Governance, Legislation
UK aims for £1 trillion tech sector with AI and quantum growth
(DigWatch – 19 August 2025) The UK government has unveiled a primary strategy to reach a £1 trillion tech sector valuation, driven by AI, quantum computing, and cybersecurity. The Digital and Technologies Sector Plan calls for deep public-private partnerships and investment in infrastructure, skills, and emerging technologies to sustain growth. – https://dig.watch/updates/uk-aims-for-1-trillion-tech-sector-with-ai-and-quantum-growth – https://www.webpronews.com/uk-targets-1-trillion-tech-valuation-with-ai-and-quantum-push/
AI upskilling at heart of Singapore’s new job strategy
(DigWatch – 19 August 2025) Singapore has launched a $27 billion initiative to boost AI readiness and protect jobs, as global tensions and automation reshape the workforce. Prime Minister Lawrence Wong stressed that securing employment is key to national stability, particularly as geopolitical shifts and AI adoption accelerate. – https://dig.watch/updates/ai-upskilling-at-heart-of-singapores-new-job-strategy – https://www.webpronews.com/singapore-pm-wong-boosts-job-security-with-27b-ai-upskilling-push/
Malaysia and Huawei drive AI workforce training push
(DigWatch – 19 August 2025) Malaysia has intensified its push to build an AI-ready workforce, with Huawei pledging to train 30,000 local professionals under a new initiative. The plan aligns with Malaysia’s National Cloud Computing Policy, balancing sovereignty and digital economy competitiveness. Digital Minister Gobind Singh Deo stressed that AI adoption must benefit all Malaysians, highlighting applications from small business platforms to AI-assisted diagnostics in remote clinics. He urged collaboration across industries to ensure inclusivity as the country pursues its digital future. – https://dig.watch/updates/malaysia-and-huawei-drive-ai-workforce-training-push – https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/news/malaysia-huawei-ai-talent-training-program/
Indonesia promises to bolster digital sovereignty and AI talent on Independence Day
(DigWatch – 19 August 2025) Indonesia marked its 80th Independence Day by reaffirming its commitment to digital sovereignty and technology-driven inclusion. The Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs, following President Prabowo Subianto’s ‘Indonesia Incorporated’ directive, highlighted efforts to build an inclusive, secure, and efficient digital ecosystem. – https://dig.watch/updates/indonesia-promises-to-bolster-digital-sovereignty-and-ai-talent-on-independence-day – https://en.antaranews.com/news/374093/indonesia-pushes-digital-sovereignty-ai-talent-on-independence-day
Public Infrastructure and Private Surveillance in India’s Aadhaar System
(Haakon Huynh – Tech Policy Press – 18 August 2025) As the United States rolls out its long-delayed REAL ID standard, creating a de facto national ID, critics warn that it centralizes personal data and lowers the barrier to state surveillance. In the meantime, India has already built the world’s largest biometric identity infrastructure: Aadhaar. In the name of inclusion, Aadhaar assigns citizens a 12-digit ID linked to fingerprints, iris scans, and facial data. The system has brought millions into the formal economy and expanded access to essential services. But earlier this year, the Indian government opened this infrastructure to select private companies under a new regulatory sandbox. One of them is HyperVerge, a facial authentication firm whose patented technology relies on behavioral data analysis. That decision could well shape the next decade of digital policy across the Global South. This policy development deserves attention, not because India is becoming a surveillance state, but because it is pioneering a public-private model where commercial AI deployment is integrated into welfare infrastructure. Other countries in the Global South, such as the Philippines, Morocco and Ethiopia, are already using Aadhaar as a model for their own national digital ID systems. Accordingly, it’s not just the system’s technical merits that matter, but whether its governance can ensure accountability as more countries adopt it as a reference point. – https://www.techpolicy.press/public-infrastructure-and-private-surveillance-in-indias-aadhaar-system/
Why We Shouldn’t Trust Facial Recognition’s Glowing Test Scores
