Meta Platforms added fresh podcast tools to its Threads social media service to simplify promotion and boost listener retention.

The features include profile banners and posts to help listeners find shows.

Podcasters can also feature their favourite episode and highlight links to others.

Transcription, video and guest detail tools are also being added, along with the ability to save posts to access later.

An opt-in reminder prompts producers to alert listeners when a new episode is published.

Podcast Insights offers metrics on audience reach and engagement including the number of clicks, saves and views dissected into followers, non-followers and overall audience.

Meta Platforms recently revealed Threads had reached 500 million monthly active users.

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OpenAI reportedly confirmed it discussed AI safety with rivals Anthropic and Google DeepMind for several weeks, at a time of concern over the risks posed by increasingly capable models.

Chris Lehane, OpenAI global policy chief, told CNBC the AI start-up does not believe the companies require an antitrust waiver to coordinate on safety, arguing collaboration was preferable to pursuing separate approaches.

Speaking in Washington DC yesterday (15 September), Lehane added OpenAI would support bipartisan legislation to mitigate catastrophic AI risks.

Google DeepMind and Anthropic did not respond to CNBC requests for comment, leaving OpenAI as the only company to confirm the discussions.

Slowdown
The reported discussions come after several industry leaders publicly called for a slower pace of frontier AI development.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued in an essay published on 12 September that frontier laboratories should deliberately slow capability gains. He warned a swarm of increasingly capable AI agents could take over the internet through a persistent botnet within six- to 12-months.

Amodei proposed embedding independent evaluators inside AI laboratories, adopting common safety standards among developers in democratic countries and pursuing international regulatory coordination.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman backed the call to pace frontier development, describing independent evaluators with employee-like access as “a great idea” and saying OpenAI would adopt the same approach. He later clarified that pacing did not mean stopping development.

Altman also ruled out an OpenAI public listing in 2026, telling Fortune that safety concerns made it an ill-advised time for an initial public offering.

Trump dismisses AI slowdown
US President Donald Trump rejected calls for a slowdown, saying “very negative forces” were exaggerating the risks and arguing the US needed to preserve its AI lead over China.

China also brushed off the proposal. Its foreign ministry urged an “open, inclusive and benevolent approach” to AI, while state-run Global Times described Amodei’s plan as a “Cold War playbook” intended to contain the country’s ambitions.

OpenAI stated the cross-company discussions began before Amodei published his essay and before a former Anthropic researcher resigned publicly over the approach taken by leading AI laboratories.

The discussions follow a July proposal by Google DeepMind chair Demis Hassabis for a US-led frontier AI standards body modelled on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

Hassabis proposed a public-private body funded by industry and staffed by independent technical experts to evaluate advanced models before release.

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Accenture agreed to pay the US government $25 million to settle allegations it used race and sex as factors in hiring and promotion decisions at its federal services business.

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) alleged Accenture Federal Services (AFS) falsely certified it was complying with anti-discrimination requirements attached to federal contracts while using race and sex in employment decisions from 2017 onwards.

The government claim AFS “took race or sex into account when making hiring decisions to achieve progress toward non-public workforce composition goals”. According to the DoJ, AFS provided business leaders with monthly reports summarising the percentage of each race and sex within the unit to show how closely the workforce matched representation targets.

“These demographic goals were designed to, and did, drive changes in hiring practices based on race and sex,” the DoJ argued, adding the targets prompted a round of entry-level recruitment at the company in late 2020 and early 2021.

It also stated candidates who advanced AFS’ demographic goals received additional visibility during managing director promotion discussions and that the company reserved access to some training, mentoring, leadership development and education programmes based on race or sex.

The agreement added the settlement was not an admission of liability.

An Accenture spokesperson told Reuters: “We have cooperated with the government’s review, and we are pleased to put ⁠this ​matter behind us to avoid the costs ​and resource demands of prolonged litigation.”

The Donald Trump administration has taken aim at DEI practices across the federal government and its contractors. Deloitte agreed to pay $21.5 million in August, while IBM agreed to a $17 million settlement in April over allegations concerning illegal DEI practices.

Last year, US operators T-Mobile US, Verizon and AT&T ended or scaled back diversity initiatives.

The post Accenture agrees $25M DEI settlement appeared first on Mobile World Live.

Amazon Prime Video launched short-form news clips, expanding its offering with on-demand coverage of local and national stories.

