TechPulse USA

By Daniel Rao, TechPulse USA Europe has spent years talking about escaping China's grip on the minerals that power everything from fighter jets to wind turbines. Now its ambassador to Australia says the money is coming — a "wave of investment", a deal eight years in the making, and a pitch that stretches from mine gates to refineries. The catch is large: most of the headline figures are not yet money in the bank, the trade deal is not yet signed and ratified, and the refineries both sides keep praising are still, for the most part, plans on paper. That tension — big rhetoric, unfinished plumbing — is the real story out of Sydney this week. Lawrence Meredith, the European Union's ambassador to Australia, speaking in Sydney, told Reuters on 27 October 2026 that the EU expects "a wave of investment" into Australia's critical minerals sector as Europe diversifies away from China. "The European Union will be massively investing in critical minerals. S...

By Daniel Rao Grace Knowles was not speeding. She was not swerving, not drunk, not running from anything. She was, by her own account, just a young woman between jobs, driving out of New Orleans toward Florida after a road trip through Oregon, Texas and Louisiana — and that, apparently, was enough. An officer pulled her over, questioned her about where she had been, demanded proof she had really visited New Orleans, and then showed her a heat map of her own life on a screen in his car. The stop, in the end, was not about how she drove. It was about what a machine thought her driving meant. That is the warning at the heart of a blog post published by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on 26 October 2026, and it should unsettle anyone who has ever taken the long way home. Police, the ACLU says, are increasingly using artificial intelligence and automated license plate reader (ALPR) data to flag motorists whose travel histories look “suspicious” — even when there is no evidence ...

  By Daniel Rao While Washington and Silicon Valley are still arguing about whether the AI boom is a bubble, China has already settled the question the hard way. Its AI stocks have not merely wobbled. They have crashed — 40% in under four months, roughly $480 billion vaporised — and the wreckage now stretches from Shanghai's STAR Market to the savings accounts of millions of small investors who believed, not unreasonably, that Beijing wanted them in. That is the uncomfortable part. This was not a market accident. It was a market that did exactly what it was encouraged to do, faster and further than anyone in charge intended, and then discovered — as markets always do — that enthusiasm is not a business model. The United States is watching the same film. It is simply a few reels behind. The numbers that ended the argument Start with the scoreboard, because it leaves little room for spin. The mainland STAR50 index, which tracks the leading AI and semiconductor names on Shanghai...

By Daniel Rao, AI correspondent — 28 October 2026 Somebody broke into the burglars' own control room. On 27 October 2026, Australia's signals-intelligence agency revealed its operators had got inside a criminal Amadey operation's backend and disconnected its controller from roughly 180,000 infected computers worldwide, including some in Australia. The criminal can no longer reach those machines. The catch — and it is a large one — is that everything already stolen from them is still out there, and cutting a cord does not rewind a theft. That tension is the whole story: genuinely impressive offensive cyber work, and no happy ending. Photo: Server racks at a data centre — file photo only, not the Amadey operation and not ASD infrastructure. Credit: Wikimedia Commons, CC0 (public domain). The break-in nobody saw coming The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) — Australia's foreign signals-intelligence and cyber security agency — disclosed the operation in an intervi...

Britain's borders watchdog is circling a question the Home Office would plainly rather it did not ask: what exactly is its AI doing to asylum claims? The Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration has asked the Open Rights Group for more detail on two generative AI tools used in asylum casework, as it draws up the topics it will inspect next year. No inspection has been announced. No inspection has been confirmed. But the request itself is the news — because it means a watchdog that rarely moves fast is now, at minimum, taking the question seriously. That distinction matters, and this article will keep it sharp throughout. The inspector has not opened an investigation. It has asked a campaign group for information while it decides what to inspect. The Home Office, for its part, insists no machine decides anything. And yet the numbers behind that reassurance are, on the campaigners' evidence, shaky enough that "trust us" no longer quite covers it. Photo...

By Daniel Rao Photo: London's Canary Wharf financial district. This is a file photo of London's financial centre, not a Guidewire or hyperexponential office or product. Credit: Gordon Joly, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0). Insurance has always been a business of judgment calls made under uncertainty, usually slowly, usually by people drowning in paperwork. Guidewire just paid up to $2.1 billion to change who — or what — makes those calls. The American software maker announced on Tuesday that it will buy London-based hyperexponential, an AI firm whose software already helps price some of the most complicated commercial risks on the planet, and the price tag alone tells you this is not a polite tuck-in acquisition. It is a bet that the underwriter of the future works shoulder to shoulder with an AI agent, and that the company that owns that relationship owns the next decade of commercial insurance. Let us be blunt about what is really happening here. Guidewire is not bu...