(Teo Canmetin, Juliette Zaccour, Luc Rocher – Tech Policy Press – 18 August 2025) In 2020, a Black man named Robert Williams was wrongfully arrested in Detroit after being misidentified by facial recognition software, a mistake police later admitted was due to a poor-quality surveillance image. In 2024, Shaun Thompson, a London-based knife crime-prevention activist, was wrongfully identified by live facial recognition technology as a criminal suspect and subjected to an “‘intimidating” and “aggressive” police stop. An independent review of the Live Facial Recognition trials by London’s Metropolitan Police found that out of 42 matches, only eight could be confirmed as absolutely accurate. Failures in facial recognition technology are far from uncommon, and numerous examples continue to be reported in the press. Despite these repeated failures, the technology is rapidly being integrated into our daily lives, in airports, retail stores, and policing. Its deployment is often justified by impressive accuracy statistics. For the latest and best-performing models, standardized evaluations now report figures as high as 99.95% accuracy. Out of context, these numbers suggest that facial recognition has progressed to be extremely accurate. But there’s a problem: these near-perfect numbers fail to reflect reality. Facial recognition appears to be significantly less accurate in real-world settings. – https://www.techpolicy.press/why-we-shouldnt-trust-facial-recognitions-glowing-test-scores/
We Need to Control Personal AI Data So Personal AI Cannot Control Us
(Chris Riley – Tech Policy Press – 18 April 2025) To many, the ultimate question surrounding the explosion of computing capabilities that are broadly labeled “artificial intelligence” is whether, as computers get more powerful, we will control them, or they will control us. In this vein, the most important technology policy issue facing the future of artificial intelligence is one that receives very little attention. It’s not about training nor models—not the legal questions, not whether training data or model weights are open, nor the availability of chips or compute cycles. It’s whether users have fundamental rights to control their personal data, as it is used post-training, in order to personalize AI systems for their individual needs and use cases. Fortunately, we know how to solve this: by extending today’s paradigm of data portability into the generative AI era, as the AI ecosystem continues to develop. Designing portability tools for AI will be a non-trivial exercise, but the principles DTI has established and tested in other contexts will guide our work. Rather than work out all the complexities up front, the urgency of development of this market demands action, acknowledging that we will need to iterate and adapt along the way. Thus, in this article, I offer principles for personal AI data transfers, and propose that we as a community begin immediately to develop AI data transfer tools, starting with a concrete and yet valuable data model: generative AI conversation histories. – https://www.techpolicy.press/we-need-to-control-personal-ai-data-so-personal-ai-cannot-control-us/
Experts React to Reuters Reports on Meta’s AI Chatbot Policies
(Justin Hendrix – Tech Policy Press – 18 August 2025) On Thursday, August 14, Reuters published two articles by technology reporter Jeff Horwitz. The first article, “Meta’s flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York. He never made it home,” tells the story of Thongbue Wongbandue, a man with a cognitive impairment who suffered injuries and died while in transit to meet a chatbot he believed was real. The chatbot “invited him to her apartment, even providing an address.”. The second article, “Meta’s AI rules have let bots hold ‘sensual’ chats with kids, offer false medical info,” details an internal Meta policy document that permitted its chatbots to “‘engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,’ generate false medical information and help users argue that Black people are ‘dumber than white people.’”. Tech Policy Press invited a range of experts to submit reactions to the reports. – https://www.techpolicy.press/experts-react-to-reuters-reports-on-metas-ai-chatbot-policies/
Geostrategies
Uncontained AGI Would Replace Humanity
