Apps & Smartphones news

• SoftBank and OpenAI launch “Patching as a Service” to defend Japan’s critical infrastructure

  16-06-2026 12:46 via thenextweb.com
  
  SoftBank and OpenAI are moving into cyber defence. The two said on Tuesday they are launching “Patching as a Service,” a security product built on OpenAI’s technology, to shield the companies behind Japan’s critical infrastructure from a rising wave of cyberattacks. SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son framed the threat in stark terms, calling Japan’s exposure “a […]
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• This a16z-backed startup says the fix for AI errors is a weaker model, not a smarter one

  16-06-2026 15:37 via thenextweb.com
  
  Most of the AI industry is trying to fix hallucinations by building bigger, smarter models. A startup called Probably is betting on the opposite. The company has raised $9m in a seed round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, with Tokyo Black and Vermilion Cliffs Ventures, to catch AI’s factual errors before they ever reach […]
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• The EU just passed the Turnberry trade deal. The tech fight is only starting.

  16-06-2026 15:33 via thenextweb.com
  
  The European Parliament voted on Tuesday to ratify the Turnberry Agreement, the trade deal struck at Donald Trump’s Scottish golf resort in July 2025. The final tally was 440 in favour, 151 against, with 50 abstentions. Under the deal, the EU will eliminate most tariffs on US industrial goods. In return, the US caps tariffs on […]
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• Nvidia is backing a startup that turns its own GPUs into a commodity

  16-06-2026 15:24 via thenextweb.com
  
  Hydra Host has raised $100m to build the plumbing of the AI boom, and one of its new backers is the company whose chips it is trying to turn into a commodity: Nvidia. The Series A was led by Kindred Ventures, with Nvidia joining alongside ARK Invest, Comcast Ventures, Magnetar, PEAK6 and others. The Information, […]
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• Commodore’s comeback flip phone runs your apps but bans the doomscroll

  16-06-2026 15:11 via thenextweb.com
  
  Commodore, the computer brand that defined the 1980s, is back with a flip phone, and its main selling point is everything it will not let you do. The Callback 8020, announced on Tuesday, is a clamshell that runs modern apps but blocks web browsers and social media outright. Pre-orders open on 30 June, prices start […]
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• Nuvei is buying Payoneer for $2.75bn to build a one-stop rival to Stripe

  16-06-2026 14:53 via thenextweb.com
  
  Nuvei is buying Payoneer for $2.75bn, a bet that the way to take on Stripe is to own every step of a payment, not just one. The Canadian firm will pay $7.40 a share in cash for Payoneer, the cross-border specialist listed on Nasdaq, in a deal both boards have approved. It ends Payoneer’s roughly […]
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• The US government is defending xAI’s polluting turbines as vital to the war effort

  16-06-2026 14:42 via thenextweb.com
  
  The US Justice Department has taken Elon Musk’s side in a pollution lawsuit, arguing that the gas turbines powering his AI data centre are too important to national security to switch off. In a filing on Monday, the department, joined by the state of Mississippi, asked a court to dismiss the case the NAACP brought […]
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• Threads hits 500 million users, and adds a feed control even X doesn’t have

  16-06-2026 14:23 via thenextweb.com
  
  Meta’s Threads has crossed 500 million monthly users, the company said on Tuesday, almost exactly three years after it launched to chase Elon Musk’s X. That is 100 million more than last August, and it puts Mark Zuckerberg halfway to the 1 billion-user goal he set on day one. Alongside the milestone, Threads is shipping […]
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• Qualcomm’s CEO says AI agents will be the new app, and 40 new devices are coming

  16-06-2026 14:09 via thenextweb.com
  
  Qualcomm’s chief executive thinks the app as you know it is on the way out, and that the phone in your pocket is about to lose its place at the centre of your digital life. ‘Agents are going to be the new app,’ Cristiano Amon told CNBC’s The Tech Download podcast. Apps are ‘not dead,’ […]
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• SpaceX makes its $60bn Cursor takeover official, days after its record IPO

