📃Senate Scraps State AI Regulation

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📣 TOP AI UPDATES

Senate Scraps AI Regulation Ban in Near-Unanimous Vote

In a 99-1 vote, the U.S. Senate has removed a controversial 10-year ban on state-level AI regulation from President Trump’s reconciliation bill, The One Big Beautiful Bill. The provision, introduced and led by Sen. Ted Cruz, would have stopped states from creating their own AI rules and had support from top tech leaders like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who warned that state laws could disrupt innovation. However, bipartisan opposition from state legislators and an amendment led by Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Maria Cantwell argued that the ban would limit oversight, harm consumers, and ultimately prevent responsible AI governance (read more).

Amazon Deploys Its One Millionth Robot

After 13 years of automating its warehouses, Amazon has reached a major milestone: one million robots now operate across its 300 global facilities. The one millionth robot was recently delivered to a fulfillment center in Japan. The company also unveiled a new generative AI foundation model, DeepFleet, which boosts robot efficiency by 10%. Alongside these technology advances—which support faster delivery times and lower costs for customers—Amazon has upskilled over 700,000 employees through training programs that prepare its workforce for future career opportunities. While certain roles have been replaced by automation, Amazon claims that robotics may boost demand for reliability, maintenance, and engineering roles by as much as 30% (see Amazon’s announcement).

Publishers Can Now Put a Price on AI Crawlers

Cloudflare has launched a private beta for "Pay per Crawl," a new marketplace that lets website owners charge AI companies per visit from their web crawlers. Publishers can now set individual rates for AI access or block crawlers entirely — with Cloudflare acting as the intermediary. The move aims to help smaller sites monetize AI-driven content scraping and shift toward a permission-based model. Major publishers like TIME, The Associated Press, BuzzFeed, Sky News Group, and The Atlantic are already on board (see Cloudflare’s announcement).

🛠️ THIS WEEK’S AI COMBO: 1 PROMPT + 1 TOOL

⚡️ MIND SPARK

🤖 Elon Musk’s xAI Bags $10B in Milestone Deal: Elon Musk’s xAI has raised $10 billion in a mix of secured financing and strategic equity through a milestone transaction with Morgan Stanley. The funding will help build one of the world’s largest data centers and expand its AI platform, Grok. Combined with a $6 billion round in December, xAI’s total funding now approaches $17 billion (see Morgan Stanley’s announcement).

📩 Superhuman Joins Forces with Grammarly: Grammarly plans to acquire Superhuman to expand its AI productivity tools. The deal will bring Superhuman’s team and technology into Grammarly, which aims to integrate AI agents across daily communication tools like email to help draft replies, organize inboxes, and manage calendars (see Grammarly’s announcement).

🤖 The Future of Money? Catena Labs Raises $18M for AI Banking: Circle co-founder Sean Neville is launching Catena Labs, an AI-native financial institution backed by $18 million from Andreessen Horowitz. The startup aims to build banking infrastructure for AI agents to manage payments, treasury, and more (see Catena Labs’ announcement).

🎨 AI ART

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