AI labs

Roche has outlined plans to move towards autonomous AI laboratories, according to a Reuters report. The Swiss pharmaceutical company intends to use artificial intelligence to run elements of its research operations with reduced human involvement, a step that would put it among the first major drugmakers to pursue fully automated, AI-driven labs.

AI companies are now competing to show that their models pose the greatest existential threat to humanity, according to a satirical report from The Civilian. The piece skewers a tech culture in which labs treat warnings about their own systems' dangers as marketing, vying to appear most advanced and most alarming at once. Readers are discussing whether the satire reflects real industry behaviour around safety claims and competitive hype.

AI company Anthropic has struck a $12 billion computing agreement with Akamai, according to a Bloomberg report. The deal would give Anthropic access to large-scale AI computing infrastructure, a growing priority for AI labs as demand for training and inference capacity outpaces supply. The size of the arrangement and its place among similar cloud and infrastructure deals drawn attention on discussion forums.

Chipmaker Cerebras has agreed to supply 100 megawatts worth of AI chips to Gimlet Labs, a cloud computing startup. The deal marks a significant scale-up for Cerebras, which builds wafer-scale processors positioned as an alternative to Nvidia's GPUs for AI workloads, and gives the young cloud provider a large dedicated supply of compute capacity.

Anthropic has released Claude Sonnet 5.5, a new version of its mid-tier AI model that the company says delivers significantly faster response times than its predecessor. The launch lands amid fierce competition among AI labs to offer quicker, cheaper models for coding and everyday assistant tasks. Users and developers are discussing the speed gains and how the update compares with rival offerings.