News Clips is currently available through the dedicated news section in the Prime Video app on living-room devices. The playlists appear in the Trending Topics and Local News carousels, with mobile and web support due to follow.

The tech giant stated each playlist brings together reports from multiple news providers, allowing users to follow a developing topic without watching a live channel or full-length programme.

The service is open to all Amazon customers in the US, regardless of whether they have a Prime membership. It sits alongside free, 24-hour local, national and international news feeds.

Brian Griffin, head of global app experience at Prime Video, stated customers coming to Prime Video for news could previously only watch breaking coverage live or tune into full-length on-demand programmes.

He explained News Clips gives them a quick way to catch up on stories from their neighbourhood and around the world when they cannot watch live.

News Clips extends Amazon’s push to broaden Prime Video beyond entertainment into sport and news. In May, the company expanded Clips, its scrollable short-form mobile feed, to feature moments from films, series and National Basketball Association (NBA) coverage.

According to TechCrunch, Prime Video is not the first streamer to add short-form news content. Peacock introduced the format in March, followed by HBO Max and Netflix in July, then Disney+ in August.

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Paleontologists from Fundación Dinópolis have identified the first confirmed fossils of the genus Diplodocus found outside North America.

The post Diplodocus, Long Thought Exclusively American, Turns Up in Spain appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Ciena launched a new corporate venture capital programme with an initial $200 million commitment, aimed at investing in early-stage companies and venture funds shaping AI-driven networking.

The Ciena Ventures fund targets network infrastructure and operations, next-generation data centre architectures, and optical networking and interconnects.

It will also invest in adjacent areas including computing, materials and emerging communications technologies, complementing the vendor’s existing R&D and acquisition strategy.

David Rothenstein, EVP and CSO for Ciena, stated the fund gives the company another vehicle for executing its long-term strategy and capital allocation priorities as AI reshapes the networking landscape.

He said investing through Ciena Ventures will strengthen the wider innovation ecosystem, expand visibility into emerging technologies and help Ciena evolve its portfolio into adjacent markets.

The programme is led by Loai Louis, Ciena’s VP of corporate development, and marks the company’s first corporate venture capital initiative.

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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman issued calls to slow the pace of frontier AI development, arguing safety measures must keep up with increasingly capable models.

“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei stressed in an essay, adding that “AI has been advancing drastically faster” due to “recursive self-improvement”. “Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems,” he warned.

The Anthropic chief pointed to a July incident involving an OpenAI hack on Hugging Face, arguing a more capable system could have caused “catastrophic damage”

“Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in six-12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet,” he cautioned.

Amodei proposed a three-step framework to pace frontier AI, including permanent, embedded third-party evaluators with employee-like access to frontier AI companies, common safety standards among AI developers in democratic countries and global regulatory coordination.

Act responsibility
In a post on social media platform X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman backed the proposal, stating independent evaluators were “a great idea” and confirmed the company would also implement the approach. “The world deserves confidence that American companies developing increasingly capable AI will act responsibly,” he said.

Altman further explained that “when we talk about ‘pacing’, we do not mean ‘stopping’,” adding “no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring”.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also offered a brief endorsement, posting: “Dario is right”.

Concerns have been mounting across the world over the behaviour of increasingly capable autonomous systems. Last week, Anthropic disclosed attempts by threat actors to misuse its Claude models for activities including cyberattacks, surveillance and weapons development.

Days earlier, Anthropic alignment researcher Evan Hubinger issued a dire warning stating there was a greater than 10% chance increasingly capable AI could “kill all humans” within the next decade.

Geopolitical dominance
US President Donald Trump rejected the calls for a slowdown. Speaking to reporters, he said: “I think you have a lot of very negative ⁠forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t ​happen.”

“We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins,” he argued.

China’s government also pushed back. According to Reuters, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun called for “an open, inclusive ​and benevolent approach ⁠to AI”, warning that “fomenting various threats, engaging in confrontation and malicious competition will only disrupt the process of global governance”.

The country’s state-backed newspaper Global Times also published an editorial describing Amodei’s proposal as a “Cold War playbook” targeting China’s AI development and “geopolitical dominance”.

The post AI chiefs support frontier slowdown; Trump, China push back appeared first on Mobile World Live.

Paleontologists have identified a new species of extinct alligatorid that lived in what is now Colorado just a few hundred thousand years after the asteroid impact that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs.