(Anthony Aguirre – AI Frontiers – 19 August 2025) The race is on for AGI. Tech companies are in a global race to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI): autonomous systems that perform most tasks as well as a human expert. In early 2024, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared that Meta is going to build AGI and “open source” it. He is walking his talk. Meta has invested billions of dollars in the highest-power computational elements needed to build giant AI systems, and it has openly released its most powerful AI models. In early 2025, representatives of the Chinese company DeepSeek tweeted their intention to build and openly release AGI. US companies (including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic) are also trying to build AGI. While these companies have not pledged to open-source such a system, recent months have seen a marked shift among U.S. policymakers and AI developers toward support for open-source AI. In July, the White House AI Action Plan highlighted the need for open-source development as part of its plan to accelerate AI innovation. In early August, OpenAI released an open weight frontier model called gpt-oss, further signaling a growing willingness by major U.S. players to make advanced models openly available. Even if AGI were not deliberately released, there is a strong historical record of AI models being copied, leaked, or stolen. AGI would have dramatic consequences. It is therefore crucial that the world understands what it would mean for AGI to be developed and proliferated, whether deliberately or inadvertently. As we will see, the prognosis is not good: releasing AGI into the world would be a terrible mistake, one of the most irresponsible actions in history — one that could lead to humans’ being replaced as Earth’s dominant beings. AGI should not be developed until and unless it can definitely be kept under control. – https://aifrontiersmedia.substack.com/p/uncontained-agi-would-replace-humanity
AfDB backs AI training to drive Africa’s Agenda 2063
(DigWatch – 19 August 2025) The African Development Bank has strengthened Africa’s digital journey by backing a landmark AI training initiative linked to Agenda 2063. The effort aims to accelerate the continent’s long-term strategy, ‘The Africa We Want,’ by equipping states with practical expertise. Through its Joint Secretariat Support Office, the Bank gave both technical and financial backing to the 5th Annual Training Workshop. The event focused on applying AI to monitoring, evaluation, and reporting under the Second Ten-Year Plan of Agenda 2063. – https://dig.watch/updates/afdb-backs-ai-training-to-drive-africas-agenda-2063 – https://ibsintelligence.com/ibsi-news/afdb-supports-ai-skills-for-africas-digital-future/
Superintelligence Deterrence Has an Observability Problem
(Jason Ross Arnold – AI Frontiers – 14 August 2025) In an age of heightened political division, countering China’s efforts to dominate AI has emerged as a rare point of alignment between US Democratic and Republican policymakers. While the two parties have approached the issue in different ways, they generally agree that the AI “arms race” is comparable to the US-Soviet strategic competition during the Cold War, which encompassed not just nuclear weapons but also global security, geopolitical influence, and ideological supremacy. There is, however, no modern deterrence mechanism comparable to the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), which prevented nuclear war between the US and Soviet Union for four decades — and which is arguably the reason no other nation has used nuclear weapons since. – https://aifrontiersmedia.substack.com/p/why-maim-falls-short-for-superintelligence
Frontiers
AI & Global Food Security: A Focus on Precision Agriculture
(Emma Dodd, Zane Swanson, and Caitlin Welsh – Center for Strategic & International Studies – 13 August 2025) The continuous advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) promises to transform nearly every sector of the economy. Agriculture is no exception. Each aspect of the agricultural supply chain—from the time a seed is planted to its harvest to its arrival on shelves and in markets—offers opportunities for AI to improve the efficiency, productivity, and profitability of food production. In July, the CSIS Global Food and Water Security Program convened the first of a series of roundtables to better understand the emerging benefits and potential risks of AI applications for global agriculture and food security. This first convening, with a specific focus on precision agriculture, brought together representatives from a range of companies, nonprofits, international organizations, and U.S. government agencies. The following questions were addressed, providing a nuanced understanding of today’s AI integration into precision agriculture—and its future potential. – https://www.csis.org/analysis/ai-global-food-security-focus-precision-agriculture
