine-tune for free, taking direct aim at Meta’s Llama series. CEO Sam Altman says the move is about “democratic values” and broad access, while experts warn open AI models could be repurposed for harmful uses. The 120B model nearly matches OpenAI’s closed GPT-4-mini on reasoning tests. Meanwhile, Google DeepMind unveiled Genie 3, a “world model” to train AI agents in realistic simulations as a step toward artificial general intelligence.
OpenAI launches two ‘open’ AI reasoning models ↗
OpenAI has released two open-weight AI models—gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b—freely available on Hugging Face. Resembling the closed o-series, the 120B model runs on one Nvidia GPU, while the 20B fits on a 16GB laptop. These are OpenAI’s first open models since GPT-2, supporting tool calls and chain-of-thought reasoning. Performance tops other open rivals, though they hallucinate more. Released under Apache 2.0 (without training data), they aim to strengthen U.S. tech leadership.