Mercedes hires a British AI to drive its cars (sort of)

Mercedes-Benz has signed a production deal to put London-based Wayve's AI Driver into its cars within two years. It's a big win for a British AI firm, but it's driver assistance, not a self-driving Mercedes.

Tesla FSD wins Czechia, speeds in Brussels, skips the UK

Czechia approved Tesla's Full Self-Driving (Supervised) this week, a Belgian test found it speeding in 30 zones, and the EU vote has slipped. UK owners who paid £6,800 are still waiting.

China's open AI models are cheap. Read the small print

DeepSeek, Z.ai, Alibaba and Moonshot have released a burst of new AI models, several with downloadable weights. They're cheap and you can run them yourself, but licences and trust come with strings.

Grok 4.7 and the week every AI model came top

xAI's Grok 4.7 landed the same week as OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol and Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, each with charts showing it winning. Independent leaderboards tell a messier story, and for UK buyers price and data matter more.

Gemini 3.8 Flash is cheap. Until 1 January

Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash is fast, capable and cheap, which is why small models are the ones most people actually use. But its introductory price doubles on 1 January, and the Cyber version is invite-only.

Claude Opus 5.5: cheaper, top-ranked, and still US-gated

Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 beats its pricier Fable 5.1 on many tests at under half the price. The savings are real, but so are the rerouted requests, the US-only Mythos and the lack of UK data options.

GPT-6 Astra is brilliant. Its benchmarks need a footnote

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra is fast becoming the model everyone wants, so much so that ChatGPT Pro sign-ups are paused. It's genuinely strong, but its headline benchmark shrinks under an independent test.

A billion dollars for UK AI. Who ends up owning it?

Emulate, ElevenLabs and Tandem Health are raising well over $1bn between them. Only some of it is backed by revenue, and very little of the money is British.

AMD hits $1tn as lenders start asking awkward questions

AMD is now worth $1 trillion, but bond buyers are charging AI giants more to borrow and a central banker has said the B-word. Here's why it matters for UK pensions and ISAs.

Amazon shut out Meta's AI shopper. Shopify let it in

Amazon has blocked Meta's Muse AI agent from buying on its site, while Shopify has plugged it straight into checkout. The fight over who lets AI shoppers in is coming, and UK rules are already waiting.