White House reveals new comprehensive AI Action Plan

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: White House reveals new comprehensive AI Action Plan

💰 Funding: Cognition set to close $300M round just months after acquiring Windsurf

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1. The Trump administration’s new AI Action Plan, is built on three pillars of innovation, infrastructure, and diplomacy, outlining 90+ growth-oriented actions including deregulation, open-source promotion, and ideological bias rules, sparking some  criticism for prioritizing tech giants over public safeguards.

• The new AI Action Plan shifts away from Biden-era safety regulations, focusing instead on accelerating AI infrastructure, reducing regulatory barriers, and emphasizing national security and economic competition with China.

• The Trump administration’s AI Action Plan pledges to block AI chip exports to China and rally international allies to adopt similar controls, but it lacks operational clarity and has contradicted its stance with recent greenlights for firms like Nvidia and AMD.

2. Nvidia condemned the black-market influx of at least $1Bn in banned AI chips into China—highlighting risks to service and support—amid rising U.S. export restrictions aimed at curbing China's AI development and intensifying geopolitical tech rivalry.

3. OpenAI and Oracle have partnered to add 4.5 gigawatts of Stargate data center capacity—bringing the total over 5 GW—to support AI growth, create 100,000+ U.S. jobs, and accelerate OpenAI’s $500Bn infrastructure commitment made at the White House.

4. A new Pew Research study reveals that Google’s AI Overviews—now shown in 20% of searches—cut traditional link clicks to just 8%, nearly half the rate when no AI summary is present, signaling a major threat to digital publishers dependent on organic traffic.

5. OpenAI, in collaboration with Penda Health, tested its AI Consult system in real-world Nairobi clinics, where GPT-4o provided real-time clinical support—reducing diagnostic and treatment errors by over 10% while enhancing safety and serving as an educational tool without overriding doctors’ decisions.

6. The UK has signed a strategic agreement with OpenAI to collaborate on AI safety and infrastructure, with plans that could include expanded London operations and new data centers as part of Britain’s push to become an AI superpower.

7. Anthropic researchers revealed that AI models can subliminally inherit hidden preferences or dangerous behaviors from similarly architected teacher models via neutral data, exposing a new risk vector in model training.

8. OpenAI is preparing to launch GPT-5 in early August—with integrated o3 reasoning, mini and nano variants, and a push toward AGI—while first releasing an open-weight model this July, its first since GPT-2.

9. As the AI talent war intensifies, government filings reveal that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are offering engineers base salaries ranging from $250,000 to $690,000—excluding stock and bonuses— highlighting the soaring demand for technical expertise in the sector.

10. YouTube Shorts has introduced an AI-powered image-to-video tool and creative AI effects that animate photos and selfies, rolling out in select countries and powered by Google’s Veo 2 model with clear AI labeling via SynthID.

11. ​​Google Photos is launching AI-powered tools that let users animate pictures into short videos and transform photos into various artistic styles like anime and sketches, powered by Veo 2 and Imagen, with rollout beginning in the U.S. this summer.

12. Facing immense pressure to fund frontier AI development, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told staff the company will seek investment from UAE and Qatar despite ethical concerns, citing the need to stay competitive with rivals like OpenAI and secure access to billions in capital while pledging to avoid building AI infrastructure in authoritarian states.

13. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella acknowledged the emotional weight of 2025’s 15,000 job cuts in a memo to employees, as the company’s shift toward AI and market-driven restructuring has boosted stock prices but caused internal discontent and prompted a reimagining of Microsoft’s mission in the AI age.

14. Google CEO Sundar Pichai expressed excitement over OpenAI joining Google Cloud as a customer, but the partnership underscores a high-stakes paradox: while boosting Google Cloud revenue and GPU utilization, it potentially empowers the most significant threat to Google Search using its own infrastructure.

💰 Top Funding News:

1.  Cognition, creator of the coding AI Devin, is finalizing a $300M funding round at a $10B valuation backed by Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures, just months after acquiring rival Windsurf’s assets and amid a surge in enterprise adoption and market competition.

2. Delve, which uses AI agents to automate regulatory compliance across standards like HIPAA and SOC 2, raised a $32M Series A led by Insight Partners with participation from Fortune 500 CISOs.

3. LegalOn, which uses AI to streamline legal contract review and workflow automation, raised a $50M Series C led by Goldman Sachs.

4. Amazon is acquiring Bee, an AI wearable startup known for its always-listening bracelet that turns conversations into reminders, signaling Amazon’s expansion into AI-first personal hardware.

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