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Today’s Highlights:
Trump Rejects Calls to Slow Frontier AI
China’s State Media Calls AI Slowdown a “Cold War” Tactic
Salesforce Launches Its First CRM Reasoning Model
Superpose Raises $2.2M for AI Photo Coaching
Tool of the day: Aside
Read Time: 3 minutes
LATEST AI NEWS
DONALD TRUMP
Image Source: Getty Images
President Donald Trump is pushing back against calls from leading AI executives to slow the development of increasingly powerful models, arguing that additional restrictions could weaken the U.S. in its AI competition with China.
🔍 The Details:
Trump called fears that AI could “take over” or destroy humanity a “hoax” and said the U.S. already has sufficient regulatory and criminal enforcement powers over AI companies.
His comments came after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Elon Musk backed efforts to slow or better coordinate frontier AI development over safety concerns.
Trump argued that slowing U.S. AI development could primarily benefit China, framing AI leadership as an important strategic competition.
Vice President JD Vance also questioned why frontier AI companies are asking the government to regulate them, describing the push as potentially resembling a “Trojan horse.”
The debate is intensifying as lawmakers and AI companies consider proposals involving independent safety audits, model evaluations, and stronger oversight of advanced systems.
📌 Why It Matters:
A major divide is emerging over how quickly frontier AI should advance. Some AI leaders are asking for stronger safeguards and coordinated pacing, while the Trump administration is emphasizing continued U.S. development and competition with China. How that disagreement is resolved could shape future federal AI policy and the pace of frontier-model development.
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CHINA
Image Source: Reuters
China’s state-backed Global Times has criticized calls from U.S. AI leaders to slow frontier AI development, arguing that the proposals could be used to preserve American technological dominance and restrict China’s progress.
🔍 The Details
The criticism followed an essay from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who proposed pacing frontier AI development to create more time for safety measures.
Amodei also called for tighter U.S. chip export controls and stronger action against alleged model distillation by Chinese AI labs.
Global Times described the proposal as a “Cold War playbook,” arguing that safety concerns were being mixed with efforts to limit China’s AI capabilities.
China’s foreign ministry has separately called for open and cooperative AI development, while rejecting what it sees as containment-focused policies.
The dispute comes as U.S. AI leaders debate whether frontier development should slow, while China continues investing heavily in domestic models, chips, and computing infrastructure.
📌 Why It Matters
AI safety is becoming inseparable from geopolitics. What some U.S. researchers frame as necessary risk reduction is being viewed by parts of China’s state media as a strategy to protect America’s lead. That disagreement could make any global agreement on slowing or governing frontier AI much harder to achieve.
SALESFORCE
Image Source: Salesforce & Nvidia
Salesforce has introduced Koa, its first reasoning model built specifically for CRM and enterprise workflows, developed with NVIDIA using the Nemotron 3 Super model.
🔍 The Details
Koa is designed for Agentforce, helping AI agents reason through complex, multi-step sales, service, and customer workflows.
Salesforce built it by post-training NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super on synthetic enterprise scenarios inspired by 27 years of CRM experience.
Salesforce says Koa matches or beats leading models on its CRM benchmark while making 3x fewer errors on tasks like updating opportunities, routing cases, and scheduling follow-ups.
No customer data was used for training. Salesforce controls the model weights and runs inference entirely inside its own trust boundary.
Koa is already being tested with organizations including Formula 1, Xero, UChicago Medicine, Engine, and 1-800Accountant.
It is available to select Agentforce customers now, with broader U.S. availability expected in winter 2026.
📌 Why It Matters
Salesforce is moving beyond plugging general-purpose LLMs into CRM. With Koa, it wants a model that already understands how businesses handle deals, customers, service cases, and internal processes, potentially making enterprise agents more reliable at actually getting work done.
AI TUTORIAL
I gave Aside a 40-minute research task and it finished while I made coffee. It's an AI browser that works across the sites you're already logged into — research, forms, messages, all the repetitive clicking you'd rather not do.
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Tell Aside what you want done in plain English
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MORE AI & TECH NEWS
⚖️ Italy Fines Character.AI €158K
Italy’s privacy regulator fined Character.AI €158,000 over data-protection violations, including shortcomings in age verification and safeguards for minors.
💰 Gates Foundation Commits $1B to AI
The Gates Foundation is committing at least $1 billion over two years to expand AI in health, education, agriculture, and underserved languages, particularly for lower-income communities
📸 Superpose Raises $2.2M for AI Photo Coaching
Former TikTok employees launched Superpose, an AI camera app that suggests poses from photos and has already generated over 190,000 poses across 22,000+ downloads.
🛡️ OpenAI Backs Independent AI Audits
OpenAI is supporting provisions in the FRONTIER Act that would require major AI developers to undergo independent third-party safety assessments
🚫 Altman Rules Out OpenAI IPO This Year
Sam Altman says OpenAI won’t go public in 2026, arguing that an IPO would be ill-advised right now given concerns around AI safety.
💻 Cognition Launches SWE-2 on Kimi K3
Cognition released SWE-2, a Devin coding model built on Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 that it says comes within one point of Fable 5.1 on FrontierCode at 64% lower cost.
📜 Microsoft Opens AI Model Rules to Public
Microsoft plans to publish a code of conduct governing its first-party MAI models and open the rules for public consultation.
👥 Meta Asks AI Engineers to Become Managers Again
Meta is asking some Applied AI individual contributors if they want to return to management roles, just months after layoffs disproportionately reduced managers.
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