Canadian AI start-up Cohere has agreed to acquire Germany’s Aleph Alpha in a transatlantic deal aimed at giving governments and regulated industries an alternative to US tech giants.

The combined entity will be anchored in Germany and Canada, pooling engineering talent and compute resources across the two G7 nations. It will target customers in the public sector, finance, defence, energy, manufacturing, telecommunications and healthcare.

As part of the deal, Germany’s Schwarz Group, the retail giant behind Lidl and Kaufland, is leading a €500m structured financing commitment into Cohere’s upcoming Series E round. Schwarz’s sovereign cloud service Stackit will act as the technical backbone of the venture.

The market opportunity is sizeable. McKinsey projects AI services will surpass $1trn annually, with sovereign AI needs accounting for close to $600bn of that total.

“Organisations globally are demanding uncompromising control over their AI stack,” said Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere. He said the partnership would give enterprises and governments “the absolute certainty that their data remains their own”.

Ilhan Scheer, co-CEO of Aleph Alpha, said the combined company would give European institutions “access to powerful, yet controllable AI they can truly own”, and serve as a “real counterweight” for organisations that refuse to outsource AI control to a single provider or jurisdiction.

A transatlantic challenger

Forrester’s vice-president and principal analyst Thomas Husson said the deal creates “a unique transatlantic player designed to challenge the dominance of US giants”.

“While it is technically an acquisition by the Canadian firm, the real power is likely to be shared,” Husson said. “Cohere will provide cutting-edge engineering and global product and commercial leadership, while German players (and especially the Schwarz Group) provide the essential capital and political backing.”

He described the structure as “hybrid and unusual” and said it was aimed at “capturing the sovereign AI market to offer a secure alternative for governments of highly regulated industries to avoid reliance on US cloud laws”.

Husson said the tie-up will put pressure on French AI company Mistral in particular. “This will directly challenge Mistral AI who will now face a new rival combining North American agility with European regulatory trust,” he said.

However, Husson warned that success is not guaranteed. “Ultimately, the deal’s success depends on whether this dual-headed leadership can remain unified while competing against the massive budgets of giants like Microsoft, Google or OpenAI.”

The transaction is subject to approval by Aleph Alpha shareholders and competition regulators.

In August last year, Cohere raised $500m at a $6.8bn valuation and hired the former Meta vice-president for AI research Joelle Pineau as its first chief AI officer. Pineau, a Canadian computer scientist and a professor at McGill University, led Meta’s Fundamental AI Research team.

Cohere’s oversubscribed raise was led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital, with additional participation from existing investors including AMD Ventures, Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures.

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from the that’s-a-lot-of-defamation-cases-kash dept

To have one defamation case about public allegations of your drinking as FBI Director would be unfortunate. To have a second dismissed the very next day would be, well, perhaps a sign that something has gone wrong. Earlier this week we wrote about Kash Patel’s ridiculously weak defamation case against The Atlantic over its big, deeply sourced article with multiple sources claiming that there have been problems associated with Patel’s drinking.

His complaint was filed on Monday. In it, his lawyers mention that they already have an existing defamation lawsuit against MSNBC’s Frank Figliuzzi (a former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence). This is part of Patel’s argument for why the Atlantic should have known the reporting was false. From the Monday complaint:

The FBI further warned Defendants that these allegations echoed a similar fabrication previously aired by MSNBC’s Frank Figliuzzi on Morning Joe—anonymously sourced reporting that was later retracted by MSNBC and that is the subject of pending defamation litigation—yet Defendants published it anyway.

That was Monday. On Tuesday, that defamation lawsuit was dismissed. Judge George C. Hanks Jr. made quick work of it, noting that Figliuzzi’s statement was clearly rhetorical hyperbole — a form of opinion that cannot be defamatory.

