Global startup funding hit $297 billion in Q1 2026, shattering every previous record by 2.5x, per new Crunchbase data. Four frontier AI labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Waymo, collected $188 billion of that, roughly 65% of all venture dollars on the planet. This single quarter outpaces every full year of global VC activity before 2019. (TechCrunch)

The "safety-first" AI lab did it again. Anthropic accidentally published 512,000 lines of Claude Code source code through a misconfigured npm package, the company's second major security lapse in a week. The code was mirrored across GitHub within hours, racking up 41,500 forks before Anthropic could issue takedowns. (CNBC)

More than 100 Baidu Apollo Go robotaxis froze simultaneously on the streets of Wuhan, trapping passengers in moving traffic for up to two hours. On-screen messages promised "staff in 5 minutes" that never came, and some riders were stuck in middle lanes with traffic flying by on both sides. It's the first mass robotaxi shutdown ever reported in China. (CNN)

Perplexity is facing a class-action lawsuit alleging its search engine shares user conversations with Meta and Google through embedded trackers, even when users enable Incognito mode. The plaintiff, a Utah man, claims he shared financial and tax data with the chatbot, not realizing third-party trackers were downloading onto his device the moment he logged in. (Bloomberg)

Chinese semiconductor firms now control nearly 50% of the domestic AI accelerator market, with Huawei leading at roughly 812,000 chips shipped. Nvidia's share in China has fallen below 60%, down from a claimed 95% before export controls kicked in, as Beijing pushes data centers to buy domestic. (Tom's Hardware)

Governor Newsom signed a first-of-its-kind executive order requiring AI companies that sell to the state to disclose safety, privacy, and bias safeguards. State agencies have 120 days to rewrite procurement rules, creating what could become the template for how government buys AI nationwide. If you sell AI tools to enterprise or government, this is the playbook that's coming for you. (CalMatters)

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