Tech firms will have 48 hours to remove abusive images under new law

The U.S. holiday shopping season is expected to bring in $253.4 billion in online sales this year, up 5.3% year-over-year, according to a new report from Adobe’s e-commerce connected division, Adobe Analytics. Adobe Analytics develops its predictions by analyzing over 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail sites, encompassing 100 million SKUs across 18 product categories….

On Wednesday, Anthropic released Claude Haiku 4.5, the newest version of its smallest model, billed as offering similar performance to Sonnet 4 “at one-third the cost and more than twice the speed,” per a company blog post. Anthropic cites a range of new benchmark results to back up those performance claims. In the company’s testing,…

Changpeng Zhao, founder of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance, has been pardoned by US President Donald Trump. Zhao, also known as “CZ”, was sentenced to four months in prison in April 2024 after pleading guilty to violating US money laundering laws. Binance was ordered to pay $4.3bn (£3.4bn) after a US investigation found it…

Liberate, an AI startup automating insurance operations, has raised $50 million in a round led by Battery Ventures as it looks to scale its agentic deployments across carriers and agencies globally. The all-equity round values the three-year-old startup at $300 million post-money, with participation from new investor Canapi Ventures and returning backers Redpoint Ventures, Eclipse,…

In a downtown Manhattan courtroom on Monday, lawyers for the US Justice Department and 40 state and district attorneys general warned a jury that the concert industry was being squeezed by a monopolist: Live Nation-Tickemaster. After amassing dominance over ticketing and artists’ use of large amphitheaters, lead DOJ counsel David Dahlquist alleged, Live Nation constructed…