The case was entirely about this exchange on MSNBC:

Host: “So, Frank, let’s turn to FBI Director Kash Patel, who has sort of taken a surprisingly backseat role—at least to this point, in the first 102 or 103 days, wherever we are right now. What do you make of that, that he’s just been a little less visible than I think a lot of people and Trump observers expected him to be?”

Figliuzzi: “Yeah, well, reportedly, he’s been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building. And there are reports that daily briefings to him have been changed from every day to maybe twice weekly. So this is both a blessing and a curse, because if he’s really trying to run things without any experience level, things could be bad. If he’s not plugged in, things could be bad, but he’s allowing agents to run things. So we don’t know where this is going.”

The court is not at all impressed by this lawsuit.

The Court finds that Figliuzzi’s statement, when taken in context, cannot have been perceived by a person of ordinary intelligence as stating actual facts about Patel. As alleged, Figliuzzi’s statement about Patel—again, made in response to a question about Patel’s decreased visibility as Director of the FBI—was that “he’s been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building.”…. A person of reasonable intelligence and learning would not have taken his statement literally: that Dir. Patel has actually spent more hours physically in a nightclub than he has spent physically in his office building. By saying that Patel spent “far more” time at nightclubs than his office, Figliuzzi delivered his answer “in an exaggerated, provocative and amusing way,” employing rhetorical hyperbole. …

The Court finds that Figliuzzi’s statement is rhetorical hyperbole that cannot constitute defamation. Accordingly, Dir. Patel has failed to state a claim against Figliuzzi, and his lawsuit must be dismissed.

If a person of reasonable intelligence and learning would not have taken this statement literally, what does that say about Patel and his lawyers?

Either way, that’s a point for The Atlantic’s legal team, which can now respond to Patel’s claim that the Figliuzzi suit was evidence of falsity with: “nope, not anymore.”

Separately, part of the case involved whether or not Figliuzzi could get attorney’s fees from Patel for filing a vexatious SLAPP suit. There was a dispute over which state’s anti-SLAPP law should apply — Texas, Nevada, or New York each had some claim — and the court (correctly, in my opinion) landed on Texas, since that’s where Figliuzzi resides. Speakers have a reasonable expectation that their home state’s anti-SLAPP law will shield them.

Unfortunately, though, because the Fifth Circuit a while back decided that you can’t use Texas’ anti-SLAPP law in federal court, it’s all for nothing, and he can’t get Patel to pay for his legal fees. This is yet another reminder of why we need a federal anti-SLAPP law — not just to protect free speech more broadly, but to protect SLAPP victims in federal courts in circuits where state anti-SLAPP statutes can’t reach.

The Court finds that Texas has the most significant relationship. Further, applying either Nevada’s or New York’s anti-SLAPP statute to a Texas Defendant would “impede on Texas’s interest in protecting its citizens and fulfilling the statute’s purpose.”…

The Fifth Circuit has found that, because Texas’s anti-SLAPP statute’s “burdenshifting framework imposes additional requirements beyond those found in Rules 12 and 56 and answers the same question as those rules, the state law cannot apply in federal court.” … Thus, while Figliuzzi prevails on the present motion to dismiss, the Court may not award him court costs and attorney’s fees under Texas’s anti-SLAPP law.

Still, even without the fee shifting, this is a good result, and underscores how these exceptionally weak defamation suits are little more than attacks on the press for reporting what multiple sources describe as problematic behavior from the FBI director.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, defamation, frank figliuzzi, free speech, jesse binnall, kash patel, rhetorical hyperbole

Companies: msnbc

A new financially motivated hacking group tracked as BlackFile has been linked to a wave of data theft and extortion attacks against retail and hospitality organizations since February 2026.

The group, also tracked as CL-CRI-1116, UNC6671, and Cordial Spider, is impersonating corporate IT helpdesk staff to steal employee credentials and demand seven-figure ransoms, according to information shared by cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 with the Retail & Hospitality Information Sharing and Analysis Center (RH-ISAC).