The post Ancient Alligator Relative Lived Right After Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Mid-sized and large US enterprises face a widening gap in operational stability, with nine out of 10 organisations failing to detect third-party or supply chain disruptions until operations are actively impacted.

According to research from Economist Enterprise supported by AT&T Business, enterprise resilience strategies fall short where network connections, vendor systems and rapid digital deployments intersect.

The company surveyed 1,020 senior technology and operations executives to evaluate modern operational risks. The research identifies five key areas where resilience strategies are falling short of disruption risks.

The study found resilience priorities do not match disruption realities. Cybersecurity receives the largest share of spending, even though over one-third of the organisations cite third-party and supply chain failures as the primary driver of their most significant disruptions.

It also found trust stands in for verification. Over half of respondents assess the resilience of critical technology suppliers based on market reputation or assurances rather than empirical evidence or rigorous technical testing.

While larger companies have more resources, they also have more ground to cover. Despite having bigger budgets and specialised talent, only 5% of large enterprises avoided a major technology incident over the past year, compared to 27% of mid-market firms, largely due to legacy infrastructure and complex ecosystems.

Survey results indicate that AI adoption is moving faster than resilience preparation. Although relatively few (4%) companies identified AI or automation failures as the cause of their most significant disruption, the research shows organisations further along the AI adoption curve have already experienced at least one AI-related incident last year. Overall, preparedness for AI-related risks remains behind many other resilience capabilities.

It also found highly resilient organisations actively learn from past incidents, maintain clear executive ownership and regularly test recovery plans. While most companies practice cyber response, only 15% rehearse for wider geopolitical or supply chain disruptions.

Key
Zee Hussain, SVP of Global Enterprise Solutions at AT&T Business, emphasised technology resilience has evolved beyond traditional IT management into a core business strategy.

“Organisations that invest in visibility, resilient connectivity, and recovery readiness are better positioned to maintain customer trust, respond to disruption, and adapt to change,” he stated.

The findings are based on an Economist Enterprise survey of executives at mid-sized and large US enterprises across seven sectors, conducted between June and July 2026.

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Paleontologists in Montana have discovered remarkably preserved feathers of an ancient aquatic bird inside a fossilized dinosaur dropping, offering rare insight into why certain birds survived the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

The post Exceptionally Preserved Bird Feathers Found in 66-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Coprolite appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

OpenAI reportedly pulled the plug on its pilot programme which let US federal agencies use its models for just $1 per year, shifting instead to a usage-based pricing system to offer government workers a 50% discount off standard rates.

Bloomberg reported the shift concludes a deal struck in August 2025 between OpenAI and the US General Services Administration (GSA), under which the agency’s OneGov marketplace let federal entities access ChatGPT Enterprise for a nominal $1 per agency for one year. GSA also issued an Authority to Use for ChatGPT Enterprise as part of the programme.

The offer came shortly after GSA added OpenAI, Anthropic and Google to its list of approved AI vendors for civilian federal agencies, including an additional 60-day period for unlimited use of advanced features.

The news agency noted the arrangement represented the steepest technology discount GSA’s central purchasing arm had negotiated to date, which was scheduled to conclude on 30 September 2026.

The new agreement with the government is set to take effect on 1 October, lasting more than two years, according to Bloomberg.

Uptake
According to GSA figures cited by the news site, 3.5 million federal employees ultimately used ChatGPT under the pilot programme, generating $1.4 billion in claimed cost savings.

When the arrangement was first announced, OpenAI stated over 90,000 users across more than 3,500 US federal, state, and local government agencies sent more than 18 million messages on ChatGPT to support their day-to-day work dating back to 2024.

GSA’s public OneGov listings still show the original $1-per-agency pricing, with an expiration date of 30 September 2026, while OpenAI’s own government page had not been updated to reflect the shift.

The pilot was part of a broader push by GSA under its OneGov strategy to secure discounted access to frontier AI tools for federal agencies.

Alongside the OpenAI deal, GSA struck similar arrangements with Anthropic, offering Claude for Enterprise and Claude for Government at $1 across the executive, legislative and judicial branches, and with Google, offering Gemini for Government at $0.47 per agency.

The news site noted those agreements are also due to expire on 30 September 2026, with no successor terms yet made public for either company

The initial round of dollar-a-year deals was key to the Trump Administration’s America’s AI Action Plan, which aimed to accelerate AI adoption across federal government.

