Maybe you can drive my car...

POTUS eases self-driving regulations: Bloomberg reports that the White House will make it easier for companies to deploy self-driving cars to America’s roads, by creating special exceptions for automated vehicles. The US Department of Transportation will propose three new rules in an effort to modernize the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, relaxing some mandated features and amenities — like windshield wipers and defrosters — for driver-free vehicles. The agency feels that these “one-size-fits-all” rules no longer apply too all the vehicles, and the auto industry certainly isn’t going to complain.

Switzerland joins the AI race: The open-source large language model Apertus (Latin for “open”) was released by a collective of Swiss public institutions, including the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne, ETH Zurich, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. Apertus is “completely open” — meaning the training materials, datasets, and documentation are all published and open for inspection, and were gathered according to Swiss data protection and copyright law. Switzerland hopes the idea of “public models” like this one catches on, transforming AI into something like a public utility rather than a privately-owned for-profit product.

TurbineOne’s new customer is the US Army: The startup makes software that keeps soldiers informed and in touch in the field, without a steady cloud connection, by running locally on their drones, laptops, and smartphones. It’s a powerful enough idea to earn the San Francisco company a $98.9 million contract to provide their platform to the US Army. Typically, a four-year-old VC-funded startup with an innovative approach would have struggled to attract the DoD’s attention and operate within the Pentagon’s extended timelines, but the Trump Administration is looking to collaborate with more startups and expand the military’s arsenal of cutting-edge technologies. So look for more ambitious companies looking to take advantage of this trend.

Stripe’s new blockchain: The fintech favorite has teamed with crypto-themed venture firm Paradigm on Tempo, a Layer-1 blockchain built specifically for stablecoins. While projects like Ethereum once focused exclusively on the application layer, making your own blockchain has become something of a hot trend. Rather than serving one native cryptocurrency, Tempo will accept a variety of stablecoins. A new Paradigm indeed.

DeepSeek’s latest and greatest: The Chinese AI startup is apparently working on its own agentic features, to compete even more directly against US companies like OpenAI. The team reportedly plans to present their latest model — which can independently carry out multi-step real-world activities on behalf of human users — by the end of this year.

Atlassian picks up The Browser Company: The startup was ahead of the curve on AI browsers, releasing Dia — with its built-in AI assistant — back in June. In fact, Perplexity reportedly considered buying them out before releasing their own rival, Comet. Instead, it’s SaaS giant Atlassian that sealed the deal, grabbing TBC for $610 million in hard cash. This makes a ton of sense, as most of Atlassian’s best-selling products — including the Jira project management suite — run in browsers.

Inside Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team: Fortune took a look at the internal Anthropic group that stress-tests the company’s most advanced AI models, and tries to figure out how they might potentially be misused and abused by bad actors. (They’re particularly focused on national security, but also considering biological research, cybersecurity, and autonomy, among other dangers). As companies race to level up their models while keeping costs down, Anthropic continues to talk publicly about the importance of safety and good governance. Perhaps it’s a tactic but we’re not complaining.

Nvidia funds Quantinuum: Finally, Nvidia — the chip maker and world’s most valuable company — took part in a $600 million new funding round, which values the quantum computing startup at $10 billion. The two companies already collaborate on Nvidia’s Accelerated Quantum Research Center in Boston. Multinational conglomerate Honeywell owns around 54% of Quantinuum and also participated in the new round. Ultimately, the promise here is that we’ll get extremely powerful computers capable of solving some of our most complex tasks, like designing new drugs, building more powerful AI models, and who knows, maybe getting us to Mars.

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