Sat 18 April 2026
Daily Brief — Curated and contextualised by Best Practice AI
Imas Warns Economists on AI Labor Risks, Cerebras Files IPO Amid OpenAI Deal, and Mythos Exposes Enterprise Vulnerabilities
TL;DR University of Chicago economist Alex Imas argues that AI's labor disruptions will outpace historical recoveries, challenging assumptions of quick job rebounds. Cerebras disclosed a US IPO filing, backed by a $20 billion multi-year deal with OpenAI for 750 megawatts of inference chips. Anthropic's Mythos model has triggered cyber defense concerns, prompting CEO Dario Amodei to meet White House chief of staff Susie Wiles amid national security lawsuits. A PwC report reveals nearly 75% of AI's economic value captured by 20% of firms. Stanford's latest assessment indicates China has nearly erased the US lead in AI capabilities.
The stories that matter most
Selected and contextualised by the Best Practice AI team
Train-to-Test scaling explained: How to optimize your end-to-end AI compute budget for inference
The standard guidelines for building large language models (LLMs) optimize only for training costs and ignore inference costs. This poses a challenge for real-world applications that use inference-time scaling techniques to increase the accuracy of model responses, such as drawing multiple reasoning samples from a model at deployment. To bridge this gap, researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madi
China has nearly erased America’s lead in AI
A Stanford report suggests that China has significantly closed the AI gap with the U.S., while the flow of tech talent to America is slowing.
Most enterprises can't stop stage-three AI agent threats, VentureBeat survey finds
A rogue AI agent at Meta passed every identity check and still exposed sensitive data to unauthorized employees in March. Two weeks later, Mercor, a $10 billion AI startup, confirmed a supply-chain breach through LiteLLM. Both are traced to the same structural gap. Monitoring without enforcement, enforcement without isolation. A VentureBeat three-wave survey of 108 qualified enterprises found that
Italian startup gets €211m to develop graphene-based optical chips
The Italian government has awarded €211 million ($249m) to a startup developing a technology that could upgrade processing times in AI data centers. Camgraphic’s graphene-based optical technology can deliver higher bandwidth density and much better latency performance than traditional silicon chips. It also consumes 80 percent less energy, said the University of Cambridge spin-off. Founders […]
AI Is Real, But the Infrastructure Race May Carry the Real Risk - KoreaTechDesk | Korean Startup and Technology News
Massive investments are being directed ... centers, compute infrastructure, and energy supply. These investments are justified by strong current demand. However, the scale and speed of expansion introduce a new question: will future demand truly match the capacity being built today? Shwartz frames this as a structural risk rather than a technological one. “There is no chance of the type of AI wint
Economics & Markets
Anthropic squeezes enterprises by ejecting bundled tokens from seat deal
Large organizations pushed toward metered pricing.
The Halo trade: a fad or the future?
Some commentators believe Heavy Assets, Low Obsolescence companies could be an investment antidote to markets ravaged by AI
The Reality of AI Investing | Five Lessons from Tom Hancock
AI will create meaningful economic change, but the distribution of that value remains uncertain. Revenues at one level depend on spending at another, and that spending ultimately depends on applications that are still taking shape.
New leaders, new fund: Sequoia has raised $7B to expand its AI bets
Sequoia Capital has successfully raised $7 billion to continue its aggressive investment strategy in the artificial intelligence sector.
Factory hits $1.5B valuation to build AI coding for enterprises
Enterprise AI coding startup Factory has reached a $1.5 billion valuation following a new funding round.
Aehr Test Systems Secures Major AI-Driven Order
Aehr Test Systems received a significant follow-on order for its high-power test systems, driven by strong AI demand.
I measured Claude 4.7's new tokenizer: Here's what it costs you
An analysis of the tokenization costs associated with the latest Claude 4.7 model.
Myseum takes flight after Allbirds in fresh AI rebrand wave | Reuters
April 16 (Reuters) - A day after ... tab was up 146% early on Thursday, in the latest sign of an investor mania for artificial intelligence stocks....