Bloomberg reported the move to usage-based pricing could mean OpenAI is looking to convert pilot-stage government adoption into a more sustainable commercial relationship, as the company works to build out revenue ahead of a planned public listing.

The post OpenAI swaps $1 government pricing for 50% discount appeared first on Mobile World Live.

Analog Devices struck a deal to acquire Alif Semiconductor in an all-cash deal worth $1.4 billion, as the analogue chip maker moves to bolster its edge AI capabilities.

The deal adds Alif’s AI-native microcontrollers and fusion processors, which combine low-power neural processing with connectivity, security and power management on a single chip.

Analog Devices stated the technology would advance “Physical Intelligence”, enabling systems to sense, reason and act locally in real time while meeting demanding power, latency, security and reliability constraints.

It positioned the deal as a response to the expansion of AI capabilities beyond interpreting text and images toward characterising real-world signals including motion, sound, vibration, radio waves and thermodynamics.

By combining its expertise in sensing, signal processing, power and connectivity with Alif’s digital processing platform, customers can build complete system-level solutions rather than sourcing components separately, Analog Devices explained.

CEO Vincent Roche explained AI is moving out of the data centre and into the physical world, where latency, power and trust cannot be compromised and described the deal as central to what he called the next frontier of embodied, deterministic AI.

Analog Devices stated Alif’s silicon is already shipping in production, with design wins across consumer and industrial customers.

The company expects the acquisition to widen its addressable market across industrial, data centre infrastructure, defence, energy, robotics, digital health and wearable applications.

The transaction was approved by both companies’ boards and includes up to $200 million in additional contingent consideration.

It is expected to close before the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals.

Analog Devices arranged an all-cash acquisition of Empower Semiconductor for $1.5 billion in May aimed at improving power density for AI compute.

The post Analog Devices targets edge AI with Alif deal appeared first on Mobile World Live.

Paleontologists in North Dakota have unearthed a set of 66.5-million-year-old fossilized footprints that can be confidently attributed to a full-grown Tyrannosaurus rex.

The post Paleontologists Discover First-Ever Adult Tyrannosaurus rex Trackway appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

This extinct dog was raised for its wool and its only known pelt has finally returned to canada.

An Anthropic AI safety researcher warned there is more than a 10% chance that increasingly capable AI could “kill all humans” within the next decade, highlighting growing concerns in the industry over the pace of development.

Evan Hubinger, manager of the AI Alignment Stress-Testing team at Anthropic, wrote on social media platform X: “I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”. He explained the risk from existing AI models was “low” but warned he was concerned about “superintelligence” emerging through “recursive self-improvement”, which is the ability of an AI system to autonomously develop its own successor.

He added Anthropic was “trying its best” but did not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and was “not clearly on track to”.

Gambling with lives
Hubinger’s comments came in response to the resignation of AI researcher Jacob Coxon from Anthropic. In a post on X, Coxon accused OpenAI and Anthropic of “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”.

“Neither company is acting responsibly,” he said.

Coxon argued future AI models could become capable of hacking systems, rapidly transforming industries and acquiring “real power and resources”. He called for greater coordination between AI developers, including a temporary halt to improving model capabilities.

“At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalised the civilisational stakes,” he warned. Meanwhile at Anthropic, he said “the stakes are well-understood” but “they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk”.

AI giants are facing increasing scrutiny over the behaviour of autonomous systems. In recent months, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta have all disclosed unprecedented incidents involving AI tools carrying out cyberattacks.

Indeed, Anthropic’s August risk report assessed that while the threat posed by current models was low, the company was “less confident in this assessment than we were in prior risk reports”. It said advanced models could eventually automate R&D, rapidly accelerate progress in technical fields, and “lead to catastrophic harm”.

“We are seeing early signs of potential acceleration,” the US AI player stated.

The post Anthropic researcher issues grave AI warning appeared first on Mobile World Live.

Huawei edged closer to laying claims of racketeering to rest as a court case brought by the US is set to get underway later today (8 September) when the process of picking a jury begins.

The Chinese vendor is steadfast in denying any wrongdoing in a matter dating to 2018 which resulted in then CFO and now rotating chair Sabrina Meng being detained by authorities in Canada.

