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AI News Flash: Rakuten Group is partnering with German defense tech startup Helsing to bring AI-powered attack drones to Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, according to exclusive reporting from Nikkei Asia. The partnership could eventually expand into domestic Japanese production of unmanned autonomous equipment, signaling Rakuten’s push to turn defense tech into a new revenue growth engine beyond its core startup support business. The original summary only covers the partnership direction and potential expansion (domestic Japan production) at this stage.

AI news brief: China’s physical AI and robotics industry could replicate the ‘China Shock’ effect—even though it still lags in key components like advanced chips, sensors, and precision machine tools, Beijing is throwing its ‘whole-nation system’ behind next-generation robotics and physical AI, aiming to dominate the overall supply chain and mass production. That’s the warning from a major Taipei think tank’s latest assessment.

AI News Brief: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word essay this week titled ‘The Future is for Everyone,’ laying out an optimistic AI-driven vision of the future — he claims ’everyone will have an extremely capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about.’ This follows a similar manifesto he published last year, ‘Futures for Everyone,’ which focused on AI running on glasses and wearables, but this time he doesn’t pin down a final hardware form, instead leaning toward letting users pick their own devices. The essay mentions Meta’s newly launched AI model Glimmer, which handles things like managing your schedule, drafting messages, and organizing files — built to run around the clock, with or without an internet connection. Meta is also keeping its higher-end model, Muse Spark, around, both to maintain control over its flagship model and as a revenue source for users or businesses wanting to scale up compute.

AI news brief: Stripe has reportedly finalized a deal to acquire OpenRouter for over $7 billion according to Bloomberg’s latest report, after the Wall Street Journal first revealed the two companies were in talks. OpenRouter helps customers route across multiple AI models based on task needs and budget, avoiding lock-in to a single provider.

AI News Brief: Dario Amodei recently pushed back on criticism from investor Gavin Baker, arguing he hasn’t overhyped AI pessimism. Baker claimed on the All-In podcast and X that Amodei’s warnings about AI risk have fueled America’s backlash against AI, particularly opposition to data centers, and accused Amodei of ’losing the argument’ on AI regulation, calling on him to advocate more forcefully for the industry as CEO of a major AI company.

AI news brief: Anthropic published a blog post on Friday detailing the watermarking mechanism behind text generated by its Claude chatbot, responding to recent debate among users on Reddit and X. The watermarking is meant to comply with the EU AI Act’s Transparency Guidelines, which require AI companies to adopt systems that can identify AI-generated content. Anthropic says Claude builds specific patterns into its responses when making ’low-stakes choices’…

AI News Flash: xAI’s chatbot Grok is embroiled in another minor sexual exploitation controversy, with a woman using the pseudonym Jane Doe 4 joining a lawsuit filed by three Tennessee teenagers against xAI (now merged into SpaceX). According to The Washington Post, the woman alleges her stepfather used Grok to alter a photo of her at age 11, generating over 7,000 explicit images. She said…

AI news brief: Cursor has officially joined SpaceX, with the deal completion announced on Cursor’s official blog. Elon Musk’s SpaceX acquired another one of his companies, xAI, earlier this year, and announced a technology partnership with Cursor in April that also gave SpaceX the option to acquire Cursor for $60 billion. Two months later, following SpaceX’s public listing, the two companies announced they were moving forward with the acquisition.

AI news brief: This week Meta released Glimmer, an open-weight AI model anyone can download and run on their own hardware — a stark contrast to Muse Spark, the company’s more capable model that stays locked behind its own API. The release came alongside an open letter from Mark Zuckerberg arguing that AI should ‘serve everyone,’ not be controlled by a handful of labs.

AI News Flash: After aggressively snapping up wind and solar projects in recent years, hyperscale cloud providers are now pivoting to bet on natural gas as the power source behind the data centers fueling their AI ambitions. But a new research report suggests this fresh fossil-fuel romance could come back to bite them. Energy research firm Noreva points out that as hyperscalers’ power demand and…