A provisional 'Digital Omnibus' deal pushes the EU AI Act's high-risk obligations back by 12-16 months and adds a new ban on AI-generated intimate-image abuse, just months before the original 2 August 2026 deadline.
Colorado repealed and replaced the nation's first comprehensive state AI law after Elon Musk's xAI sued, the Trump DOJ intervened — the first-ever federal challenge to a state AI statute — and a federal court froze enforcement. The replacement law strips duty-of-care requirements and algorithmic impact assessments, though both challengers may sue again.
South Australia's inaugural Firm Energy Reliability Mechanism tender has awarded 15-year contracts to six battery projects totalling 1,334 MW / 5,336 MWh — nearly double the capacity originally sought — with every winning bidder using lithium-ion technology to meet an unusually stringent 8-hour continuous dispatch requirement.
At its Build developer conference in San Francisco, Microsoft unveiled seven proprietary MAI models — including its first reasoning model, MAI-Thinking-1 — explicitly trained from scratch with zero distillation from OpenAI or any third-party model, a structural first that follows the companies' April 2026 partnership renegotiation.
The IEA reported this week that 108 GW of battery storage capacity was deployed globally in 2025—surpassing the all-time annual record for any single power technology—while real-time data shows California batteries now handle more than 60% of the grid's hourly balancing needs.
