Volkswagen reportedly wants to cut 100,000 jobs, about 15% of its workforce, and close German plants. It would be the biggest overhaul in the carmaker’s history, and the unions are vowing to fight. Europe’s car industry is shrinking, and its biggest name is leading the retreat. Volkswagen reportedly plans to cut around 100,000 jobs at […]

California has built the first state tool to watch for AI wiping out jobs. The early read: no mass layoffs yet, but warning signs are flashing in the Bay Area and among college-educated workers. Everyone argues about whether AI is killing jobs. Almost nobody has hard data. California has now built a tool to find […]

OpenAI made its debut at the Cannes Lions advertising festival this week, but it did not book a beach club on the Croisette alongside Meta, Amazon, and Google. Instead, the company summoned reporters and agency executives to a semi-secluded villa near the harbour, a staging choice that doubles as metaphor: OpenAI is in the ad business, […]

Patronus AI has raised $50m to build simulated worlds where AI agents can be tested before they touch a real system. The pitch borrows from Waymo: train in a replica before you trust the road. AI agents are meant to do real work now. They book trips, write code and run financial analysis on their […]

The shipment passed through Kuala Lumpur declared as ordinary computer components. Inside the 72 server units, Malaysian customs officers found something the paperwork did not mention: advanced artificial-intelligence chips worth 52.9 million ringgit, or about $13m, sitting in the airport’s free trade zone and waiting to move on. Malaysia’s customs department announced the seizure on […]

Germany’s financial regulator is reviewing a disclosure tied to the About You takeover. Zalando says it is formal and not material. The market disagreed, briefly. It took one regulatory headline to wipe a fifth off Zalando’s value. Shares in the German online fashion retailer fell as much as 20% in Tradegate premarket trading on Friday […]

The institution that counts France found itself counting victims this week. INSEE, the national statistics department, said a cyberattack had exposed personal data belonging to about 12,800 current and former staff, along with members of the civil-service corps attached to the agency. The breach was detected on 19 June. What was taken, according to INSEE, […]

A London court already found 26 of Samsung’s smartwatch faces infringed Swatch trademarks. Now the two sides are fighting over the bill. The fight between a Swiss watchmaker and the world’s largest phone maker has come down to a number, and the number is $170m. Swatch is asking the High Court in London to make […]

A self-publishing platform exists to say yes. Kobo’s, last year, spent a remarkable share of its time saying no. Rakuten Kobo rejected 45% of the titles submitted to Kobo Writing Life, its self-publishing service, in 2025, and chief executive Michael Tamblyn attributes more than 80% of those rejections to books he judges to be manifestly […]

Numbers in the trillions have a way of losing their edges, so it is worth holding this one still for a moment. Samsung is expected to announce plans to invest 1,000 trillion won, around $647.5bn, in South Korea over the next 10 years, according to local media reports that several outlets carried on 25 June. […]