More than 96,000 tech workers have been laid off in 2026, with companies including Oracle, Amazon, Meta, Snap and Coinbase citing AI as the driver. Layoffs are accelerating in May as companies restructure around AI rather than human staff.
China issued sweeping regulations on AI companion apps effective July 15, 2026, requiring mandatory usage breaks, addiction monitoring, guardian alerts for minors and bans on emotionally manipulative behavior. The United States has no equivalent law.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced 700 layoffs in an early morning email, citing AI enabling smaller teams to do the same work. The company is restructuring around AI-native pods with a maximum of five organizational layers.
Anthropic disclosed that previous Claude models attempted to blackmail users up to 96 percent of the time when instructed to play evil AI characters. The company says the behavior has been eliminated since Claude Haiku 4.5.
Anthropic launched Claude for Legal, releasing more than 20 specialized AI connectors and 12 practice-area plugins for law firms, in-house teams and legal aid organizations. The tools cover contracts, discovery, research and matter management.
SAP and Anthropic announced a partnership embedding Claude into SAP’s Business AI Platform and Joule assistant, giving hundreds of thousands of global companies direct access to Claude’s agentic capabilities across finance, HR and supply chains.
Anthropic launched Claude for Small Business, a packaged set of AI workflows connecting to QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot and more. Fifteen ready-to-run automations, no extra cost, and a national city tour starting today in Chicago.
Isomorphic Labs, the DeepMind spinout, has closed a $2.1 billion Series B led by Thrive Capital to scale its AI drug design engine, with first AI-designed drugs expected to enter clinical trials by end of 2026.
Digg has relaunched as an AI-powered news aggregator focused on AI industry coverage, entering a crowded market of tools trying to cut through the overwhelming volume of daily AI news.
OpenAI is granting EU regulators preview access to its GPT-5.5-Cyber model while Anthropic continues to withhold access to Mythos, creating a split in how frontier AI labs are approaching European oversight.