#cryptography

Microsoft unveiled two proprietary MAI models at Build, including a 1-trillion-parameter reasoning model and a 137B coding model for GitHub Copilot, as Uber hit its AI budget ceiling after burning through its full 2026 allocation in four months. Alnylam struck a $2 billion deal with Inceptive Nucleics to build AI foundation models for RNA interference therapeutics. Trump signed a narrower AI oversight executive order requiring a 30-day review before powerful open-weight models can be released. The Trump administration also moved to strip job protections from roughly 8,000 NIH staff, including officials who oversee research grants, while Medicaid work requirements drew criticism for going beyond what advocates had anticipated.

The FDA's leadership vacuum deepened this week as the drug center head followed Commissioner Makary out the door, leaving the agency with no confirmed leadership at its two most critical posts. Open-weight models kept multiplying with Gemma 4, DeepSeek V4, and Kimi K2.6 all dropping in the same month, while Sebastian Raschka's analysis of new KV-sharing and compressed attention techniques explains why long-context costs are falling fast. A rare Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in Congo's Ituri province prompted a WHO public health emergency declaration, and the WHO's move landed as hantavirus conspiracy theories were already cycling through social media. On the economy side, Trump's China visit produced mixed signals on decoupling, while Noah Smith argued that Europe's comfortable stagnation is no longer viable.