Labor & Society
New Data Challenges AI Job Loss Narrative
/PRNewswire/ -- At a time when headlines warn that artificial intelligence is displacing workers, a new white paper from the University of Maryland–LinkUp AI...
Deloitte to trim benefits for ‘center’ workforce amid AI shift
This category includes internal-facing roles such as administrative staff, IT support, and finance teams
UK financial regulators reject AI 'wait-and-see' criticism from lawmakers
UK financial regulators have defended their oversight of AI, rejecting lawmakers' criticism that they are taking a "wait and see" approach to managing emerging risks.
Brussels tells Google to hand rivals its search crown jewels as privacy row brews
Includes a to-do list on search data sharing and platform access as DMA enforcement ramps up.
White House and Anthropic hold 'productive' meeting amid fears over Mythos model
The discussion is a sign the AI firm's technology may be too critical for even the US government to do without.
EU advances sovereign cloud strategy with multi-provider framework for sensitive data | Domain-b.com
The EU is expanding its sovereign cloud strategy, integrating AI capabilities and reducing reliance on global tech providers for sensitive data infrastructure.
US House committee urges stricter controls to win AI chip race with China
Several bills pending in Congress could help the United States maintain its lead over China in building and amassing the chips undergirding advanced AI models, a new House committee report posits.
UK launches $675M Sovereign AI fund to break dependence on US tech giants
The UK government has announced a new fund aimed at developing domestic AI capabilities to reduce reliance on major U.S. technology firms.
EU in Critical Talks with Anthropic Over Cybersecurity AI Regulations and Deployment
The European Commission is negotiating with Anthropic over the integration of its cybersecurity AI, Claude Mythos, within EU regulations due to its dual-use concerns.
When Geopolitics Writes Your Compliance Roadmap - Security Boulevard
NCC Group’s fifth edition of its Global Cyber Policy Radar suggests that cycle is finally breaking — not because governments have gotten smarter, but because the stakes have grown too large to ignore. The report lands at a moment when geopolitical fracture lines are reshaping the regulatory landscape faster than most compliance programs can track. Three forces drive the transformation: digital sovereignty fragmenting the global technology stack, AI ...
South Korea weighs Claude Mythos threat, finance-software phaseout
South Korea's National AI Strategy Committee is discussing security threats posed by Anthropic's Claude Mythos and plans to phase out installation-based security software in the financial sector.
Digital platforms called to chip in on EU pledges on AI usage in elections
The European Commission has begun preparing guidance on the use of AI in elections, launching a targeted stakeholder consultation with a closed-door meeting on April 23.
PRA to focus on geopolitics, private market risks in business plan - Corporate Adviser
The Prudential Regulation Authority is to target emerging risks from geopolitical trends and stress tests focused on private markets.
Centre Sets Up AI Governance Body To Align Policy Across Ministries
AIGEG will act as the government’s top decision-making group on AI policy, bringing together key ministries, regulators and advisors under one framework.
Atlassian’s new data collection policy protects rich customers while AI eats the rest
From August 17, the outfit will collect customer metadata by default unless you pay for the top tier Unless a customer pays for the most expensive enterprise license, or the law forbids it, Atlassian is going to collect their data to train its AI models. And you can't fully opt out.…
A view from DC: Can AI governance catch up to innovation? | IAPP
A new report from Stanford HAI highlights major technical progress and a 17% growth in AI governance roles in 2025, but new challenges are rapidly emerging alongside more complex AI pipelines, writes IAPP Managing Director, Washington, DC, Cobun Zweifel-Keegan.
We need a new document that AI labs should release with each new model, besides the model card: a sort of changelog I want to see how & in what way the new model changes, breaks, or improves at a range of individual tasks compared to the earlier models. Increasingly important!
We need a new document that AI labs should release with each new model, besides the model card: a sort of changelog I want to see how & in what way the new model changes, breaks, or improves at a range of individual tasks compared to the earlier models. Increasingly important!