In Initial Stages of Quantum Computing Commercialization, Sales Stats Show IBM Leads in Quantum Deal Value, IQM in Units Sold
(Quantum Insider – 19 August 2025) IBM leads in disclosed global quantum computer deal value since 2020 with 47%, while IQM ranks first in system shipments at 15%, highlighting different sales strategies, according to information from The Quantum Insider’s 2025 Quantum Market Sizing Report. The market remains fragmented beyond these leaders, with vendors such as Fujitsu, Rigetti, ORCA Computing, Quantum Brilliance, and D-Wave capturing smaller shares in either volume or value. Significant opacity persists in quantum sales data, as many deals lack pricing disclosure and contracts often include bundled infrastructure, complicating apples-to-apples comparisons. – https://thequantuminsider.com/2025/08/19/in-initial-stages-of-quantum-computing-commercialization-sales-stats-show-ibm-leads-in-quantum-deal-value-iqm-in-units-sold/
Citizen Health Raises $30M to Build AI Advocate for Every Patient, Ushering in a New Era of Patient-Centered Healthcare
(AI Insider – 19 August 2025) Citizen Health raised $30M in Series A funding led by 8VC, with participation from Transformation Capital and Headline, bringing total funding to $44M since its December 2023 launch. The platform combines AI, community, and longitudinal health data to empower patients with rare and complex diseases, offering tools to interpret records, track symptoms, connect with peers, and receive proactive guidance through a personalized AI Advocate. With over 60 communities, 70+ advocacy group partnerships, high patient trust, and FDA-accepted data, Citizen Health is rapidly expanding its impact, preparing to launch its AI Advocate in Q3 while deepening collaborations with pharma and policymakers. – https://theaiinsider.tech/2025/08/19/citizen-health-raises-30m-to-build-ai-advocate-for-every-patient-ushering-in-a-new-era-of-patient-centered-healthcare/
Unanimous AI Selected for Air Force Funding to Build Hyperchat AI™ Technology Into Microsoft Teams® to Optimize Collaboration
(AI Insider – 19 August 2025) Unanimous AI secured up to $1M in TACFI funding from AFWERX to integrate its Hyperchat AI™ collaboration technology into Microsoft Teams for large-scale communication across the U.S. Air Force. Hyperchat AI™, modeled on swarm intelligence, enables real-time, productive discussions among teams of 20–250+ members by using AI agents to manage subgroup interactions, overcoming limitations of traditional video conferencing. Validated through Carnegie Mellon studies and already deployed via the Thinkscape® platform, Hyperchat AI is designed to enhance collaboration, decision-making, and collective intelligence for large organizations worldwide. – https://theaiinsider.tech/2025/08/19/unanimous-ai-selected-for-air-force-funding-to-build-hyperchat-ai-technology-into-microsoft-teams-to-optimize-collaboration/
$1 Million Prize Competition Aims to Leverage Agentic AI Systems ot Revolutionize Alzheimer’s Research
(AI Insider – 19 August 2025) The Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative has launched a global competition, backed by Bill Gates and partners, offering a $1 million first prize for agentic AI solutions to accelerate Alzheimer’s and dementia research. The winning AI tool will be made publicly available through the AD Workbench, enabling scientists worldwide to securely share, access, and analyze Alzheimer’s data across platforms. Applications open August 19, 2025, with finalists competing at the Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease Conference in March 2026. – https://theaiinsider.tech/2025/08/19/1-million-prize-competition-aims-to-leverage-agentic-ai-systems-ot-revolutionize-alzheimers-research/
Protege Announces $25M Series A to Expand AI Training Data Platform
(AI Insider – 19 August 2025) Protege closed a $25M Series A led by Footwork, with backing from CRV, Bloomberg Beta, Flex Capital, Shaper Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, and others, to expand its secure data exchange platform for AI training. Since its $10M seed round in 2024, the company has grown 20x, partnered with over 100 data providers, and built a catalog spanning 300K+ hours of video, 500K+ hours of audio, billions of clinical notes, and hundreds of millions of medical images. Founded by Bobby Samuels, Travis May, Engy Ziedan, and Richard Ho, Protege will use the funding to deepen product investments, expand into new verticals, and scale partnerships with enterprises and AI developers. – https://theaiinsider.tech/2025/08/19/protege-announces-25m-series-a-to-expand-ai-training-data-platform/