  16-06-2026 13:53 via thenextweb.com
  
  SpaceX has made it official. In a filing on Tuesday, Elon Musk’s newly public rocket company said it had signed a binding agreement to buy Anysphere, the startup behind the popular AI coding tool Cursor, in an all-stock deal that values the company at $60bn. It confirms an option SpaceX first disclosed in April, and […]
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• Claude earns more revenue per user than ChatGPT, Sensor Tower finds

  16-06-2026 13:24 via thenextweb.com
  
  OpenAI still rules AI by sheer size, but it is no longer running away with it. ChatGPT’s apps crossed 1 billion monthly users last month, the fastest any app has reached the milestone, according to Sensor Tower’s State of AI report. Yet on the metric that pays the bills, OpenAI is losing: Anthropic’s Claude now […]
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• SailPoint plans to buy Entro to pour non-human identities into its “Agentic Fabric”

  16-06-2026 13:10 via thenextweb.com
  
  The race to secure non-human identities just produced its second deal of the day. SailPoint, the Austin-based identity-security giant, said it plans to buy Entro, a Tel Aviv startup that finds and protects the credentials, keys and machine accounts that now swarm through every cloud. The companies did not disclose a price; Calcalist reports it […]
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• 1Password acquires Apono to govern what AI agents can do once they’re inside

  16-06-2026 13:05 via thenextweb.com
  
  1Password is buying its way into the agentic enterprise. The Toronto identity-security company said on Monday it has acquired Apono, an Israeli startup that decides, in real time, what every human, machine and AI agent is allowed to touch inside a company’s systems. Neither side disclosed a price; the Israeli outlet Calcalist reports the deal […]
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• France’s intelligence service is dropping Palantir for a homegrown rival

  16-06-2026 11:21 via thenextweb.com
  
  France’s domestic intelligence agency is dropping Palantir. The DGSI will replace the American firm’s data-analysis tools with software from ChapsVision, a French company, Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said on Tuesday, framing the switch as part of a wider push to put sovereign technology at the centre of the French state. The timing is the part […]
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• SpaceX overtakes Amazon as its post-IPO rally rolls on

  16-06-2026 11:14 via thenextweb.com
  
  SpaceX is now worth more than Amazon, at least for as long as the rally holds. Shares of the rocket company rose more than 10% on Tuesday, extending a run that began at its market debut and putting it on course to become the world’s fifth most valuable listed company, four trading days after it […]
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• China signs up 26 financial institutions for digital-yuan cross-border payments

  16-06-2026 11:07 via thenextweb.com
  
  China’s central bank has brought a fresh batch of financial institutions into its digital-yuan network for cross-border payments, extending a currency that began life as a way to buy noodles in Shenzhen towards the far harder business of moving money between countries. Reuters reported the expansion on Monday, the latest in a steady run of […]
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• OpenAI spent $34bn last year as it lines up for an IPO

  16-06-2026 11:00 via thenextweb.com
  
  OpenAI spent $34bn in 2025, more than two and a half times what it took in, as it prepares to file for one of the largest public listings ever attempted. The figure, reported by the Financial Times, lays out in stark terms what the race to build frontier AI now costs the company leading it. The […]
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• As Europe rearms, the ‘wingman’ drone takes centre stage at the Berlin airshow

  16-06-2026 10:55 via thenextweb.com
  
  The aircraft drawing crowds at last week’s Berlin airshow was not the one with a pilot in it. The “loyal wingman,” an uncrewed jet built to fly beside a manned fighter and carry the extra sensors, jammers, and weapons the fighter cannot, has become Europe’s defence obsession, and four companies turned up to sell it. […]
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• France to spend €655m on AI and a single chatbot for the whole civil service

  16-06-2026 10:47 via thenextweb.com
  
  France wants its civil servants to share a chatbot. On Monday, Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu announced an additional €655m for artificial intelligence, the headline use of which is a single sovereign conversational assistant intended for every public agent in the country, roughly a million people. The assistant, according to the announcement, is meant to help with […]
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• Ukraine gains access to EU emergency cyber response for major attacks

  16-06-2026 10:11 via thenextweb.com
  
  Ukraine can now draw on emergency European Union cyber support to respond to large-scale incidents, after the Council of the EU approved its inclusion in the EU Cybersecurity Reserve on 15 June. The decision extends a defensive mechanism built for member states to a country whose networks have been under sustained attack since Russia’s full-scale […]
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• AlphaGo’s David Silver puts his superintelligence bet on Google Cloud

