Open models skip US safety tests + Texas audits data centers

Officials walked executives from Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic through the completed frontier-model framework, and its shape is now clear. Only closed, proprietary American models that hit top scores on cybersecurity benchmarks are asked to submit for government testing — voluntarily, up to thirty days before release. Open-weight models are exempt, and Bloomberg reports that officials told American firms the open-weight models coming out of China will not be tested either. The framework itself will not be published; Chris McGuire of the Council on Foreign Relations called that baffling, arguing the world cannot run on secret, voluntary rules for its most important technology.

Governor Greg Abbott directed the state's utility commission and its grid operator to verify and audit each data center moving through the interconnection queue, and any project that fails the requirements will be denied a connection. That queue now holds roughly 474 gigawatts of requests, more than five times the state's record peak demand, and about ninety percent of it is data centers. Applicants must disclose projected power draw, on-site generation, water sourcing and cooling method, noise and lighting mitigation, tax incentives received, and who actually owns the project. An earlier voluntary survey went mostly unanswered.

Volta, founded in January by former Brookfield Asset Management executives, leases artificial intelligence capacity and helps customers finance the chips behind it. It will supply Anthropic under a six-year agreement worth $10 billion, starting with a 133 megawatt site in Norway built with the crypto-mining firm Bitdeer and running Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems. Volta raised $300 million recently, valued at $2.4 billion, so the contract is worth more than four times the company selling it — the same lease-the-compute structure that now sits underneath much of Anthropic's capacity.

The African Cyberthreat Assessment Report 2026, drawn from 36 member countries, finds that 55 percent of reported cybercrime on the continent is now AI-enabled, and that losses climbed from $192 million in 2024 to $484 million in 2025. Neal Jetton, who directs INTERPOL's cybercrime unit, said AI is automating every stage of an attack, from reconnaissance and phishing through extortion and evasion. Business email compromise aimed at victims in Europe and North America is the clearest case, and 72 percent of the countries surveyed reported scam centres operating on their soil.

Shieldstral judges text, images, and text-image pairs against moderation policies written in plain language at inference time, rather than against a fixed set of harm categories frozen in during training. A platform can therefore change what counts as unsafe by rewriting a sentence instead of retraining a classifier. Mistral says the model matches or beats open guard models up to seven times its size, runs on a single 16 gigabyte Nvidia GPU, and ships on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 license — which lands the same week that Washington decided open weights are the category it will not be testing.

Merlin, which represents independent labels and distributors across more than 70 countries and roughly 15 percent of the global recorded-music market, signed on to Spotify's forthcoming fan-made covers and remixing product. Member labels choose whether their artists take part, and the tool will launch as a paid add-on so participating artists earn from it. "Every creation drives listeners back to the original work," said Spotify senior vice president Charlie Hellman. Universal Music Group had already backed the product separately, which puts both the major-label and independent halves of the market inside a format that did not exist a year ago.

The waitlist is gone. Dallas riders no longer need an invitation to hail a fully autonomous car, six months after a February commercial launch that carried nearly 150,000 people drawn from the interest list. Waymo says fully autonomous testing is already running at the Love Field Airport terminals, and that freeway testing begins shortly — the last step before highway routes open to public riders.

High Bandwidth Flash sits between high-bandwidth memory and solid-state storage, using NAND flash to hold far more data than HBM does at speeds much closer to it. The first specification, published through the Open Compute Project six months after the consortium formed, defines stacks up to 512 gigabytes with three performance grades running from roughly 0.4 to 3 terabytes a second. The target is inference, where model weights and context windows have outgrown the memory attached to each accelerator. Google and Tenstorrent are also in the consortium.