EU's data protection rule revamp would clarify use of pseudonymized data
A revamp of the EU's data protection rules would clarify how companies should tackle the complex use of pseudonymized data under a compromise text to be debated by European legislators.
It is time to ban the sale of precise geolocation
An argument for legislative action to prohibit the commercial sale of precise geolocation data to protect individual privacy.
Regulatory Considerations for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: A WHO Perspective
The mission of the World Health Organization (WHO) is to promote health, keep the world safe and serve the vulnerable is articulated in its global strategy on digital health 2020–2025. At the heart of...
Africa’s AI Strategies Cannot Say No
AI governance in Africa is reproducing extraction dynamics at a continental scale through the guise of development.
Energy secretary sees ‘growing’ opposition to AI as 'very real' risk | FedScoop
The agency, as well as the broader administration, is trying to change the public perception of AI, according to DOE’s Chris Wright.
Technology & Infrastructure
Intel eases reliance on TSMC with 'Merica-made Core Series 3 processors
Stripped-down Ultra for laptops and low-power edge boxes Intel brought a few more chips home from Taiwan this week, with a new round of budget-oriented Core Series 3 processors fabbed right in the US-of-A.…
Italian startup gets €211m to develop graphene-based optical chips
The Italian government has awarded €211 million ($249m) to a startup developing a technology that could upgrade processing times in AI data centers. Camgraphic’s graphene-based optical technology can deliver higher bandwidth density and much better latency performance than traditional silicon chips. It also consumes 80 percent less energy, said the University of Cambridge spin-off. Founders […]
Taiwan critical to AI hardware resilience: report - Taipei Times
Bringing Taiwan to the World and the World to Taiwan
Soaring Tungsten Adds Impetus to Vietnam Mine Sale Effort
Some 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Hanoi, in Thai Nguyen province, a massive open-cut mine tears into the landscape. Ringed by dense, green hills, the vast, stepped crater is raw gray and brown. Along its sides, huge trucks creep along, while a murky pool lies stagnant at the bottom.
Landmark Canada AI Supercomputer: $890M Federal Initiative
Canada AI Supercomputer gets $890 million through the AI Sovereign Compute Infrastructure Program. Applications open until June 1, 2026.
Train-to-Test scaling explained: How to optimize your end-to-end AI compute budget for inference
The standard guidelines for building large language models (LLMs) optimize only for training costs and ignore inference costs. This poses a challenge for real-world applications that use inference-time scaling techniques to increase the accuracy of model responses, such as drawing multiple reasoning samples from a model at deployment. To bridge this gap, researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madi
Top 10 Expansion Investments Powering AI, Energy, and Infrastructure Growth in Q1-2026 | Intellizence
Large-scale expansion investments are shaping the future of artificial intelligence, telecom, clean energy, semiconductors, robotics, and industrial infrastructure. Across the world, leading companies are committing billions of dollars to build data centers, strengthen energy networks, expand ...
Commentary: AI drives CPU crunch, lifting data center demand and pricing
The global AI boom is shifting infrastructure bottlenecks from GPUs to CPUs, as inference-heavy and agentic AI workloads push compute demands beyond accelerator capacity into system-level constraints.
AI Infrastructure Is Booming and Applied Digital's Capitalizing on the Build-Out | The Motley Fool
Although Applied Digital isn't technically a real estate investment trust, I think it's helpful to think of it as such. Applied Digital's model is to design and build data centers, then rent its capacity to other clients. One of Applied Digital's largest clients is CoreWeave, which is a neocloud company that then rents its services out to companies like Meta Platforms. While there are several links in this chain, each one is a business that's focused on a different aspect of bringing AI computing ...
War, Watts, and the AI Buildout That Won't Stop | InvestorPlace
The Iran blockade has injected real uncertainty into global energy markets. Oil is elevated. Inflation expectations are shifting. And the sectors that benefit from sustained energy disruption — defense, energy infrastructure, and AI compute — are not the same ones most investors are watching.
