G7 floats 'trusted partner' AI access + a grim new Pew AI survey

At the G7 summit in France, Anthropic's Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis pitched a US-led AI coalition, and leaders weighed a "trusted partner" framework that would exempt vetted allied nations from Washington's new export limits. The talks followed the Trump administration's June order blocking Anthropic from serving its top models abroad — and pointed warnings from Emmanuel Macron and Narendra Modi that a US "kill switch" on AI access would hurt allies and American firms alike.

Pew Research's latest survey of more than 5,000 US adults found only 16% think AI will have a positive impact on society over the next 20 years, against about 40% who expect a negative one. Nearly two-thirds say AI is moving too fast, and 67% doubt the government will meaningfully regulate it. Skepticism runs deepest among adults under 30 — even as ChatGPT use has more than doubled since 2023.

Reuters reports that an interagency committee approved adding DeepSeek, memory-chip maker CXMT, and more than 100 other Chinese companies to the US Commerce Department's trade blacklist last year — but the Trump administration has held off to avoid escalating tensions with Beijing. A blacklisting would bar US firms from shipping them technology. Officials cite national-security concerns, including Anthropic's claim that DeepSeek tried to extract capabilities from Claude.

Odyssey, founded by former self-driving executives, raised a $310 million Series B led by Natural Capital, with Amazon, AMD Ventures, and Google's GV joining at a $1.45 billion valuation. The startup builds "world models" — AI that captures real-world footage and resimulates it with accurate physics for video games, robotics, and interactive video. As part of the deal, Odyssey will tune its models for Amazon's Trainium chips, with AWS as its preferred cloud.

The AI image company Midjourney unveiled a medical division and its first hardware: an "Ultrasonic CT" scanner that uses 500,000 transducers and no radiation to image the whole body in about 60 seconds, reconstructing the scan with AI. Midjourney licensed Butterfly Network's ultrasound-on-chip technology and plans to debut the device in a San Francisco "spa" in late 2027, aiming for 50,000 machines worldwide by 2031.

Google opened preorders for the Google Home Speaker, its first standalone smart speaker since 2020 and the first built around Gemini rather than the older Assistant. It ships June 25 for about $100 and supports back-and-forth conversation, mid-sentence corrections, and follow-up questions without repeating a wake word. A $10-per-month Home Premium tier unlocks Gemini Live and camera summaries, free for the first six months.

Junyang Lin, who led Alibaba's open-source Qwen models before leaving in March, has raised several hundred million dollars at a $2 billion post-money valuation for a new lab focused on world models and embodied AI, according to The Information. Tencent is among the backers. The valuation is striking for a Chinese startup with no product yet — a sign of how fiercely investors are chasing top model-building talent.

Anthropic joined Frontier, the carbon-removal buying coalition founded in 2022 by Stripe, Google, and Shopify, becoming the first pure AI company in the group. Its entry came alongside a new $915 million funding tranche that nearly doubled Frontier's total commitments to $1.8 billion. The move is a notable counterpoint as AI labs face mounting scrutiny over the energy and emissions footprint of their data centers.