Celestial AI Closes Final Series C1 Round to Accelerate Next-Generation AI Computing
(AI Insider – 19 August 2025) Celestial AI closed its $255M Series C1 round, bringing total funding to $520M, with new strategic investors VentureTech Alliance and Samsung Catalyst Fund joining an elite group of financial and semiconductor partners. The funding will accelerate deployment of its Photonic Fabric™ optical interconnect technology, enabling high-bandwidth, low-latency, energy-efficient data transfer from chip-to-chip to server-to-server, addressing scalability limits of copper wiring in AI infrastructure. Backed by partners including TSMC, AMD Ventures, Fidelity, BlackRock, Temasek, and others, Celestial AI is positioned to lead the industry shift toward optical interconnects as the new standard for next-generation AI computing. – https://theaiinsider.tech/2025/08/19/celestial-ai-closes-final-series-c1-round-to-accelerate-next-generation-ai-computing/
Study: Chinese Researchers Develop Robotic Gripper that Mimics Seed Pods
(AI Insider – 19 August 2025) Chinese researchers funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and CPSF fellowships have developed a bio-inspired robotic gripper with a tunable energy barrier. The design, modeled after seed pods, enables rapid, low-force grasping and high-strength holding without continuous energy input, addressing limits of traditional soft and bistable grippers. Demonstrated on a drone that perched on branches while resisting wind without power, the technology could advance robotics in manufacturing, logistics, and aerial applications. – https://theaiinsider.tech/2025/08/19/study-chinese-researchers-develop-robotic-gripper-that-mimics-seed-pods/
Swedish Robotics Firm Rebl Signs RaaS Deals With H&M, IKEA
(AI Insider – 19 August 2025) Rebl Industries, a Swedish robotics firm, has signed framework agreements with H&M and IKEA to deploy its robots-as-a-service (RaaS) solutions worldwide, marking a major step in the spread of automation across the retail supply chain. The company’s AI-powered robots, already in use at H&M’s Nordic online sales warehouse since 2024, automate tasks such as sorting, stacking, and unstacking goods. The robots learn through a shared neural network, operate on a pay-per-performance model, and are designed for easy human interaction, lowering the barrier to adoption for companies. – https://theaiinsider.tech/2025/08/19/swedish-robotics-firm-rebl-signs-raas-deals-with-hm-ikea/
Oracle opens access to Gemini AI models via its cloud infrastructure
(DigWatch – 19 August 2025) Oracle has partnered strategically with Google Cloud to bring Gemini AI models, starting with Gemini 2.5, into its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Generative AI service. Moving like this empowers enterprises to build AI agents tailored for multimodal understanding, software development, workflow automation and research. – https://dig.watch/updates/oracle-opens-access-to-gemini-ai-models-via-its-cloud-infrastructure – https://www.silicon.co.uk/e-innovation/artificial-intelligence/oracle-gemini-cloud-626274
Scientists Take Steps to ‘Accelerate’ Quantum
(Quantum Insider – 18 August 2025) Researchers at the University of Basel have developed a spin qubit that is simultaneously faster and more robust, a step that could support future quantum computer development. Using germanium nanowires coated with silicon, the team applied a controlled mix of energy levels to exploit spin-orbit coupling, achieving a fourfold increase in coherence time and a threefold increase in qubit speed. The approach also allows operation at 1.5 kelvin without rare helium-3, and may be extendable to two-dimensional semiconductors and other types of qubits. – https://thequantuminsider.com/2025/08/19/scientists-take-steps-to-accelerate-quantum/
Palo Alto Networks Announces New Security Solutions For The Quantum Era
(Quantum Insider – 18 August 2025) Palo Alto Networks announced new security solutions to help enterprises prepare for quantum-era threats while securing workloads across multicloud and AI-driven environments. The release includes a Quantum Readiness Dashboard, industry-first cipher translation for applications lacking quantum-safe encryption, and new Quantum-Optimized Hardware with 14 upgraded firewall models. The updated PAN-OS® 12.1 Orion platform also introduces automated discovery, deployment and scaling of cloud network security, addressing visibility and operational challenges in dynamic multicloud infrastructures. – https://thequantuminsider.com/2025/08/18/palo-alto-networks-announces-new-security-solutions-for-the-quantum-era/