AI Is Real, But the Infrastructure Race May Carry the Real Risk - KoreaTechDesk | Korean Startup and Technology News
Massive investments are being directed ... centers, compute infrastructure, and energy supply. These investments are justified by strong current demand. However, the scale and speed of expansion introduce a new question: will future demand truly match the capacity being built today? Shwartz frames this as a structural risk rather than a technological one. “There is no chance of the type of AI wint
The best and worst states for AI data centers
Data center construction is booming nationwide, but the AI buildout is separating the friendliest states from the most resistant.
Anthropic won't own MCP 'design flaw' putting 200K servers at risk, researcher says
Bug or feature?
The Regional Data Centre Revolution Powered by AI Demand - ScotlandIS
Mark Lewis, Chief Marketing Officer at Pulsant, offers his insights into why data centre hubs are gradually moving away from London.
Adoption & Impact
Most enterprises can't stop stage-three AI agent threats, VentureBeat survey finds
A rogue AI agent at Meta passed every identity check and still exposed sensitive data to unauthorized employees in March. Two weeks later, Mercor, a $10 billion AI startup, confirmed a supply-chain breach through LiteLLM. Both are traced to the same structural gap. Monitoring without enforcement, enforcement without isolation. A VentureBeat three-wave survey of 108 qualified enterprises found that
Beauty Industry Uses AI to Help Consumers
Artificial Intelligence in the beauty industry is becoming increasingly common, both in consumer-facing offerings and behind the scenes in research and development. Bloomberg This Weekend's Lisa Mateo dives into how AI is reshaping the industry. (Source: Bloomberg)
MWC26: Value in motion and when AI became operational | PwC
MWC26 insights on AI becoming operational—how telecom leaders are scaling AI, building connected ecosystems and unlocking value in motion.
You can watch the accelerated shipping from the AI labs to get a feeling of what AI-driven product development makes possible. A tremendous number of products are coming out, many of them are really good (with rough edges)... but we also don't have the capacity to absorb it all.
You can watch the accelerated shipping from the AI labs to get a feeling of what AI-driven product development makes possible. A tremendous number of products are coming out, many of them are really good (with rough edges)... but we also don't have the capacity to absorb it all.
How CIOs can tackle AI ownership | CIO Dive
As tech execs gain more control over AI, they must become enablers for its adoption, taking a leadership role around governance and ROI.
Using Claude Code: Session Management & 1M Context
This guide explores how Claude Code's 1 million token context window impacts workflows and introduces management techniques like rewind, compaction, and subagents.
UAE among top nations for AI adoption and talent amid investment boost | The National
Globally AI has reached mass adoption faster than the personal computer or the internet, Stanford study says
Geopolitics
China has nearly erased America’s lead in AI
A Stanford report suggests that China has significantly closed the AI gap with the U.S., while the flow of tech talent to America is slowing.
China Central Bank’s Pan Flags AI Risks, Opportunities at IMF
China’s central bank governor Pan Gongsheng said artificial intelligence is driving a new wave of technological and industrial transformation that brings both opportunities and risks to the global economy.
China Tech Investment News: 3 Powerful AI Signals
China’s DeepSeek is reportedly raising funds at a $10 billion valuation. See what this China tech investment news means now.
New U.S.-Backed Industrial Hub Signals Where AI-Era Jobs Will Be Built Next
Philippines, U.S. to build industrial hub to strengthen supply chain security
Finance minister stresses commitment to making S. Korea global AI hub
WASHINGTON - Finance Minister Koo Yun-cheol on Thursday underscored his commitment to making South Korea a global hub for artificial intelligence (AI), pointing to international organizations' plans to install their key AI platforms in the Asian country.
Swarm welcome: Britain lines up 120,000 drones for Ukraine
Giant UAV package will include strike, recon, logistics, and maritime systems.
Europeans tried to win over the US this week in DC. Their efforts were lost in translation. – POLITICO
The Trump administration, focused on the economic arms race with China and its foreign policy goals, doesn’t seem to be listening to Europe.
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