Unit 42 security researchers have also linked BlackFile with moderate confidence to “The Com,” a loose-knit network of English-speaking cybercriminals known for targeting and recruiting young people for extortion, violence, and the production of child sexual exploitation material (CSAM).

In a Thursday report, RH-ISAC said that the group’s attacks begin with phone calls to employees from spoofed numbers, in which the threat actors pose as IT support to lure staff to fake corporate login pages that ask them to enter their credentials and one-time passcodes.

“The attackers behind CL-CRI-1116 use voice-based phishing (vishing) from spoofed Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) numbers or fraudulent Caller ID Names (CNAM) as a social engineering technique, typically posing as IT support staff,” RH-ISAC said.

“We can confirm that we are seeing a significant increase in Blackfile matters and that TTPs appear to be very similar to such groups as ShinyHunters and SLSH and similar copycats employing vishing/social engineering data exploit tactics,” CyberSteward founder and CEO Jason S.T. Kotler also told BleepingComputer.

Using stolen credentials, the BlackFile attackers register their own devices to bypass multifactor authentication, then escalate access to executive-level accounts by scraping internal employee directories.

BlackFile steals data from victims’ Salesforce and SharePoint servers using standard API functions, searching specifically for files containing terms such as “confidential” and “SSN.”

The exfiltrated documents are downloaded to attacker-controlled servers and published to the gang’s dark web data leak site before victims are contacted with ransom demands via compromised employee email accounts or randomly generated Gmail addresses.

“By leveraging Salesforce API access and standard SharePoint download functions, the attackers move large volumes of data – including CSV datasets of employee phone numbers and confidential business reports – to attacker-controlled infrastructure,” RH-ISAC added.

“This is often done under the guise of legitimate SSO-authenticated sessions to avoid triggering simple user-agent alerts.”

Employees of compromised companies (including senior executives) have also been targets of swatting attempts, which involve making false emergency calls to responders. Attackers often use this tactic to exert additional pressure on their victims.

Mandiant also told BleepingComputer that they are actively responding to several vishing incidents that led to data theft and extortion, including one that used a BlackFile victim-shaming site that is now offline.

To reduce the success rate of BlackFile’s attacks, RH-ISAC recommends that organizations strengthen their call-handling policies, enforce multifactor identity verification for callers, and conduct simulation-based social engineering training for frontline staff.

AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.

At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.

Claim Your Spot

Overpriced Mac minis are flooding eBay amid shortages of the sold-out machines, which have become a favored tool for running on-device AI models like OpenClaw.

This week, reports indicated that the $599 M4 Mac mini base model with 16GB RAM and 256GB of storage is sold out on Apple’s retail website, with no options for delivery or in-store pickup. The shortages have since extended to other configurations of the base model, regardless of the amount of memory selected. This is the first time the base model has been sold out, some outlets noted. Meanwhile, models with higher storage (512GB and up) are only available to ship starting in June.

As a result, eBay has become a secondary market for these in-demand computers. On the site, various configurations of the M4 Mac mini are available for sale at higher prices than if buying direct from Apple, which is no longer an option.

Apple’s power-efficient Mac minis have become popular devices for testing and running at-home, on-device AI models, beginning with the OpenClaw craze but now extending to OpenClaw alternatives like ZeroClaw, other AI tools from Anthropic and OpenAI, Perplexity Computer, or other specialized local models. Unlike some PCs, Mac minis also run quietly and tend to be more reliable for 24/7 use, compared with laptop computers.

The shortage of the devices also comes alongside an industry-wide memory crunch and plans for a Mac mini refresh, according to Bloomberg. However, refreshes of product lines haven’t led to shortages before.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This perfect storm of supply chain stress and increased demand for AI-friendly machines has inflated the prices of used consumer electronics.

As of Friday morning, M4 base models with the 16GB RAM/256GB SSD configuration were selling at markups like $715-$795 for a new, “open box” model, and as high as $979 for an “excellent” refurbished version. Some “lightly used, pre-owned” Mac minis with this configuration were selling for around $700 — more than $100 more than the price of a new base model.

