The artificial intelligence industry is entering a phase in which the most valuable companies may not be the ones building the biggest models, but the infrastructure providers that determine how businesses access, route, and pay for those models. That possibility is at the center of reports that Stripe has finalized an agreement to acquire AI gateway startup OpenRouter for more than $7 billion. If completed at the reported price, the transaction would represent a remarkable acceleration in...

Alibaba has unveiled Qwen3.8-Max, a new flagship artificial intelligence model that signals a major escalation in China’s effort to compete with leading U.S. AI developers. With 2.4 trillion parameters, a context window reaching 1 million tokens, multimodal capabilities and support for long-horizon autonomous tasks, the model represents a shift in the competitive priorities of frontier AI. The significance of Qwen3.8-Max extends beyond parameter counts. Alibaba is positioning the system...

Modern cyberattacks are increasingly shifting away from exploiting technical vulnerabilities alone and toward manipulating human trust. Rather than spending weeks searching for software flaws, attackers are finding success by impersonating trusted colleagues, IT administrators, and helpdesk personnel. This evolution reflects a broader transformation in cybercrime, where social engineering has become one of the most effective methods for gaining initial access to corporate environments. A...