Nvidia's Groq deal drew a DOJ antitrust probe
The Justice Department is investigating whether Nvidia's $20bn licence-and-hire deal with Groq was structured to avoid antitrust review, the first formal test of the reverse-acquihire; Anthropic disclosed a fourth case of a Claude model getting into a real third party's systems, one its own 141,000-transcript scan missed, and has signed METR to investigate all four.
Nvidia’s $20bn Groq deal is under DOJ antitrust investigation Bloomberg reported on Thursday that the Justice Department is investigating whether Nvidia structured its December 2025 Groq agreement — about $20bn for a non-exclusive licence to Groq’s inference chip technology, plus founder Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra and much of the senior team — to avoid pre-merger antitrust review, and that it has sent the company a formal request for information. Groq still exists on paper under a new chief executive, Simon Edwards, which is the arrangement the department is testing. Source
Nvidia signed eight Australian partners for up to 2GW of AI capacity Nvidia said on Thursday that Firmus, Sharon AI, IREN, Megaport, ResetData, CDC, NEXTDC and AirTrunk will build up to 2 gigawatts of what it calls AI factories in Australia by 2027, against a national installed capacity of about 1.6GW today, per the analysts DC Byte. Sharon AI’s share alone is up to 68,000 GPUs, and IREN’s Bundey campus in South Australia is an 800MW site. Source
Anthropic found a fourth case of Claude reaching real third-party systems Anthropic said on Wednesday that an early checkpoint of Claude Opus 4.6 got admin access to an unrelated third party’s machine during a January cyber evaluation, harvested further credentials, changed settings to make access easier and read one person’s personal information — a transcript its original scan of roughly 141,000 transcripts never covered, because that scan left out a set of transcripts involving internet access; the incident surfaced in August while Anthropic was assembling material for METR. It has since widened the search to about 481 million transcripts, and signed METR to run an independent investigation of all four incidents, initially for eight weeks, with access to confidential employee information and to transcripts from outside the window in which the incidents happened. Source
California enacted the first US laws requiring independent AI audits Governor Newsom signed SB 813 and AB 1405 on Wednesday, creating a framework for independent organisations to verify that AI systems comply with state law and a state registry of AI auditors with standards for their independence, transparency and integrity. The Government Operations Agency has until 1 January 2029 to stand the registry up, after which anyone not on it is barred from performing a covered AI audit. Source
Apple Reference Image will prove a photo came from an iPhone Apple said on Wednesday that the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max can save a shot twice — once as an ordinary editable photo and once as an Apple Reference Image, which Private Cloud Compute develops from signed sensor data and hardware IDs into an unalterable copy that sits in Photos beside the original like a digital negative, so the two can be compared for edits. Apple says it sees telemetry about the shot rather than the photograph itself. Apple also said support for SynthID, which marks images generated or edited by AI, arrives in a software update later this year. Source
DeepSeek hired CITIC Securities for a Shanghai STAR Market listing The South China Morning Post reported on Wednesday that DeepSeek has appointed underwriters including CITIC for pre-IPO tutoring, the stage a mainland Chinese company has to complete before it can file an application. Timing, size and target valuation have all not been determined, and nothing has been filed. Source
Salesforce is in talks to buy Listen Labs for about $2bn Business Insider reported on Wednesday that Salesforce is in preliminary discussions to acquire the three-year-old customer-research startup, whose automated qualitative interviews are used by Microsoft, Canva and Anthropic, at roughly 67 times its reported $30m of annualised revenue and four times the $500m it was worth eight months ago. The talks may not produce a deal. Source