The top things worth knowing about in AI today.
SpaceX has agreed to acquire AI coding startup Cursor in an all-stock deal valuing it at $60 billion, the largest takeover of a venture-backed startup on record. Cursor's tools are used by 67% of the Fortune 500 and write about 150 million lines of enterprise code a day. The deal, expected to close in the third quarter, pushes Elon Musk's empire deeper into the AI coding race against OpenAI and Anthropic.
Read moreChatGPT's share of AI assistant use has fallen below 50% for the first time, landing at 46.4% in Sensor Tower's 2026 report. Google's Gemini rose to 27.7% (662 million monthly users) and Anthropic's Claude to 10.3% (245 million), even as ChatGPT itself passed 1.1 billion monthly users. The market is no longer a one-horse race, which is worth weighing before you standardise a single tool across a team.
Read moreA coalition of 42 US state attorneys general has subpoenaed OpenAI over consumer-protection concerns, including model sycophancy, handling of health data, and safety for minors and older users. New York's attorney general served the request on the group's behalf, days after OpenAI filed initial paperwork for a public listing. It is the broadest consumer-protection action yet against a frontier AI lab, and a sign regulators are scrutinising how these products affect vulnerable users.
Read moreChina is preparing to spend about $295 billion over five years to build a connected national network of AI data centres, with state firms running most of the sites. The draft would require at least 80% of chips and equipment to come from domestic suppliers such as Huawei, largely shutting out Nvidia and AMD. Counting power infrastructure, the total could reach roughly $740 billion, hardening the split between US and Chinese AI supply chains.
Read moreOpenAI and chemistry startup Molecule.one ran a model through 10,080 wet-lab reactions and improved a stubborn step in drug synthesis, finding an unexpected additive that lifted yields for a chemical group present in more than 90 approved medicines. The model chose the problem, designed the experiments and interpreted results, with human chemists validating rather than directing. It is described as the first documented case of an AI system taking an open-ended chemistry problem from literature review through to lab confirmation.
Read moreGoogle is releasing its first standalone smart speaker in nearly six years, the $99.99 Google Home Speaker, on 25 June. It runs Gemini for natural back-and-forth conversation and multi-step commands such as turning off all the lights except a bedside lamp, then setting a timer. The more capable features sit behind a $10-a-month Home Premium plan, a clear move to charge for assistant AI in the home.
Read moreKPMG is rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot and the new Agent 365 platform to more than 276,000 staff across 138 countries, with central controls to govern the agents it runs. The deployment moves AI agents out of pilots and into day-to-day audit, tax and advisory work. It is one of the larger single corporate agent rollouts announced so far, and a marker of how quickly professional-services firms are standardising on this tooling.
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