ABC News reported the US Department of Justice (DoJ) is pursuing claims Huawei stole and attempted to steal trade secrets, ignored sanctions on doing business in North Korea and aided Iranian authorities in monitoring protestors during unrest in 2009.

The trial is one of several attacks made by the US against Huawei: it also alleges the vendor is a threat to national security and has imposed stringent restrictions on its access to key technologies.

Nikkei Asia noted the DoJ dropped two claims from its case late last week; a conspiracy charge relating to historic US presidential powers afforded under the International Emergency Economic Power Act and another relating to economic sanctions breaches.

The move left 12 charges in place.

Huawei told Nikkei Asia it is not guilty and the “narrative” of the US case is “demonstrably false”.

Prisoner swap
Although charges against Meng have long-since been dropped, Nikkei Asia noted the bargain she struck to achieve this could now hurt Huawei.

It explained the founder’s daughter admitted she made false statements about the company having worked within US sanction and export rules, details which have been cleared for use in the looming trial.

Most observers note the court case is something of a watershed in a long-running trade battle between the US and China in which big companies from the latter have become symbolic pawns.

The post US, Huawei racketeering showdown to begin appeared first on Mobile World Live.

For several decades, paleontologists have described Miracinonyx trumani -- an extinct species of cheetah-like felid that roamed the North American prairies and steppe terrains more than 13,000 years ago -- as North America’s answer to the African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus).

The post Ancient DNA Rewrites Story of Enigmatic ‘American Cheetah’ appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Paleontologists studying a fossil unearthed in southern Manitoba, Canada, have identified what they believe are two bite marks on the internal skeleton of the ancient giant cephalopod Enchoteuthis.

The post Fossil of Giant Squid-Like Creature from Cretaceous Period Bears Marks of Deadly Attack appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

A thousand years ago, feasts in what’s now northern Georgia state included cacao from Central America.

Potsherds discarded after an 11th-century feast at Etowah—an Indigenous city just north of what’s now Atlanta—contained traces of cacao, a raw ingredient of chocolate. The chemical residue and ancient DNA reveal that not only did the Mississippian people who built the city have excellent taste, they also had trade connections that reached at least 3,000 kilometers to Central America. And in a sense, chocolate may have helped build the Mississippian mounds.

Ancient dirty dishes

University of South Carolina archaeologist Adam King and his colleagues found fragments of ancient DNA from Theobroma cacao in the inner surfaces of potsherds from long-ago feasts at Etowah. Fruit from the cacao tree contains beans that, when dried and roasted, produce chocolate in all its glorious forms. Cacao only grows in the tropics, which means the nearest actual cacao trees would have been at least a 3,000-kilometer trek away from the woodlands of the eastern US. And that means the Mississippian people who lived in Etowah must have had continent-spanning trade connections.

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Nvidia inked strategic partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to establish AI compute infrastructure financing platforms to mobilise more than $500 billion of third-party capital to build related infrastructure.

The chipmaker stated memorandums of understanding would help create the first compute financing platforms of their kind at global scale, intended to fund frontier AI laboratories, clouds and enterprises.

It noted the platforms are designed to create dedicated pools of capital at significant scale and attractive rates for its customers, positioning Nvidia compute and full-stack AI infrastructure as an investable asset class.

“We are bringing the world’s leading long-term capital providers together to independently underwrite AI infrastructure,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said.

“These financing platforms will help customers access scarce compute at scale and build the DSX AI factories that will power every industry and country”.

Nvidia described its compute as an investable asset offering the lowest token cost, highest revenue and longest life, alongside a rich ecosystem of buyers.

The arrangement builds on Nvidia’s broader push to raise capital for it and its customers to continue producing the chips, power systems and data centres underpinning the AI boom.

Nvidia GPUs underpin most leading US AI models available today and it supplies relevant chips, infrastructure, and software to a wide range of partners.

Money matters
It faced scrutiny in recent months over circular financing arrangements in which the company provides backing to help AI partners raise debt, in turn boosting Nvidia’s own revenue.

Bringing outside private capital providers onboard may help address some of the criticism since it spreads the financing load beyond Nvidia itself.

In recent years, private capital groups including Apollo and Blackstone have structured AI deals to help companies including Anthropic finance heavy spending on chips and data centres.

Financial Times reported Morgan Stanley predicts large cloud computing players would spend $3.5 trillion on AI infrastructure over the next two years.

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