  16-06-2026 10:04 via thenextweb.com
  
  Ineffable Intelligence, the London startup founded by the DeepMind researcher behind AlphaGo, has named Google Cloud as the infrastructure partner for its frontier AI lab. The deal, announced at Google Cloud’s London summit on 16 June, gives a company with grand ambitions and no product the computing scale its founder says the work demands. The founder […]
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• TCS takes a $70m hit after US Supreme Court rejects its appeal

  16-06-2026 09:54 via thenextweb.com
  
  Tata Consultancy Services will book a one-time charge of $70m after the US Supreme Court declined to hear its appeal in a trade-secrets dispute, the Indian IT giant said. The court’s refusal, issued on 15 June, closes the last legal avenue in a case that has run since 2019 and leaves the lower-court judgment standing. […]
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• India blocks Telegram until 22 June over medical exam-cheating rackets

  16-06-2026 09:46 via thenextweb.com
  
  India has temporarily blocked access to Telegram until 22 June, the government said, after concluding that cheating rackets were using the app to defraud candidates sitting a high-stakes medical-entrance re-exam. The order, invoking Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, ties a national app block to a single, fraught testing event. The exam is NEET-UG, […]
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• Italy’s antitrust regulator opens a probe into Apple’s cloud services

  16-06-2026 09:40 via thenextweb.com
  
  Italy’s competition authority has opened an investigation into Apple over its cloud services, examined under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act. The move places Apple’s cloud business under a regulator that has already become one of the company’s more persistent adversaries in Europe. The Digital Markets Act is the framework doing the work here. The EU’s […]
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• DeepSeek closes $7bn-plus round with an unusual structure

  16-06-2026 09:33 via thenextweb.com
  
  DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab that unsettled the industry with a cheap, capable model last year, has closed its first round of outside funding, raising roughly 50 billion yuan, about $7bn, in a deal whose structure is as notable as its size. The valuation lands between $52bn and $59bn, according to Reuters. The unusual part […]
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• Florida sues TikTok over its child social-media law

  16-06-2026 09:27 via thenextweb.com
  
  Florida has sued TikTok, accusing the app of breaking the state’s law restricting minors’ access to social media and of misleading parents about what their children would find there. Attorney General James Uthmeier announced the suit on 15 June, filing it in St. Lucie County Circuit Court. The complaint alleges TikTok illegally let minors onto the platform, […]
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• Alibaba unveils AI models for robots as China’s focus shifts to agents

  16-06-2026 09:21 via thenextweb.com
  
  Alibaba has revealed its first suite of AI models for robots, a move that says as much about where Chinese technology is heading as about the models themselves. The launch came as the industry pivots away from chatbots and towards agents, the systems meant to carry out complex tasks rather than just answer questions. At […]
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• Anthropic curbs make the case for sovereign AI, Upstage chief says

  16-06-2026 09:15 via thenextweb.com
  
  When the US government ordered Anthropic to cut foreign access to its most capable models, and the company switched them off worldwide rather than try to comply selectively, it handed every advocate of home-grown AI a tidy piece of evidence. Sung Kim, chief executive of the South Korean startup Upstage, picked it up at a […]
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• Exclusive: Optiak raises €4m to build an orchestration layer for enterprise AI

  16-06-2026 09:00 via thenextweb.com
  
  Optiak, a startup building what it calls a modular operating system for enterprise AI, has come out of stealth with a €4m pre-seed round, about $4.7m, led by Market One Capital, Next Tier Ventures, EA Ventures Plug and Play EMEA Fund and Mission. The company, the founders say, is trying to solve a problem most […]
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• Rocapine raises $13m to build wellness apps that hold instead of hook

  16-06-2026 02:00 via thenextweb.com
  
  Rocapine, a Paris venture studio building wellness apps, has raised a $13m Series A led by Educapital, the company said. The pitch is a neat inversion: take the playbook that made mobile gaming addictive, fast iteration, AI-native development, performance marketing, and aim it at the opposite outcome. Not time on screen, but, in the studio’s […]
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