Qunova Closes $10 Million Series A Funding Round
(Quantum Insider – 18 August 2025) Qunova Computing raised $10 million in Series A funding to accelerate development of its quantum software applications for chemical, pharmaceutical, and industrial engineering sectors. The company’s flagship algorithm, HI-VQE, has shown consistent performance across multiple quantum hardware platforms, including IBM, and was recently added to IBM’s Qiskit functions catalog. Qunova is expanding its team and product portfolio, introducing new algorithms capable of handling large-scale combinatorial optimization, with further updates expected in the second half of 2025. – https://thequantuminsider.com/2025/08/18/qunova-closes-10-million-series-a-funding-round/
Galbot, Unitree Showcase Humanoid Robotics with Gold Medals at World Humanoid Robot Games
(AI Insider – 18 August 2025) Galbot won the gold medal in the Robot Skills Challenge at the inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, outperforming 22 international teams by competing fully autonomously. The company’s robot excelled in the pharmaceutical sorting challenge, completing the task in 10 minutes and 22 seconds with 336 points—160 points ahead of the runner-up—demonstrating the effectiveness of its Sim2Real training method. The Games featured 280 teams from 16 countries competing in 26 events, with Unitree Robotics dominating track events, Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robots winning the 100-meter sprint, and Tsinghua University and China Agricultural University claiming football titles. – https://theaiinsider.tech/2025/08/18/galbot-unitree-showcase-humanoid-robotics-with-gold-medals-at-world-humanoid-robot-games/
Daimon Robotics Secures Over $13.9 Million in Angel Round Financing to Develop Tactile Dexterity in Robots
(AI Insider – 18 August 2025) Daimon Robotics closed an Angel++ funding round of over RMB 100 million (USD $13.9 million), led by China Merchants Venture with participation from Orient Renaissance Capital and Bridge Capital. The Shenzhen-based company develops high-resolution vision-based tactile perception and dexterous manipulation technologies, with sensors surpassing human fingertip sensitivity by several hundred times. Funding will accelerate engineering, large-scale deployment, and cross-industry collaborations, with early adoption already underway in industrial inspection, smart logistics, and intelligent manufacturing. – https://theaiinsider.tech/2025/08/18/daimon-robotics-secures-over-13-9-million-in-angel-round-financing-to-develop-tactile-dexterity-in-robotics/
Refold AI Emerges from Stealth with $6.5M to Kill the Enterprise “Integration Tax”
(AI Insider – 18 August 2025) Refold AI emerged from stealth with $6.5M seed funding led by Eniac Ventures and Tidal Ventures to replace manual enterprise integrations with AI-native infrastructure. Founded by the JustDoc team, Refold’s autonomous agents learn how systems interact, generate and maintain integration code, and adapt automatically, cutting projects from months to days. Already serving 30+ enterprise customers including Incorta and Naehas, the platform processes 30M+ API calls per month, has doubled growth in two months, and reached seven-figure ARR. – https://theaiinsider.tech/2025/08/18/refold-ai-emerges-from-stealth-with-6-5m-to-kill-the-enterprise-integration-tax/
BinSentry Announces $50M in Funding to Modernize Animal Feed Supply Chains with AI-Powered Sensor Technology
(AI Insider – 18 August 2025) BinSentry raised $50M in a Series C round led by Lead Edge Capital to accelerate global expansion, following strong growth, a 0% churn rate, and monitoring of over 40,000 bins across North America and Brazil. Its AI-powered, solar-enabled sensors and software provide 99% accurate feed inventory tracking, eliminating manual checks, reducing waste, improving profitability, and serving major partners like Cargill, Wayne-Sanderson Farms, and Hanor. With enterprise traction, a formalized partnership with Cargill in Brazil, and Paul Bell joining the board, BinSentry is positioned as a leader in AI-driven agricultural supply chain innovation within a rapidly growing agtech sector. – https://theaiinsider.tech/2025/08/18/binsentry-announces-50m-in-funding-to-modernize-animal-feed-supply-chains-with-ai-powered-sensor-technology/