There was also a single listing for a $925 brand-new M4 Mac mini with the same 16GB RAM and 256GB storage; the listing warned in bright red text: “Last one.”

While you still may be able to score a reasonably priced refurb if you keep a close eye out (or if you win an eBay auction where the bid has started at a lower price point), it seems that the demand for the device is going to keep prices up until Apple’s supply chain refreshes.

And now that the Mac mini is unavailable, Apple has begun to see increased demand for the Mac Studio, too. That computer is also now sold out across several configurations.

As Ars Technica pointed out, you can still get a MacBook Pro with 128GB RAM and larger SSDs within a few weeks, and even the new and popular MacBook Neo is still shipping within two to three weeks. This suggests the real issue is consumer demand for the Mac mini itself.

Erdŏgan has 15 days to sign the bill into law. The legislation enters into force six months after publication in the Official Gazette. The main opposition CHP criticised it as a political censorship tool rather than child protection.

Turkey has previously blocked Instagram, Roblox, and restricted platforms during the İmamoglu protests.

Turkey’s Grand National Assembly passed a law late on Wednesday banning social media for children under 15, making the country the latest, and one of the largest by population, to introduce legislative age restrictions on social media access.

Under the law, social media companies including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram will be required to implement age verification systems, block under-15s from creating accounts, and provide parental control tools to manage the accounts of 15-to-17-year-olds.

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President Recep Tayyip Erdŏgan has 15 days to sign the bill. If signed, it will enter into force six months after publication in the Official Gazette. Online gaming companies must also appoint a Turkey-based representative to ensure compliance.

The immediate political catalyst is the Kahramanön school shooting on 14 April 2026, in which a 14-year-old boy killed nine students and a teacher at a middle school in Kahramanön in southern Turkey before dying himself. Police subsequently arrested 162 people accused of sharing footage of the attack online. Investigators are examining the perpetrator’s online activity for clues to his motivation.

Erdŏgan made the political link explicit in a televised address on Monday: “We are living in a period where some digital sharing applications are corrupting our children’s minds, and social media platforms have, to put it bluntly, become cesspools.”

The parliamentary commission that proposed the law framed it in a report titled “Threats and Risks Awaiting Our Children in Digital Media.”

The law’s operational mechanics carry significant compliance demands for platforms. Companies with more than 10 million daily users in Turkey, a threshold that covers all major platforms, must remove content deemed harmful within one hour of notification in an emergency.

Foreign services with more than 100,000 daily users must maintain a local representative. Enforcement is through Turkey’s communications watchdog, the BTK.

Penalties escalate from advertising bans to access speed restrictions, effectively throttling platform performance, to potential access bans. The speed restriction mechanism is the same tool Turkey has used in previous enforcement actions against platforms that have declined to comply with content removal orders.

Running parallel to the under-15 law is a second legislative initiative that is editorially more significant for digital rights. The Turkish government has separately reached an agreement with social media companies requiring that all Turkish citizens, not just minors, verify their identity to use social media accounts.

The precise mechanism of this identity verification system has not been disclosed, and how platforms will technically implement it is still unknown. Merve Gürlek, the Turkish official who announced the agreement, made the announcement on 3 April; further details of the legal framework are still being drafted.

The end of social media anonymity for all Turkish users represents a categorically different kind of intervention than the under-15 age restriction and carries obvious implications for political speech.

The opposition Republican People’s Party, the CHP, Turkey’s main secular opposition, voted against the bill, arguing that children should be protected “not with bans but with rights-based policies.”

This is a standard liberal critique of age-based social media bans, but in the Turkish context it carries additional weight given the government’s documented record of using platform restrictions for political purposes.

Online communications were widely restricted during 2025 protests in support of Istanbul’s jailed opposition mayor Ekrem İmamoglu. Instagram was blocked in 2024 following a dispute over Hamas-related content.

Roblox was banned, with Turkish officials citing inappropriate sexual content and, separately, what an official described as the “promotion of homosexuality.”

