News & Insights

Meta says its AI model hacked another company, adding to worries about bots going rogue

On July 21st OpenAI, an American lab, said an unreleased model had escaped from a closed environment testing its hacking skills, launching series attacks on HuggingFace, a Franco-American AI-infrastructure firm.

The Hyderabad facility brings Microsoft's cloud regions in India to four, adding to existing centers in Pune, Chennai and Mumbai, and cementing its position as the country's largest cloud-computing provider

Vivo has launched the S2 in India, featuring a 120Hz AMOLED display and MediaTek Dimensity 7360 Turbo processor. 

Redmi Note 17 has launched in India with Snapdragon 4 Gen 4 processor, 8,000mAh battery, OLED display and 45W of fast charging.

Meta's AI models hacked into a third-party company during cybersecurity testing due to a misconfiguration by the security firm Irregular. 

The Big Four are forging alliances with tech startups and OEMs to offer clients bundled agentic AI and transformation solutions. It's a win-win: startups gain enterprise access and credibility; advisory firms expand their offerings, and the enterprises get vetted, one-stop implementation with ease. 

The report, based on a survey of 1,013 senior finance leaders across 20 countries and 13 sectors, said active AI use across finance has more than doubled in two years, rising from 30 per cent in 2024 to 75 per cent in 2026. More than three-fourths of organisations are leveraging AI in financial planning, reporting and commercial analysis, while 71 per cent said AI is meeting or exceeding return-on-investment expectations.

The UK's AI Security Institute found that AI agents from Anthropic and OpenAI performed unsanctioned actions during security tests

Google will launch its Pixel 11 series in California next week. Pixel 11 Pro Fold is expected to feature an 8-inch OLED display, Tensor G6 chipset, and could start at a price of $1,899 in the US.

TECH-EUROPE/RESULTS (ANALYSIS, PIX):ANALYSIS-Europe's established tech firms emerge as unexpected AI winners

OPENAI-ANTHROPIC/CYBERSECURITY (PIX):OpenAI, Anthropic AI agents implicated in new security breaches

Recent AI safety disclosures by OpenAI and Anthropic have highlighted a legal blind spot for autonomous AI under Indian law.

USA-ORACLE/LEASE (GRAPHIC):GRAPHIC-AI data-centre race builds $1 trillion lease burden for Big Tech

Apple Inc. exceeded $10 billion in annual sales in India for the first time last fiscal year, underscoring surging demand for its pricey devices in a market where it’s steadily ramping up its retail network.

The cost of land (for data centres), some equipment (to fill these with AI servers) and labour (from construction workers to AI whizz-kids) is lower in China than in America.

OnePlus has launched its Independence Day Sale 2026 in India, offering discounts on smartphones, tablets, and IoT devices from August 7

The POCO M8 Power features a 6.9-inch FHD+ AMOLED display, Snapdragon 4 Gen 4 processor, 8,000mAh battery, and 45W fast charging.

Telegram announced its messaging app is back on the App Store after being removed for violating guidelines regarding child sexual abuse material.

Thousands of WhatsApp users reported issues on Monday, unable to send media or create stories. 

The Visa layoffs show how AI is changing employment in multinational technology companies, with automation, tighter spending and workloads shifting months before thousands of roles were eliminated.

USA-TRUMP-AI:Meta, Anthropic invited to meet with Trump officials about AI safety testing

BRITAIN-AI/MINISTER:Britain says it is open to AI regulation if voluntary safeguards fall short

TRAI said the app is designed to bridge the gap between technical performance metrics and what consumers actually experience on calls.

Nearly half of Indian enterprises run live AI pilots, but only 15% manage to scale them. Beyond the hype lies a landscape of operational friction, messy data, and unproven return on investment. Here’s how industry leaders overcome the sandbox trap.

Google announced pre-orders for the Pixel 11 series starting August 12, with global launch on the same day and Indian debut on August 13. 

Advances in artificial intelligence are dramatically reshaping the cybersecurity landscape by enabling faster discovery and exploitation of software vulnerabilities, while organisations continue to struggle to patch them in time, according to a report by J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management.

Apple's MacBook Air faces supply shortages due to memory constraints, leading to significant price hikes. 

Restricting Chinese open models could protect U.S. developers but increase costs for U.S. users and slow AI adoption, analysts say.

AI-assisted staging draws boos at the Richard Wagner festival in Germany

Cognizant has launched its first OpenAI Codex Hackathon, allowing 10,000 associates in six Indian cities to learn and develop applications using AI tools. 

AI, semiconductors and quantum computing will shape future of this century: Fadnavis

Smartphone launches are heating up this month with several models set to debut, including the Pixel 11 series and the Redmi Note 17. 

OpenAI has claimed that its unreleased model Astra was able to solve 10 long standing problems in Mathematics

The report noted that publicly announced capacity targets of 6-8 GW by 2030 appear aggressive. A more realistic estimate is 3.4-3.6 GW of planned capacity by mid-2030, while actual operational capacity could be closer to 2.8 GW. This reflects challenges around execution, power availability, equipment supply and construction timelines.

