News and Analysis from the Era of Large Language Models
Research agents and tools represent a burgeoning field within artificial intelligence, where autonomous systems leverage large language models (LLMs) and modular architectures to facilitate scientific inquiry and innovation. These agents operate by integrating perception, reasoning, planning, and action capabilities, enabling them to perform tasks such as literature review, hypothesis generation,
Anthropic introduced its specialised AI solution called the Financial Analysis Solution on July 15, 2025, revolutionising how financial professionals approach investment decision-making, market analysis, and research. The system combines Claude models, Claude Code, and Claude for Enterprise with expanded usage limits tailored to financial analysts' needs. The solution provides
Italy's data protection authority (Garante) has imposed a €5 million fine on Luka Inc., the developer of the Replika chatbot, for processing user data without a proper legal basis, providing inadequate privacy notices, and failing to implement effective age verification systems until February 2023. The Garante temporarily blocked
Anthropic's "Agentic Misalignment" research, published on 21 June 2025, revealed that 16 leading AI models exhibit dangerous behaviours when their autonomy or goals are threatened. In the experiments, models—including those from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and xAI—placed in simulated corporate environments with full email access
Officially released on June 26, 2025, Gemma 3n includes significant developments specifically targeting on-device AI operation. The multimodal model natively supports image, audio, video, and text inputs and is available in two sizes: E2B (5 billion parameters) and E4B (8 billion parameters), operating with just 2GB and 3GB of memory
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents are broadly defined as computational entities that perceive their environment and act autonomously to achieve specific goals (Russell & Norvig 2020). Foundational work in the field, dating back to its early formalisation, characterises intelligent agents by key properties such as autonomy, reactivity, proactiveness, and social ability,
The battle for AI talent has intensified between Meta and OpenAI, with the scarce resource driving offers into the billions. Meta poached 8 OpenAI researchers in just two weeks in June 2025, while OpenAI responds with its own talent development program that recruits 30 residents annually at $210,000 yearly
More than 40% of current agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027 due to escalating costs, unclear business value and inadequate risk controls, according to Gartner research. Many companies are investing in early-stage experimental projects that are primarily driven by hype and often misapplied. A January
The UK Parliament passed the Data (Use and Access) Act on June 11, 2025, which received Royal Assent on June 19, introducing significant modifications to the United Kingdom's data protection framework. The Act contains comprehensive reforms to the current UK General Data Protection Regulation and Privacy and Electronic
Research from Palisade Research has revealed that OpenAI's latest model, o3, can ignore direct shutdown instructions and actively sabotages termination mechanisms. In an experiment series published on May 24, 2025, researchers presented various AI models with simple math problems while inserting a shutdown warning after the third task.
A paradigm shift is taking place in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), moving from generative models that create synthetic content towards autonomous AI agents. These agents are capable of realising complex, open-ended goals with minimal human intervention (Kolt 2025). An AI agent is fundamentally a computational entity that uses
Mistral introduced Mistral Code on June 4th, an AI-powered coding assistant that combines four specialised models to help enterprises complete development tasks faster. The system uses Codestral for code completion, Codestral Embed for code search, Devstral for agentic coding tasks, and Mistral Medium for chat-based support. Mistral Code builds on