The law passed by parliament is not in itself a tool of censorship; but it expands and formalises the regulatory infrastructure through which the government controls what Turks can access online.

Turkey’s law joins a rapidly expanding international landscape of social media age restrictions. Australia’s ban for under-16s came into force in December 2025.

Norway announced on Friday that it plans to legislate a ban for under-16s by end of 2026. Indonesia has implemented restrictions on under-16 access to platforms exposing minors to pornography, cyberbullying, and addiction. France has age verification requirements for social media.

The UK’s Online Safety Act imposes harm prevention duties on platforms. Turkey’s approach is distinctive in two ways: it pairs the child protection measure with a universal identity verification requirement that no comparable democracy has yet implemented, and it introduces it in a political environment where the infrastructure for platform restriction has already been deployed against political opposition.

Whether the legislation functions primarily as child protection or primarily as a new layer of state control over digital speech will depend largely on how the BTK applies its enforcement powers in the years ahead.

In an effort to simplify the connections on modern TVs, companies like LG and Samsung are currently offering an option on select TV models to move all of the source connections from the TV itself to a separate box located somewhere near the TV (generally, up to about 30 feet away). With this wireless connectivity, the only connection required for the TV itself is a power cord. This makes installation much simpler, whether you’re mounting your TV on a wall or on a stand out in the middle of an open floor plan living room.

Early implementations of this technology required line of sight connection between the box and the TV, which isn’t always convenient or practical. The high bandwidth required to transmit a full 4K video signal with HDR and with lossless immersive multi-channel audio can make the signal susceptible to dropouts in the form out audio and video glitches.

Samsung offers a wireless connection box called the “Wireless One Connect Box” on its Frame Pro TV and select Micro RGB TV models as well as an optional add-on for its S95H OLED TV. LG offers a wireless connection box called the “Zero Connect Box” in its W6 Wallpaper OLED TV as well as its MRGB9M Mini RGB LED/LCD TV.

But while Samsung’s commitment for wireless video performance is “Trust Me, Bro. It’s Fine,” (and it may very well be), LG has actually attained third party certification for its wireless audio and video connectivity.

This week, LG announced that its wireless Zero Connect Box has attained “True Wireless Lossless Vision” certification from TÜV Rheinland. This certification verifies that the specified models deliver “visually lossless 4K picture quality” at frame rates up to 165 Hz. Certified models include LG’s W6 OLED Wallpaper TV and MRGB9M Mini RGB LED/LCD TV.

According to LG, the certification verifies that LG wireless TVs preserve color accuracy, image detail and HDR tone reproduction during wireless video transmission. For this verification, TÜV Rheinland established a dedicated test standard covering key factors in the delivery of high-quality visual performance, such as input lag, color accuracy and gamma tracking.

Following the required evaluations, TÜV Rheinland confirmed that LG’s wireless TVs maintain accurate color reproduction, fine image detail and precise HDR tone performance within defined tolerance levels (relative to the input signal), qualifying them as “visually lossless” under international test standards. For consumers, this means cinematic films, live sports and next‑generation gaming can be enjoyed wirelessly with the same confidence in picture quality previously reserved for hard‑wired TV setups.

“True Wireless Lossless Vision certification confirms that our premium TVs can deliver award-winning picture quality and wireless freedom at the same time,” said Park Hyoung‑sei, president of the LG Media Entertainment Solution Company. “This achievement reflects LG’s long-standing commitment to enhancing the viewing experience and to elevating everyday living.”

As of April 2026, the LG W6 OLED TV is available to pre-order in the U.S. The MRGB9M is expected to be available later this year.

The Bottom Line

While wireless connection of source devices to a TV makes installation far less complex, some consumers may worry that doing so will impact the audio and video performance. With third party certification, buyers of LG’s wireless-enabled TVs can rest assured that that eliminating all these extra wires won’t mean sacrificing the picture and sound quality that they’re paying for.