The Google Pixel 11 serieswill launch on August 12. The new Google lineup could start at a price of  â‚¬999 for the standard Pixel 11 while the Pixel 11 Pro Fold could begin at €1,999

CULTURE-Q

Artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure investment continued to broaden in July, with enterprise adoption expanding alongside sovereign AI initiatives and growing support for cloud providers, according to a Goldman Sachs research report, which said the latest announcements reflect a widening AI ecosystem beyond large technology companies.

The new breakouts were uncovered during the company's publicly announced investigation into how one of its agents escaped what was meant to be a contained testing environment this month, the two people said.

Replit Agent turns an app idea into a working mobile prototype, letting teams test it on a phone, gather feedback and refine it before committing time and money to development.

Apple Pay down globally? Downdetector reported that 57 percent of complaints involved fund transfers, compared with 25 percent related to payments and 13 percent tied to the app itself.

Kamaljeet Singh, director general of Semi-Conductor Laboratory, said upgrading to newer chip nodes will require three times the outlay of the ₹4,500 crore pitched by the Centre. It maintains that legacy-standard chips could be strategically important in defence and space applications.

AI model distillation is a technique that allows developers to shrink powerful artificial intelligence models into cheaper, more efficient systems. This has now become the latest battleground between the US and China in the race for AI dominance. 

Anthropic says its AI models hacked 3 organizations during testing

ANTHROPIC-CYBERSECURITY:Anthropic's AI hacked three companies during tests, highlighting growing security risks

ChatGPT Work turns AI into an autonomous workplace assistant that gathers information across apps, completes multi-step tasks and returns finished deliverables instead of just answering prompts.

For India to succeed in robotics, experts say the country will need what some countries spent decades building: a robotics ecosystem where research labs, universities, manufacturers and startups partnered in innovation.

Microsoft plans to use Helios to power inference for advanced AI models, support Azure AI services, and expand computing resources available to enterprise AI customers

With the launch of Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8, Chinese AI firms are gaining momentum. Alibaba's Qwen comes with 2.4 trillion parameters and promises to go open weights soon

As enterprise AI consumption soars, clients are shifting routine work to smaller models and reserving larger ones for complex tasks.

Moonshot had paused new subscriptions for its Kimi K3 model due to overwhelming demand.

OpenAI's GPT-Live transforms ChatGPT's voice mode into a natural conversation by letting it listen and respond simultaneously, while seamlessly handling complex queries through GPT-5.5.

They built AI long before it became fashionable. But being ahead of time and a deal they couldn’t accept left Mad Street Den’s founders with a painful choice. This is a story of ambition, vision, failure, and resilience—and why their biggest success may still lie ahead.

The control that these two governments exert over frontier AI puts other countries in a very tight spot, especially as the technology spreads.

With Indian firms far behind global rivals, experts cautioned that these may not have the kind of global pricing impact that China did with DeepSeek

From token limits and usage-based pricing to layoffs and AI sovereignty, companies are discovering that the economics of artificial intelligence matter as much as the technology itself.

The strategy emerges amid investor concern that AI could disrupt India's $315 billion IT services industry by reducing demand for engineering teams, shortening project timelines and squeezing prices as clients seek a share of productivity gains

Copilot in Excel saves your process as a skill once; call it with a simple mention instead of retyping it each cycle.

The advantages promised by AI could be self-defeating for consumer brands, argues Gavekal’s Louis Gave. That would undermine investors’ ability to value companies.

The government is preparing to extend at-scale subsidized access to artificial intelligence chips beyond startups to government departments, research agencies and state-backed colleges, in a move aimed at accelerating the development of indigenous AI models and applications

OpenAI has unveiled ChatGPT Work, a unified app for enterprises that combines AI capabilities with essential tools, challenging Microsoft and Google.

India now hosts over 2,100 GCCs, contributing nearly 2% of GDP, but sustaining the lead will require continuous investment in talent, AI and innovation

CEA Anantha Nageswaran feels that artificial intelligence raises the value of each working professional rather than replacing them. “Our goal should be to use machines so that our people are freed to do more of what only people can do,” he said.

China’s National Vulnerability Database said the suspected vulnerability could allow the transfer of data, such as user location details and identity-related information.

The move highlights the evolving ties between the US government and leading AI companies as regulators and developers work together to determine how access to highly capable AI systems should be managed.

Meta has launched Muse Image and Muse Video, advanced AI models for image generation.

Indian firms are ramping up AI investment across sectors, while boards demand accountability on returns and risks. Experts say gains will bring incremental efficiencies, rather than instant breakthroughs. Meanwhile, global tech giants report surging enterprise demand in India, a key market.

Alibaba has prohibited employees from using Anthropic's Claude Code, labeling it as high-risk software.

Senior executives are swapping boardrooms for classrooms, driven by a mix of curiosity and urgency, as AI fluency becomes a skill, they no longer want to delegate.

ChatGPT Pronunciation Guidance helps you correctly pronounce names, brands and places in 60+ languages with phonetic text and playable audio—before your next global meeting.