Section

Business

Funding, acquisitions, market moves, and the commercial side of AI.

5 published stories

TechCrunchAug 23, 2026Regulation

Is it legal to train AI models on copyrighted books? It’s complicated

Legal and ethical questions surrounding the use of copyrighted literature to train generative AI models remain unresolved. AI developers have routinely used large corpora of scraped and digitized books without explicit licensing or author consent. While creators argue this practice infringes on intellectual property rights and disrupts publishing livelihoods, technology companies often cite fair use doctrines to defend training practices across the AI industry.

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TechCrunchAug 22, 2026Business

Harvard’s $699 startup bootcamp offers AI avatars of its instructors

Harvard Business School has introduced AI-driven instructor avatars within its $699 HBS Foundry startup bootcamp. The synthetic avatars are deployed to simulate interactive scenarios, delivering automated feedback to participants during practice pitch sessions and simulated board meetings. The program represents an institutional deployment of generative persona modeling to scale interactive professional coaching at a lower price point than traditional executive education courses.

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TechCrunchAug 22, 2026Regulation

OpenAI says California should strengthen its AI safety bill

OpenAI has publicly urged California lawmakers to strengthen Senate Bill 53, an AI safety legislative proposal. The stance marks a strategic shift for the company, which previously opposed the measure. The engagement highlights increasing industry involvement in shaping state-level AI safety mandates, risk management standards, and operational obligations for leading artificial intelligence developers operating within the state.

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WIREDAug 21, 2026Business

The Unlikely Place at the Center of China’s AI Boom

A municipality in Inner Mongolia has established itself as a critical hub for China's expanding artificial intelligence data center infrastructure. The region leverages affordable energy resources, expansive land availability, and geographic proximity to major technology centers in Beijing to support dense compute workloads. This operational cluster provides essential compute capacity to sustain large-scale model development, training runs, and high-throughput inference operations across the domestic technology ecosystem.

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TechCrunchAug 21, 2026Business

Nvidia partners with data center developer Cloverleaf

Nvidia has established a partnership with data center developer Cloverleaf to expand specialized AI computing infrastructure. The collaboration reflects Nvidia's ongoing strategy to invest directly into physical data center expansion and facilities development, securing dedicated deployment capacity for its AI hardware ecosystem. While specific financial terms and project timelines remain unstated in initial reports, the move reinforces the semiconductor leader's vertical integration strategy across physical hosting environments and accelerated computing hardware.

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