Amazon has launched an unprecedented AI-focused spending spree—what JPMorgan calls a "Capexapalooza"—marking a strategic shift from its frugal "shopkeeper" culture to heavy capital expenditure on AI initiatives, a high-risk, high-reward gamble. - The Economist

Meta is laying off hundreds of employees across recruiting, social media, sales and Reality Labs as it reallocates resources toward AI, projecting up to $135 billion for AI data-center buildout and having about 79,000 employees as of December 2025. - The Verge

Batteries not included: Panasonic will triple lithium‑ion cell production at its Japanese factories, convert automotive lines to make datacenter batteries, has about 80% pre‑sold and targets ¥800 billion in FY2029 sales while planning supercapacitor shipments in FY2027. - The Register

Trickle-down AI: Trump AI policy unabashedly serves Big Tech and economic elites, potentially splitting 'populist' MAGA coalition. - Schneier on Security

Elizabeth Warren: Only Money Gets a Seat At The Table - Benzinga

Sanders and AOC propose data center freeze. - Business Insider

2 robots promote AI education at White House - The New York Times

Senate Democrats led by Sen. Adam Schiff and Sen. Elissa Slotkin are drafting legislation, to be introduced in coming weeks, that would codify Anthropic's red lines banning its models' use for fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. - The Verge

America hates AI, can’t stop using it: Americans express negative views of artificial intelligence, yet companies keep developing and deploying AI, and adoption is keeps expanding, pressure grows on policymakers and firms to address public concerns. - The Washington Post

U.S. commission warns China's open-source AI strategy builds a self-reinforcing edge as Qwen surpasses Llama downloads - International Business Times

Jefferies' Mohit Kumar says China could be 'the big winner' in AI, citing abundant cheap power (Goldman Sachs: ~400 GW spare by 2030; electricity as low as $0.05/kWh versus up to $0.40/kWh in U.S.) and rapid open-source adoption. - AOL

China bars Manus founders from leaving the country - Reuters

Atlas swarmed: China unveils Atlas drone-swarm system with 'smart brain' autonomy controlling up to 96 vehicles for coordinated strikes - GlobalSecurity.org

Autonomous swarms are the future of drone warfare - The Economist

GitHub expands training on user data, if you don't opt out - The Register

GitHub is adding AI-powered scanning to its Code Security suite, with a hybrid CodeQL/AI public preview slated for early Q2 2026, after internal testing processed over 170,000 findings in 30 days with 80% positive developer feedback. - Bleeping Computer

LiteLLM, the open-source AI project that was recently compromised with credential-harvesting malware, was certified security-compliant by Delve, which has come under scrutiny for rubber-stamp audits. - TechCrunch

Delve certification:

A 56,000-Star AI App Shipped With a Textbook SQL Injection Flaw Exposing User Data - Hacker Noon

"Model poisoning" maliciously fine-tunes model weights to embed dormant backdoors that trigger on specific inputs to exfiltrate secrets, resist detection amid billions of weights, and enable corporate espionage and supply‑chain compromise, prompting least‑privilege and proxying mitigations. - Hacker Noon

the bacon narwhals at midnight: eigenvectors, execute order 66

Xbow USA, which automates web-application attacks and was founded by Copilot creator Oege de Moor, raised $120 million in a Series C at a valuation above $1 billion for its autonomous penetration-testing platform. - SiliconANGLE

Block CFO: AI-Driven Job Cuts Are Inevitable Across All Industries - The Wall Street Journal

Skeptics question whether bots are really replacing workers. - The Wall Street Journal

regular layoffs, with just a dash of AI rationalization

AI-powered resume tools drive 3.5x surge in job applications, overwhelming recruiters - AP News

AI automation of workforce tasks to drive HR-tech market to $82 billion - MIT

Hoover Institution panels on March 17, 2026 warned AI's rapid rollout will outpace institutions, citing a 14% productivity gain, about 1.3 million new AI job postings and a 60% rise in entrepreneurship, and urged faster policy, reskilling, and data sharing. - Hoover Institution

Tufts Study: AI Could Displace 9.3 Million U.S. Jobs and $1.5 Trillion in Wages - The Brighter Side of News

Citi's Jay Collins warns AI and robotics could bring a 'tragic end' to capitalism and democracy unless policymakers enact fiscal, tax and redistribution measures, predicting manufacturing job losses around 2028–2029 and proposing a productivity dividend and robot taxes. - Business Insider

How to tell if you will survive AI - The Atlantic

Self-improving AI: The AI Scientist, an end-to-end pipeline that autonomously generates ideas, code, experiments, analyses and manuscripts, produced a fully AI-generated manuscript exceeding an ICLR workshop's average acceptance threshold. - Nature

Beat the final boss with AI for $1m: he ARC Prize Foundation released ARC-AGI-3, a benchmark of more than 1,000 video-game-like scenarios testing on-the-fly reasoning over memorization, offering up to $1 million in prizes and highlighting current models' struggles to generalize to unfamiliar tasks. - ARC Prize

ICML rejects hundreds of papers whose authors submitted AI-assisted peer reviews, busted by prompt-injection/watermark - Nature

Energy Traders Turn to AI to Forecast the Weather Forecast - Bloomberg

Uber, Pony.ai, and partner target Zagreb for 1st European commercial robotaxi service, using Chinese EVs. - zagdaily.com

New Brunswick tourism chatbot 'Explora' produces dozens of factual errors including misidentifying largest city - CBC

Kled AI, founded by 22-year-old Avi Patel, pays people to film task-specific iPhone photos and videos, reports about 200,000 users and ~5 million daily uploads, and raised $6.5 million at a $150 million valuation. - Business Insider

OpenAI has put plans to develop an erotic chatbot on hold indefinitely after staff and investor concerns about sexual AI content, prompting an internal review of safety, policy and compliance that may delay the product roadmap. - Financial Times

Adult performers embrace AI digital twins to generate perpetual revenue beyond physical careers - WIRED

Google upgrades music generation model - TechCrunch

Real Housewives of the Fresh Grocer: Viral AI fruit soap opera videos have a sexist subtext? - WIRED

New documentary 'The AI Doc' features industry leaders debating AGI risks and societal impacts - The New York Times

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