A book by Asim Javed
Future Without Consent
How AI, Power, and Profit are deciding what comes next. Here's the research behind the book, shared in real time.
Coming Soon0
Events tracked
0
Years of AI history
0
Topics
0
Categories
Latest Events
The most recent developments tracked by our research pipeline.
July 28, 2026
India's top court takes up police face scans at protests
A sitting Indian lawmaker has taken the country's police use of AI facial recognition at protests directly to its highest court. Rajya Sabha member A.A. Rahim of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) filed a Public Interest Litigation before India's Supreme Court on July 28, 2026, alleging that Delhi Police deployed facial recognition systems, AI-enabled smart glasses, fingerprint scanners, drones, and a mobile surveillance vehicle at the Jantar Mantar sit-in protest led by the Cockroach Janta Party beginning June 20, 2026. The petition, filed through advocate Subhash Chandran K.R. and naming the Union of India, Delhi Police, the National Crime Records Bureau, and two private vendors, Aditya Infotech Ltd. (CP PLUS) and Dimension NXG Pvt. Ltd. (AjnaLens), argues that thousands of protesters and journalists were biometrically identified against undisclosed databases without notice, statutory authority, or any Privacy Impact Assessment.
SourceJuly 27, 2026
Nvidia bets $5 billion on Sutskever's secret lab
Secretive AI lab Safe Superintelligence (SSI), co-founded by Ilya Sutskever (formerly OpenAI's top scientist) and Daniel Levy, just got a massive injection of computing power and cash, which matters because it is now one of the best-funded AI efforts on the planet despite having released nothing publicly yet. SSI announced a long-term partnership with chipmaker NVIDIA that includes a reported $5 billion investment and priority access to NVIDIA's next wave of AI processors. The company has now raised $7 billion in total at a $32 billion valuation, backed by major investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet, and Sequoia Capital.
SourceJuly 27, 2026
Microsoft launches AI tools to automate cyber defense
Getting hacked is expensive and hard to defend against, and Microsoft just released a suite of AI tools it says can handle the bulk of that work automatically. The company unveiled MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, its first AI model built specifically for cybersecurity, along with a multi-agent security system called MDASH and an automated security platform called Project Perception. Microsoft claims MDASH outperformed Anthropic's competing security model on a public test, though the company did not let outside researchers verify that before announcing it.
SourceJuly 26, 2026
AI labs outspend legacy chipmakers on DC lobbying
AI labs are now outspending legacy chipmakers on Washington lobbying, a sign of how much regulatory risk has shifted toward frontier model companies. The Financial Times reported on July 26, citing newly filed federal disclosures compiled by nonpartisan watchdog Issue One, that eleven major tech, social media, and AI firms spent a combined $41.8 million lobbying the U.S. government in the first half of 2026, averaging more than $230,000 per day. Anthropic nearly tripled its six-month total to $3.53 million, more than the company spent in all of 2025, while OpenAI roughly doubled to a record $2.22 million; both companies focused their disclosed lobbying on federal rules for new model releases, export controls, cybersecurity, defense procurement, and data center construction. Issue One also reported that the White House intervened to shield Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai from testifying at a July Senate hearing on child safety practices, with the Instagram and YouTube division heads substituting for their bosses.
SourceJuly 26, 2026
Nvidia and SoftBank plan Ohio's biggest data center
The largest data center ever built could be coming to Ohio, and the money and power behind it stretches from Tokyo to Washington. Nvidia is in talks to help finance up to $250 billion so OpenAI can lease the facility, which is being developed by SoftBank's energy arm, SB Energy, about 50 miles south of Columbus; combined with separate chip financing Nvidia is discussing with OpenAI, the total could top $500 billion. The electricity supply for the site is controlled by the U.S. government, with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick deciding who gets access, and Japan is partly funding the project through a trade deal linked to a $33 billion natural gas investment.
SourceJuly 24, 2026
Singapore startup harvests daily human movement for robots
Teaching robots to move and act like humans requires massive amounts of footage of humans actually living their lives, and a Singapore startup just built a device to capture exactly that at scale. Ropedia, co-founded by three Nanyang Technological University graduates, raised $22 million from angel investors connected to Google, NVIDIA, and Amazon, plus Asian venture funds, to grow its head-mounted wearable called HOMIE, which records synchronized video, depth, eye-gaze, and body-movement data to train physical AI and robotics systems. The company also released a free public dataset of over 10,000 hours of recorded human experience, which crossed two million downloads within five days of going live.
Source