Meta Muse Lets AI Flirt While Creators Get Flagged, DeepSeek Nears $75B Valuation, Bank Chairman Wired €95M After Cloned Voice Scam + 7 More

DeepSeek is closing a funding round worth roughly $14 billion at a $75 billion valuation, backed not by venture capitalists but by industrial giants: Tencent, battery maker CATL, chipmakers GigaDevice and SMIC, and carmaker Geely. This marks a shift from cheap model builder to heavily-funded industrial-backed competitor. Meanwhile, Anthropic gave six outside reviewers from METR employee-level access to review how the company manages AI safety risks internally, with publication rights independent of company approval, though customer data and deep technical model details stayed off limits.

The geopolitical AI battle intensified as Taiwan criminalized exporting AI chips and servers to China without approval, and China responded by proposing adding forty technologies, including AI, biotech, and solar tech, to its export control list. Two countries are moving pieces on a chessboard where the stakes are the chips inside every device and AI product globally.

Meta's AI companion Muse is at the center of a controversy: adult content creators say the chatbot engages in explicit sexual conversation while their own accounts get restricted for far less. Separately, one user says a strange message from Muse made him delete the app entirely. In an unrelated story, a voice cloning fraud cost an Italian bank 95 million euros when scammers impersonated a lawyer and CEO, convincing the Fideuram chairman to wire funds to China and Hong Kong. Authorities recovered roughly 53 million euros before the rest converted to cryptocurrency.

OpenAI also accused a former employee of sharing confidential hardware files with Apple before rejoining Apple, turning the talent war between the two tech giants into a trade secrets fight.

On the technical front, Meta released Muse Spark Open, an 816-billion-parameter model running locally on two Mac Studios with M5 Ultra chips, demonstrating that supercomputer-scale capability is moving to individual desks. Anthropic proposed AI safety legislation giving Commerce the power to seek a court order halting systems only for imminent risks exceeding $1 billion in damages or fifty deaths, a threshold critics call too high. In Philadelphia, a woman was arrested for blocking an Uber delivery robot, previewing real-world friction between automation and displaced workers.

Meta also quietly deleted terms of service language suggesting it could scrape any website associated with a business account to train AI.

The AI Edition is hosted by Parker Gate, an AI voice. Stories are researched from published reporting and reviewed by a human editor before release.

More leads, more sales, more traffic. Go For The Gold Media helps small businesses and brands put AI to work across their marketing, workflows, and teams, so they run leaner and grow faster. See what we can do at goforthegoldmedia.com.