Related Reading:

LG’s W6 Wallpaper OLED TV Gets Priced, and It’s Actually Pretty Reasonable

LG’s First Micro RGB evo TVs Details Revealed, Including Pricing and Availability

If you have ever stared at a chaotic wall of Spotify playlists on your phone and wished you could just organize them into folders, we have good news. Spotify is finally rolling out playlist folders to its iOS and Android apps.

Playlist folders have existed on Spotify’s desktop app since 2010, making this a 16-year wait for mobile users. A Redditor was the first to flag the feature going live on iOS, with different users on the same thread confirming it had shown up on Android too.

How do Spotify playlist folders work on mobile?

To get started, tap the “+” icon inside your Library, and you will now see a new Folder option in the menu. From there, you can name your folder and start dropping playlists into it.

The feature also lets you play everything inside a folder at once, either in order or on shuffle. That last part is genuinely useful for long commutes or gym sessions where you want variety without manually hopping between playlists.

The timing of this rollout makes sense given how Spotify has been promoting its Prompted playlists, recently. Those tend to pile up fast and clutter your library quickly. Folders give you a clean way to manage all of that without heading to a desktop.

Are there any limitations to Spotify’s mobile playlist folders?

We haven’t seen the feature on our Spotify apps yet. According to the discussion on Reddit, you can only move playlists into folders, not entire albums. Custom folder cover art is also not supported yet. And since this is a server-side rollout, not everyone will see the option at the same time. If it has not appeared for you yet, patience is the only fix for now.

If you want even more control over how your music flows, Spotify also has a feature to automatically reorder playlists for smoother transitions, making playlist management easier on the platform.

Google plans to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic and support the AI firm’s growing computing needs, Bloomberg reports. The Alphabet subsidiary is committing to invest $10 billion now, at a $350 billion valuation for Anthropic, with another $30 billion to follow if Anthropic hits certain performance targets, according to Anthropic. 

The promise of investment comes after Anthropic released its latest model, Mythos, to a limited group of partners this month. Anthropic says that Mythos is the company’s most powerful model to date and has significant cybersecurity applications. Due to potential misuse, Anthropic has restricted broader access while it works with select organizations to evaluate and address those risks — though the model has already fallen into unsanctioned hands. It’s also likely expensive to run at scale. 

The AI race is increasingly defined by access to the compute needed to train and deploy these systems. OpenAI has moved aggressively to secure that capacity through a web of multi-hundred-billion deals across cloud providers, chip suppliers, and energy, including an expanded deal with chipmaker Cerebras this month. 

Anthropic has been in a scramble of its own. The company has faced widespread complaints about Claude use limits in recent weeks and responded with a bevy of infrastructure deals. Earlier this month, Anthropic struck a deal with cloud computing provider CoreWeave for data center capacity. It also this week secured an additional $5 billion investment from Amazon, part of a broad agreement under which Anthropic is expected to spend up to $100 billion for around 5 gigawatts of compute capacity over time. 

While Google is a direct competitor in AI models, it’s also a key infrastructure supplier to Anthropic. Anthropic relies heavily on Google Cloud for chips and infrastructure, including access to Google’s tensor processing units (or TPUs), which are specialized chips designed for AI workloads and considered among the best alternatives to Nvidia’s in-demand processors.

Anthropic’s relationship with Google predates this week’s news. Earlier this month, Anthropic announced a partnership with Google and chipmaker Broadcom, which designs custom AI chips for Google, to access multiple gigawatts of TPU-based computing capacity beginning in 2027; a subsequent Broadcom securities filing put that figure at 3.5 gigawatts.

The new Google investment expands that arrangement, with Google Cloud now providing a fresh 5 gigawatts of capacity over the next five years, with room to scale further.

Anthropic’s valuation stood at $350 billion as recently as February; investors have since been eager to back the company at $800 billion or more, according to Bloomberg. The company is also reportedly considering an IPO as soon as October.